Feeling stuck happens to women who are titans of Wall Street and leaders of mighty teams and moms navigating the sometimes tough terrain of balancing everything (hopefully, with a little grace for themselves.)
We can find ourselves on a path that we didn’t expect either through our own decision or that of someone else. We might find ourselves unexpectedly heading for divorce or navigating with an illness or without a job. It is easy to feel anxiety (or depression) and in fact, both of those conditions are pretty clear biological signals that we are not where we want to be, as if our own bodies have an emergency warning mechanism for alerting us to something that feels like danger to us.
We all feel lost at times.
Most of us are trained by our earliest caretakers to find answers and we learn to cultivate an anxious hostility to uncertainty. So, in the chaos of trying to find your way, it is normal and human to lack confidence in yourself and your decisions. Even as it can feel disorienting and extremely uncomfortable.
Why We Feel Stuck
There is often unwanted tension and frustration that lies in the space between where you are and where you feel that you want to be. You might experience feeling stuck in the following circumstances:
- Exiting a long-term relationship
- Getting your heartbroken
- Negotiating a serious or ongoing illness
- Being broke
- Losing a job
- Getting promoted
- Having a child (especially the first one)
- Losing a loved one
If you live long enough, more than one of these life-altering events will happen to you. Sometimes, several of them will occur at once.
Reframe How You Use The Time
Just because you feel stuck doesn’t always mean that there is no movement. Sometimes, what feels like procrastination is really a time to integrate what you’ve learned – especially if you know what to do but you experience feeling stuck to take the next step because it’s not clear what the next step should be or if it will succeed. This can be especially true if you have experienced a loss of some kind. But, these are opportunities to be still, pay attention to your feelings and your body, and integrate the lessons from your experience.
You might be so focused on accomplishing a goal that you fail to enjoy the journey of becoming.
Most of us do not enjoy being a beginner yet we all must start somewhere. The most important journeys in life are often scary in the beginning and a little sad at the end so it is the joy in the journey that counts.
What needs to shift (within yourself) for you to enjoy the journey?
Confidence Practices To Stop Feeling “Stuck”
1. Recognize Your Season
Timing matters. We often want to rush progress along at the speed of “now” but everything in nature paces itself. We don’t expect to rush a baby’s progress through gestation because we know that bad things happen if we do.
Bamboo is a natural plant that looks like a tree but is actually grass. It requires about 3 years to establish itself, building the root system, during which time there is little to no visible growth above the ground. The invisible growth is key to the next explosive phase in which some species of bamboo can grow as quickly as 3 feet a day!
The unseen growth is still extremely important growth and must precede any externally visible milestones. Trust your process and your timing. Use this time to be still and listen.
In the silence, your soul speaks truth.
2. Honor Your Feelings
We often want to just feel “ok”. Often, women experience feelings that they just want to “get through it” or to push past unwanted feelings. But, feelings are not your enemy. Even anger has a purpose that could help you get to where you want to be if you let it guide you.
Feelings are simply guides.
The power of feelings is that they can signal to you that something in your life needs to shift. In fact, journaling your feelings in the presence of strong emotions can help you regain the right perspective. Anger can be nothing more than a call to action, not necessarily to take action, but to understand yourself and to notice which parts of you need healing. Perhaps most powerfully, feelings can reveal who you are being in situations and help you to gain clarity on what is next for you.
I’ve coached scores of women around developing the confidence to take inspired action and the hardest, most impactful part is understanding how you feel.
Every decision becomes clearer when you know where you are emotionally.
That is why emotional hygiene is one very important, daily habit of confident women.
3. Ask Better Questions
Often we ask questions that reflect our limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs, as you might have guessed, limit your potential because they hold you in a place of fear.
You can tell limiting belief questions because they are often permission questions like “Can I do…?” The answer is binary (yes or no).
Power questions are ones that open your capacity to create solutions such as “How can I do…?” With a simple word added at the beginning of the sentence, new possibilities can open up.
So, you might experience feeling stuck because you are asking permission questions when you need to ask possibility questions.
4. Embrace The Power Of Your P
Hidden inside the phrase “mission impossible” is “mission I’m Possible”. One of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal right now is the strength of your PERCEPTION.
Perception is like a lens through which we see our world (and create our world). Perception is at work when we experience confirmation bias, the phenomenon of seeing only what you expect to see. And telling a narrative about what an experience or feeling means. (More on this later.)
All it takes is a perception shift to find the way to your highest power.
We work on beliefs and perceptions in The Knowing Woman Confidence Course →. A big part of the work to stop feeling stuck is to shift your perspective. You might not see an opportunity that is right in front of you simply because you are not expecting to find it.
5. Heal
If you find yourself getting the same unsatisfactory results over and over again in relationships, work, love, money…
It could be your wounds in the way that are creating repeating results.
It is not your fault. But, it is within your power to shift into the most delicious experience for your life yet and it is more simple than you might think…by 1) using your words to be witnessed and 2) by doing the work…
Make no mistake. This soul-searching, change-your-life, create-the-possibility, and start living not your default life but your desired life with confidence is…one of the greatest self-development journeys that you will go on. Because:
- You have to acknowledge what trauma and truths your family gave you
- You have to be honest about what your upbringing gave you or didn’t give you. And then decide who you are going to be.
- You have to come out of hiding
- You have to do new and scary things (‘cuz what got you here won’t get you there)
- You have to start having difficult conversations with others and most importantly, with yourself
- You have to practice giving and receiving (praise, criticism, money, and support)
- You have to ask for help
- You have to find a way to survive and rebound from “bad days”
- You have to emotionally navigate (and stabilize!) yourself even in uncertainty
- You have to stop caring what others think so much
- You have to learn to believe in your own genius and your own magic
- You have to cope with failure
- You have to learn to practice patience
- You gotta give yourself some grace! (You are and always have been doing the best that you know how.)
Ironically, these are the challenges that every confident woman who has made the hero’s journey must navigate.
From that perspective, your mission should you choose to accept it is to:
Set your expectation that you will either grow or learn in every step.
Owning the power of your own strength to reprogram your life is what we work on in the confidence course.
Final Thoughts
Feeling stuck can be a gift if you learn to recognize the useful time that it gives you. By slowing down, shifting your perceptions, and using the practices shared in this blog post, you can find your way to clarity about what is right for you. And discover what’s next.
Auxiliary Resource:
- The Knowing Woman, the confidence course for women
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