Ep486 Still Stuck? Do This.

Let's talk about how to deal with the feeling of being stuck, even after following the advice from the previous episode.

Key Points:

• Feeling stuck is a normal part of life, especially when striving to move forward.
• Common reasons for feeling stuck include:
  • Job dissatisfaction
  • Financial burden
  • Dead-end relationships
  • Not making progress on goals
• The first step to getting unstuck is to identify what's making you feel that way. Ask yourself "what else?" to dig deeper.
• Once you identify the root cause, you can start to shift your perspective.
• Examples of shifting perspective:
  • High performers can set high standards and still celebrate small wins.
  • In a relationship, instead of trying to change your partner, focus on supporting them to be who they are.
  • With financial burdens, focus on solutions and take steps towards your goals.
• Limitations are often self-imposed perceptions. Challenge these limitations and ask yourself "who says I can't do that?"
• The stories we tell ourselves about our family, friends, and self-identity can limit us. Rewrite those stories if they are holding you back.

Call to Action:

• Listen to the previous episode for tips on how to get unstuck in the first place.
• Ask yourself "what else?" to identify the root cause of your feeling stuck.
• Challenge your limitations and rewrite the negative stories you tell yourself.

Chapters

• 0:02 Overcoming Feeling Stuck in Life
• 15:34 Overcoming Stuckness

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello, conscious Investor, and welcome back. I'm your host, julie Hawley. For over four years, I've paired my background in real estate, investing, education and coaching to create powerful content for you each week. This podcast is where we take a holistic approach to investing by focusing on three ingredients to a life of personal freedom health, mindset and wealth. We'll talk about everything from passive investing through syndication and how to use your retirement accounts to boost your investing, to mineral balancing and gut brain health, and into topics that cultivate your inner strength and resilience so you can thrive regardless of any of life's current events. And yes, those are all episodes currently available and linked in the show notes below. Join me each Monday for a mindset episode and later in the week for an interview with expert investors and health professionals, so that you can experience your greatest health, strongest mindset and build the wisest wealth.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Welcome back, conscious Investor. You know, last week we were talking about what do we do when we are stuck and we talk about. We spoke about how we have to engage ourselves, we have to identify what we value and we have to figure out what that first step is, because that first step puts into motion a whole series of events that otherwise could not happen. But the reality is events that otherwise could not happen. But the reality is is that feeling stuck is like such a normal part of being human, and so you might have listened to that episode. You may have actually worked through those three steps and then found yourself still feeling stuck. So that's why there's this episode. It's called Still Stuck. Do this Because reality is, being stuck isn't a permanent state of life, but it is something that comes about on a regular basis, especially when we are striving to move forward in life in powerful ways. We should, as I mentioned in the episode, stuck Do this. We should anticipate resistance, we should anticipate obstacles, we should anticipate fatigue and we should anticipate those points where, holy cow, I don't know what to do next and we just want to crawl in a ball and fall asleep or do whatever you do. That, you know, kind of helps you out. So today I want to share with you five more things that you can do if you feel stuck. Again. Last week, go back and listen to that episode. We talked about very specific areas where we can feel stuck, because it's such a common part of life, and this week we're going to dive into, you know, the five things that you can do that will really help clear your bandwidth so that you can have the energy and the clarity to move forward and be not stuck anymore. Hey, can I get an amen on that? Because I'm pretty much feeling like I don't like being stuck. I really push past it. But let's talk about some of the reasons why we might feel stuck.

Speaker 1: 3:06

A lot of oftentimes, people I speak with feel stuck with their nine to five grind. It's not that they don't love what they do or love their job. It's just I wake up in the morning and I'm working from 730 in the morning until six at night, seven at night, and I don't take a lunch break. By the way, I'm helping different clients work through that exact scenario. It's so common.

