3 Strategies To Move Past Being STUCK
How To Move Past Being STUCK
Have you ever known something would be good for you BUT you’ve had mixed feelings about moving forward?
You may be in that very spot now, in one or more areas of your life. Where you feel like you’re not on track at work; not as happy as you know you could be in your relationship; or just not as excited as you’d like to be about life in general…
You desperately want to get unstuck!
You have an idea or even a few of what you could do to get moving. It feels good to think about moving but no potential solution you can come up with feels like the perfect answer and so… you do nothing!
The trouble in these situations is not the potential solutions, but instead the mixed feelings about them…
Because when it comes to big decisions, what we feel actually becomes more important than any logic we can come up with.
And, feelings that are ‘mixed’ lead to us doing nothing…
Because whichever way we try to go it feels uncomfortable. So we stay where we are – as illogical as it might be.
It mightn’t feel great, but at least it feels familiar. (An insidious problem because staying with the familiar leads to a life of quiet desperation.)
It might go something like this…
“I dislike the work I do and I want to leave for another position, but if I leave I’d feel like I’m failing.”
Or
“I feel I should be able to handle the job I’m in but I feel constantly stressed trying to make that a reality.”
Or
“I feel held back by my partner but I don’t want to leave them because I do love them!”
Mixed feelings lead to an apparent Lose/Lose situation for you! Staying ‘as is’ feels bad and ‘doing something’ different feels bad too. No matter which feeling you land on, there’s a barb to it. Aaagggh!
Here are 3 Great Strategies to Move Past Mixed Feelings.
Use one alone or a few of them together!
1) Project it out:
Check how ‘doing nothing’ will feel if you do it for another 5 years. Take all the pain that you feel today AND over the next 5 year term and feel it now. Then compare that to what ‘doing something’ will feel like over that same time period. The latter may have an initial glitch of pain in the short term but over the 5 year term it might feel good, so take all those feelings and feel them now. If the solution you have is a good one, all of a sudden moving forward feels easy.
2) Be your own best friend:
Consider: What would you tell your best friend to do?
It’s easy to give advice to others and we can usually come up with 5-10 alternative options for them to consider. This is usually the case even when your friend is ‘certain’ there are only one or two options!
So, try being your own best friend. Imagine it’s not you that’s in the thick of things; imagine it’s your best friend. By extracting yourself from the situation and imagining it to be someone else you can temporarily detach from the mixed feelings and free yourself up to look for other options that will be logical and feel good too!
3) Do it for the kids:
Ask yourself: “What decision would I want my children (or niece or nephew) to be able to make for themselves?”
Sometimes we don’t feel worthy of making the decisions we need to make for ourselves. We feel bad about putting others out and therefore end up putting ourselves out instead!
In this case it can be good leverage to “do it for the kids”. Because you, as their role model are showing them how to (or how not to) look after themselves. So, if you want them to grow up looking after themselves, then be the person who can show them how to do that! This simple reframe can lead to us feeling good about taking the action we know we need to take.
