What to do When You Feel “Stuck” in Life
I’m stuck.
No you’re not.
You don’t understand. I’m really stuck.
What makes it seem like you’re stuck is your insistence that you are.
It’s true we travel through different phases in life ”“ some that seem to last a very
long time, and others that fly by ”“ but in actuality, they all end up being relative and
we never truly are in a perpetual state of stuck as we proclaim.
What keeps us stuck is our story about being stuck.
And boy, do we have some great stories that keep our feet firmly planted in place. It
never happens for me. I had a terrible childhood. I always get shafted. I never get a
break. I can’t find a partner. Those are stories. Indeed they may have happened and
they were real. But the fact that you keep relying on that narrative to keep you
where you are is what keeps you stuck. And invested in the stuck.
Change the story; change your stuck-i-ness.
The last I looked, we were bipedal creatures. We have two feet. If we literally were
stuck we could attempt to move. Just take a step. Walk away. Leave. Get up. Go.
Depart. At the very least, we can roll, crawl, stagger, slide, inch our way out of
something we’ve outgrown and into something new.
Un-stuck yourself.
Use the friend litmus test to see how un-stuck you really are. When we see someone
we love who claims to be stuck, we don’t really see them that way. Use that prism to
see yourself.
I have a friend who says he wants to work out more and go to the gym but has “no
time”. To me, it’s a no-brainer. But every idea I offered got shot down. I gave up. He’s
stuck. Not because he can’t do something about it, but because he really doesn’t
want to change his stuck-i-ness. To do that means having to really make changes in
his life.
I can’t go to the gym = Stuck.
Hire a trainer. Get up 15 minutes earlier. Go for a run instead of breakfast. Eat
breakfast at work. Work out on your lunch break. Ride your bike to your job. Get an
accountability partner. Go to the gym right after work. Ask if your work has a gym
partnership = Unstuck.
There are resources, insights, possibilities, assistance and solutions to every single
story we tell ourselves that keeps us stuck.
Ouch. I’ll say it again. There is a solution to every stuck. You just have to want the
solution more than you desire the stuck.
Our pal, Bruce Lee said it better.
“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will
spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only
plateaus and you must not stay there ”“ you must go beyond them.”
Unstuck.