Speaker 1: 3:30

So if you are feeling that you are not a loan conscious investor, it is very common. We might feel stuck because we feel burdened and encumbered by student loan debt. We might feel stuck because inflation is real and there is a higher cost of living these days. We might feel stuck because we feel that we're in a dead end relationship. By the way, if you're going to be in a lifelong committed relationship, I just have to say you might anticipate feeling stuck from time to time because you're working with another person to build life together. That's so normal, so common. We might feel stuck because we're just not making the progress that we're looking for with the goals that we have set out. By the way, that is something I feel on a regular basis. I can, I can, take on too many goals, too many projects, and then I'm not gaining the momentum and then I feel stuck and I feel overwhelmed and it leads into a real downward spiral and it sucks my energy. So again, conscious investor, never talking at you, I I speak from experience and from being in the trenches of living and building life, just as you are. So let's go ahead and talk about what do we do. The first thing that we want to do at five is we want to, similar to last week when we said, engage ourselves. We want to identify what makes us feel stuck. We really have to get granular with ourselves, and that might mean take yourself out for a cup of coffee.

Speaker 1: 5:07

I personally have been spending the last couple of mornings going outside for a walk. It's beautiful, it's calming. I literally hear birds chirping and cows mooing out in the pasture and it makes me feel really, really grounded and allows me it has allowed me to engage myself in a really unique way to say, like what is going on? Like, take yourself out on a date if you will like, if you want to think of it like that, and just engage yourself and say, okay, what is going on, peel back the onion. I know for me, when I was out on the swath this morning, I was trying to figure out, like, why am I feeling stuck? Why am I repeating these patterns that I've already dealt with and, as I just worked through that internally, it allowed me to just reawaken and it was really powerful and it set a different trajectory for my day and how I'm able to show up. So I want to encourage you that you want to identify what it is that is making you feel stuck.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Do not settle for superficial. You need to actually push yourself, and one question you can ask yourself is what else? Well, I feel stuck because the things that I thought were going to happen didn't happen, even though I did my part, and so now I feel stuck. Okay, and what else? Well, I'm actually discouraged because I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board. I'm going to have to re-engage this whole other part of the process I thought I'd already completed and I'm tired and exhausted.

Speaker 1: 6:47

So I've now identified some very deliberate feelings. Right, I'm discouraged, I'm tired, I'm exhausted. Right, I feel like I'm going backwards, not progressing forward. Okay, well, and what else? Actually, I feel like I'm disappointing people and that I'm letting myself down. Wow, that's identifying a lot more. Okay, I went deeper. And what else? Well, I really hold myself to a really high standard and I don't know that I allow myself to ever feel the success Whoa, I'll tell you what.

Speaker 1: 7:21

Conscious Investor, when I got to that point, right there that was the seed of all of it it was really truly a matter of huh. I'm really holding myself to high standards, higher standards than most people hold themselves to, and I'm not reaching that bar, and it's making me feel discouraged. Conscious Investor, you are a high performer. More than likely, you are holding yourself to such a high standard and you're not putting little stop gaps along the way to where you can stop and celebrate those achievements and victories, so it can really make you feel stuck because you can't see the progress you're truly making in life. Now, that was just a personal example of how I worked through getting into that granular. Borrow that question, ask yourself and what else? Don't settle for superficial. Your life can't be made on superficial. Your life is only going to be built in a solid way, on faith and on getting into the nitty-gritty, pretty granular on this.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Okay, after we've identified what's making us feel stuck, now we can change our perspective. You could probably already hear that my perspective started shifting when I got down to that bottom line. And, by the way, there's, there's more I can ask myself and what else? Several times more to go deeper than the fact that I'm setting the bar up so high. But for the sake of this podcast, we're going to just leave it right there. And I'm going to say I had a shift in my perspective.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Once I figured that out, once I went granular, it's like, oh, okay, wait, I am really setting the bar high for myself and there is nothing wrong with that. I am a high performer and I'm never going to lower the bar. But what can I do to support my perspective along the way? So now I'm putting in some concepts. Okay, let me just layer this in and say, on the way to this end zone, what are some things I'm anticipating? What are some mile markers I'm anticipating passing by on that path that I can celebrate and I can look back and see the progress that I'm making, so that I can feel that motivation, I can gain that momentum because I can see what is actually taking place.

