IF YOU'RE FEELING STUCK, YOU NEED TO READ THIS.
Whether personal, professional or both, being stuck denies the innate drive we all have to progress in life, which means it has the potential to impact our mental health and wellbeing. Therefore, knowing how to become unstuck is a critical life skill.
Developing self-awareness is the first unavoidable step in knowing how to become unstuck in life. If we are unaware of something, we might conclude there is nothing to change! Self-awareness creates distance between ourselves and our internal and external worlds, equipping us with the ability to compare how things are with how we want them to be, and when we become stuck, our lives are, by definition, no longer how we want them to be.
Self Awareness gives us the ability to:
- Appreciate the disconnect at the heart of being stuck.
- Accept (does not mean ‘like’) our situation.
- Compare fantasy (our desired life) with reality (our actual, stuck life).
- Pinpoint which areas we are stuck in.
- Identify the reasons why you are stuck.
- Create an action plan to turn things around.
So is self-awareness all we need to become unstuck in life? No. As I said, self-awareness makes the above possible but doesn’t make them happen. Only we can do this. I can be aware that a piano is falling out of the sky and about to drop on my head, but if I don’t step out of its way...
Knowing how to become stuck in life requires that we marry self-awareness with precise, well-informed actions that take us from an appreciation of our stuckness to acting successfully on it. Luckily, many ways exist to achieve the happy union of awareness to action, such as:
Ways to take action:
- Acknowledging the stress of being stuck as a helpful message encouraging you to address why your life has plateaued.
- Mapping out the critical areas of your life and distinguishing those that are in good shape from those that are not.
- Get support from people with a track record of being helpful to you to highlight actions and build strategies.
- Going out outside of your existing support network for professional support.
- Access the vast array of online self-help resources that exist in books and on popular social media sites.
- Build, slowly and patiently, a compelling vision of life where you are no longer stuck.
Above all, be kind and compassionate to yourself, and avoid self-criticism and judgement. Becoming stuck is not a mark of failure, simply evidence that you are a human being navigating your way through an often complex, challenging world.
In this blog we have covered the importance of normalising personal professional ‘stuckness’, developing self-awareness and combining awareness with effective action.
What should you do next?
If you can relate to the events and issues raised in this article, and you are perhaps feeling a bit stuck, then it’s probably the case that you might benefit from working with us here at Conversations With Impact, and in doing so, you’ll learn about how to use The IMPACT Model to Transform yourself. Please follow the links to take the next steps: