What to Do when You Feel Stuck In Life

Why Do I feel Stuck in Life?

Feeling stuck in life is the worst. With all the uncertainty around us — particularly if you’re facing very real limitations — you may have a lot on your plate that keeps you feeling stuck in your life, your career, or even in your relationships.

With my experience as a life coach and career coach, I understand that many clients find that getting unstuck to create a new reality can get quite tricky, particularly when they have very real obstacles and challenging circumstances. However, Denver therapist and certified online life and career coach, Elise, is here to remind us that we are capable of empowering ourselves and moving forward — even when things are feeling hard.

In this episode of the Love, Happiness and Success podcast, my colleague, Elise R., shares her insights on the mental blocks that lead to feelings of stuckness, as well as the importance of getting emotionally unstuck on the inside before you can create positive change in your reality.

She’s providing you with some concrete “how to get unstuck” strategies drawn from her effective approach to personal coaching services, and how she helps clients get over this feeling. If you want to learn how you can get unstuck when you’re feeling trapped, then this episode is for you!

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. Get insights from a professional life and career coach on how to get unstuck mentally and emotionally.
2. Discover why understanding the importance of getting yourself unstuck internally can help you create your own reality as well as how to get yourself unstuck. 
3. Learn about the hidden, subconscious core beliefs that can keep you feeling stuck — and how to break through.

What Makes People Feel Stuck in Life

• Life coaching and career coaching clients reach out to Elise and tell her they feel stuck or trapped and don’t know what to do. She shares where she starts in helping them get unstuck, by increasing self awareness. 
• We talk about why different life circumstances lead to feeling stuck in different ways. For example, feeling stuck in a career is a very different experience from feeling stuck in a toxic relationship!
• When you feel trapped, it leads to an increase in feelings of worry and nervousness about the future. That in turn leads to even greater paralysis and difficulty in taking effective action.
• One of the odd paradoxes is that when you have too many choices, it’s harder to make a decision. It leads you to feel more overwhelmed or trapped. Find out why this is so, and what to do when you just don’t know where to start.

How to Get Unstuck

• If you’re feeling stuck, getting support from a life coach, career coach, or relationship coach, or even just someone you trust can help in processing your thoughts and laying out all the possibilities you have.
• Sometimes you need someone else to help you align your thoughts, especially when your mind is feeling clouded or very self-limiting.
• Elise uses Snyder’s Hope Theory with her clients. It focuses on identifying goals and pathways to achieve those goals, as well as developing your agency to do that.
• Elise connects the feeling of stuckness to hopelessness, which is why she tries to instill hope in her clients.
• After identifying concrete barriers or obstacles, it is easier to move towards specific goals and solutions.
• The process of getting unstuck might also include looking back at successful moments and determining the strategies that worked during those situations. It is a way to build hope.

5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

“That feeling of worry and nervousness about the future and about not being able to do anything really signals to me that someone actually really does care about wanting to make positive changes, but doesn’t know where to start by themselves.”

On “I should” statements: “Those kinds of things can lend to feeling stuck, because it’s not coming from that place where you feel like you have the ability to actually do something. I always say, with the ‘shoulds,’ you’re shoulding on yourself, and that doesn’t leave a lot of productive work.”

“Sometimes, feeling stuck in life means you do have to do hard things because it will get you to that ultimate goal.”

“At the beginning of the process, when I’m hearing someone’s stuck, my brain automatically thinks, ‘Oh, they’re feeling hopeless. There’s not a lot of hope.’ […] And so I love starting by asking, ‘What is one thing that you would love to change about your current circumstances?’”

“You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to start getting unstuck. Because often the place you’re meant to be will be revealed as you continue that process.”

About Life & Career Coach Elise R.

Elise R. is a life coach, career counselor, and an individual Denver therapist. She is one of the experts behind the Growing Self team. Elise is passionate about helping people find their truth and change the world through living their authentic purpose.

Read more about Elise on Growing Self. If you’re feeling inspired to do your own work around getting unstuck above and beyond listening to this episode, you can schedule a free coaching consultation with Elise to discuss your life  and career goals, and how she can help you achieve them. 

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Here’s to finding love, happiness, and success!

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

If you want to get even MORE insight into why you’re feeling stuck and how to liberate yourself mentally and emotionally, be sure to take my “What’s Holding You Back” online quiz to see where you need to focus your personal growth work.