Speaker 1: 9:45

So you want to encourage you, change the perspective. If you're feeling stuck in a relationship, let's just go there, because oftentimes I speak with clients oftentimes that are feeling stuck in a relationship. Especially when a high performer is married to someone who is not a high performer, there can be a lot of moments of feeling very stuck in that relationship. Okay, and so changing the perspective is going to be a powerful support for for those of you who are in those type of relationships. Shift that perspective. Just because I'm a high performer doesn't mean that my partner needs to be a high performer. What can I do to support my partner with who God created them to be, so that I'm not pushing them in a direction that is me pushing them into another version of me, but I can support them in becoming who God created them to be right.

Speaker 1: 10:46

So we can just shift, toggle the switch, flip the track. If you're looking at train tracks and they're you know you go straight and that train's going to have a head-on collision. You just want to toggle that, switch over so it's going to veer off the other way. Always shift the perspective and say how can I support this person, how can I support myself, how can I show up in a different way? We're talking about that financial burden, you know, shifting that perspective. We can feel very overwhelmed with our finances and instead we can simply shift our perspective and say what am I going to do about this? Evaluate the landscape, get the facts and then solutionize. What's the first step I can take towards a path that is going to lead me in the direction that I want. And that doesn't mean that if you are down and out, down, living in a van down by the river, it just simply means, hey, financially I want to be in a different position. What am I going to do about that? You might be well compensated in your career right now. Most of you are conscious investors, but you want something different financially for your future, for your family. So we just want to toggle that switch, shift the perspective, step into solution mode. All right.

Speaker 1: 12:04

Number three limitations are perspectives, I'm sorry. Limitations are perceptions. We inflict these limitations on ourselves every single day, limitations on ourselves. Every single day we put the I can't into our world. We choose that. I don't know why we do it, but we do it. I do know why and it usually it is a protective mechanism that we have for ourselves. Sometimes we just simply don't want to challenge ourselves and really, truly, for most people in Western culture right now, they are simply exhausted, they are threadbare and they are just trying to go through each and every day successfully, and so we want that sometimes we'll put these limitations on ourselves to protect ourselves energetically. I don't have anything more to give to the world or to anyone else or anything else. I just am trying to exist right now. So these limitations are these perceptions that we've put into our life to protect ourselves. We want to remove them Anytime we see that limitation.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Well, why? Who made that rule? Who said that? Who says I can't do that? Who says that that's not possible? Why? I mean people go to outer space. People develop new technology all the time. Now, instead of having to have little carrier pigeons, now we have these great computers, handheld computers, to send messages across the world. You can even talk to somebody in outer space from your little handheld computer in your pocket. So when we think about limitations, those are self-imposed. They're typically protective limitations that we are putting on ourselves. That just again us. So push past that, challenge yourself. Well, what would it look like if I started going to school in the evening so I could have more education and I could shift my position within my company? What would happen if I simply applied to that upper level management position? What would happen? The limitation is well, I'm not qualified. You know Susie Q down the corner, she's going to apply for that. I shouldn't apply for it. She's way better than me. No, heck, no. If you want it, you go for it, and if you don't get it, it's not a big deal, but you go for it and you keep going. Get it, it's not a big deal, but you go for it and you keep going for it and you challenge yourself, you put yourself out there.

Speaker 1: 14:44

Hey, number four stories we tell ourselves. Oh goodness, you know we've talked about this so much on the podcast Conscious Investor, but the stories we tell ourselves are part of the limitations that we have. Well, you know my family that I grew up with. They did it like this. You know my family growing up. We just didn't. Oh, my friends, we just don't. Most of all, it's our self-identity, how we view ourselves. I'm not smart enough, I'm not strong enough, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't know the right people. We tell ourselves these stories, similar to limitations, that protect ourselves, that keep us stuck.

Speaker 1: 15:34

What would happen if you changed that story? What would happen if you took that page out and just tore it in half and said no more? What's the story you're telling yourself right now, conscious investor, are you telling yourself that your spouse is just, you know, sucking all the energy and life from you? Is that the story? Because I guarantee, if you step into that narrative, you can change that narrative. Why is my spouse feeling this way? What can I do to support my spouse? When you start showing up in a different way, I promise you something is going to happen. I'm speaking from personal experience.

Speaker 1: 16:14

By the way, the stories we tell ourselves keep us stuck. They keep us trapped. If you don't like the story, then change the story. You're the one writing it. And if you say no, jules, I'm not writing the story, I mean these are my circumstances, this is how my life is, then reclaim that pen.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Nobody else has the right to take that pen from your hand and start writing your story. This is your life, your heartbeats. So why are you handing that pen willingly over to someone else or something else to write the story? Money doesn't write the story in our lives. Past abuse doesn't write the story of our life. Bad bosses don't write the story of our life. Systems that are against us don't write the story of our life, because there are plenty of examples throughout all of history where people have chosen to reclaim the pen and to write their narrative, regardless of their circumstances. Do not tolerate that in your life. Reclaim the pen, write the story of your life. In fact, send me an email and say what is it that you want? What is it that you feel stuck with? That you are absolutely done with and you're not going to let that be the narrative of your life and it's not going to continue on for generations to come. Send me an email, seriously, right now, julie, at JulieHawleycom. Don't mind me, you know I get a little bit fired up conscious investor.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Okay, number five, last one seek support. You guys, we are created for community. We are created for contribution. That is how God hardwired us from the very get-go and yet for some reason and I'm going to just point the finger at Western culture, which is slightly unfair because it's just humanity we think that we have to do it alone, like we have to prove something to others, to ourselves, to I don't know who. It varies for everybody, but we are not designed and created to do things alone.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Now, that doesn't mean that the steps you're taking aren't sometimes solo steps. I've had to take a lot of solo steps because those are the steps on my path. But guess what? I had other people around me, supporting, cheering me on, rallying for me on my side, and that's what I mean when I say don't do this alone. I had coffee with a friend this morning and this friend her father is battling cancer showed me this picture of a prayer quilt that I think it looked like. Maybe 42 people created these, you know, one foot squares, knit them, even men knitting these squares to go onto this quilt. It was a ginormous quilt. Nobody else can go into the chemo treatments. Only her dad can go into those chemo treatments, right, so his body has to do the chemo and fight the cancer on its own.

Speaker 1: 19:42

Having that blanket, knowing all of the love. All the support is encouraging, warming, supportive, powerful. Okay, we need that level of support. Taking time to build relationships so that you have that type of support in your life is paramount, and contributing is also part of the human condition, part of how God created us. So be that person on the other side that is also encouraging someone else, that's supporting somebody else. Take the time to make that investment in those relationships. Give and get, give and gain. That's how it goes. I'm going to throw a bonus in here. I'm going to say be patient. So many of us want things right now and that's just not how it goes. So I want you to remember be patient with yourself and be patient with others.

Speaker 1: 20:48

This is a process. You don't have to be stuck forever. Being stuck is a frame of our mind, it's a construct, it's something that we've created. The moment you start shifting your thinking, you are going to be living and leading a very different life, but be living and leading a very different life. Just a quick recap.

Speaker 1: 21:08

First of all, we want to identify what is making us feel stuck. Remember, get granular, ask yourself that question and what else? What else? What else, why? Then we want to challenge, I'm sorry, change our perspective. Just switch it. Number three our limitations are our perceptions. Don't be afraid to challenge yourself. Mind the stories that you are telling yourself. You are the narrator. You are the writer, the narrator of your life. Don't let other people do that. Don't give other people that power. It's your life, your heartbeats entrusted by God to you, heartbeats given for you to live an extraordinary life. And remember we're not in this alone. Get the support that you need. It's powerful and it's important. And throughout this entire process of being stuck, remember, be patient, be kind with yourself.

Speaker 1: 22:10

Conscious investor, if you are feeling stuck, reach out. Do not go this alone. I help so many of my coaching clients move beyond being stuck into the fullness and freedom that God created them for. Fullness and freedom that God created them for. Don't. Don't live your life stuck, because it's way more fun, way more exhilarating when you are stepping into the life you were created for. Just reach out to me, head on over to. I am a conscious investorcom. You can reach out and get in touch. Until next time, live big, love bigger and do great things. Are you enjoying this episode? Help spread the word by sharing the episode with a friend or family member, because, really, where would any of our lives be without other people sharing great content with us? Help spread the word by sharing on your social platforms and with those you care about, and remember, tag me at HappyJulieHawley.