The Hidden Truth About Being Stuck (And Why It's Actually Good News)

Feeling stuck can be tough, but you're not alone. Whether you're stuck trying to reach a goal or just feeling blah, there’s hope and a way forward. We’ll  explore the two types of being stuck and learn real ways to get moving again.

Find out why your brain might be stuck in survival mode, causing negative thoughts, and learn to focus on future possibilities instead of past mistakes. Using practical techniques like a "friction audit," you'll see what's holding you back and plan for real change.

We’ll also  look at how money problems can make you feel stuck and offers positive solutions for tackling this issue. You'll discover how to recognize, deal with, or remove the barriers in your way.

The key is taking small steps forward. Each little step can build up positive energy and create big changes in your life. Ready to turn your stuck feelings into a starting point for something great? 

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Transcript

Hi friends. Today we are talking about feeling stuck, specifically about feeling stuck after a money setback or business setback. It's something that many people go through and we'll chat about why it happens and how we can move forward.

Welcome to Her Money Mindset show. Thank you so much for being here. I know your time is valuable and I appreciate you joining us today. I'm Stephanie, Her Money Coach, and I'm here to help you get through any money setback, whether it be from a divorce, a job loss, or a business that didn't work out, you're in the right place.

My journey with money and mindset changes started over 15 years ago after a tough divorce. I had to learn how to change my thoughts to turn my life around. These skills have helped me through a long career in Fortune 500 companies, real estate investing, and being a single parent. In 2022, I lost my franchise business and a lot of money and my home, but thankfully these mindset skills helped me bounce back quickly and I want to teach you how to.

 So the first thing to understand about being stuck is it is universal. It's part of this human experience. To me that is a freeing thought because it feels like a very personal attack or very personal when you're going through it.

When we're stuck in being stuck, we don't see how other people around us are also stuck because in reality we're all stuck in some kind of way.

That's the first thing to understand. The second thing to understand about being stuck is that there are actually things you can do systematically one after another to get unstuck. It may not feel that way. It may feel like a mess. You may be saying it's complicated. You don't understand my situation.

It's hard to see that there's actually a path to get through it when you're right in the middle of it. But in many, many cases, there is a path. It's just that most of us don't know those steps.

So today we're going to walk through what is being stuck, why do we get stuck, especially after a set back.   How do we know when we are stuck, and how do we get unstuck. What those steps that I talked about?  

 Let's dive in and talk about what is being stuck. Dr. Adam Alter wrote a book called "The Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to get Unstuck When it Matters Most". And he says there's two kinds of stuck. There's the one kind where you can't complete a goal, and then there's another kind where you don't even know which way to go, you're just feeling blah. 

And they're a little different, but they both exist. So the first one, you're saying things like, I wanna be at point Z, and I'm at point A and I don't know how to get there. And you want to figure out how to get from that point A to Z with the shortest possible path.

In this case, there's a destination, and it's obvious, and you know it. Maybe you call the destination a goal. There's something specific That you want. It might be job related. It might be to get out of debt. It might be to increase your income, whatever it is, you have a goal and you're stuck because you don't know how to get from where you're at  to that goal, to where you want to be.

This one is often easier to solve than the second reason for being stuck. And the second kind of being stuck is just that blah. And I think we've all felt this at some point in our lives, and you just don't know what you're supposed to be doing. Things feel kind of dull and gray.

You don't even know what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be. It might be this feeling of blah in your career, in a friendship, in just general malaise in life. In this kind of stuck, life feels like it's  been leached of all the things that make it rich and interesting and motivating.

It's just a general kind of stuckness, not attached to one specific thing. And this is  very common.  There was some research done by a man named Bruce Feiler and he calls these lifequakes and lifequakes are these huge major life events that affect all of us and we're almost blindsided by And they're very often not things we want to have happen in our life, like a divorce, like a job loss, like a bad business investment, those things that come up, and they're considered negative. 

These life events that we didn't want to happen, but they happen nonetheless. These can spring us into being stuck.

So why do these kinds of life events or setbacks get us stuck? Well, one reason is we get stuck in the past. We have not processed. any of these negative feelings that kind of just are spiraling out of control in our brain and they're taking over. Our inner critic, our saboteurs, our negative talk is just on autopilot in the back of our brain at all times. And you cannot move forward. You can't put this past behind you when that is going on.

You cannot create a future  when you're repeating the past in your brain. The brain is unconsciously streaming these negative thoughts. They're just unconscious. 

And they're just perpetuating the fact that your future is not going to be any different than your past. And in effect, you're creating a self fulfilling prophecy. 

There's a great book on this topic called The Gap and the Gain, and it talks about how when you're thinking about things in your life that are a gap, like things you don't have, versus things that are a gain, things that you've accomplished, things that you've done, wins you've had, that that keeps you stuck.

And when we're stuck with these negative thoughts on autopilot, we are not able to use our prefrontal part of the brain to decide our thoughts on purpose. 

 Think of it like this, there's a hot stove and you put your hand on it. You want your hand to feel that hot stove so that  you can feel it and burn just enough to alert you to take your hand off it. But if you keep your hand on that hot stove it will burn your hand off.

So, if you use that analogy to think of negative thoughts, a negative thought can come in and it can alert you to something going on and a danger. But if you let those negative thoughts just spiral and spiral and build and build, then it's like keeping your hand on the hot stove and it's just going to cause a lot of damage.

 Because you can't problem solve when you're in survival mode. When your brain is in survival mode, it's giving more weight to those negative thoughts. It's giving your inner critic louder and louder voices. And that is overwhelming and can make us stuck.

 That inner alarm in our head is signaling that you are stuck in your head and you have removed yourself from the present moment. Eckhart Tolle has a quote, Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are. Whatever you fight, you strengthen. Whatever you resist, persists. You are not your mind. And I know we don't believe that. We think that we are our mind. We think our thoughts are true. But they may or may not be true. And you are not them.

You are not your mind. 

So the third thing we do when we get stuck from a setback is we avoid dealing with  the real financial challenges. They can be intimidating and overwhelming. Things like paying our bills, things like looking at our bank accounts. These kinds of things we want to avoid, but we need to face them.

We need to open up our bills and become aware so that we know where we are and we know where we can go. We can learn skills and steps to get there, to bring confidence and clarity. We have no clarity and therefore no solutions if we don't know what the problems are, if we haven't figured out what we need and want to do.

So how do we know when we're stuck? Think it's pretty apparent to us when we feel stuck. Again, there's the two kinds of being stuck. If we have a goal we want to attain and we don't think we're taking steps and we don't know how to get there, we are aware of that. We have those feelings and we know that it can make us procrastinate, uh, be unmotivated and unproductive.

We can find ourselves making a lot of excuses. For example, let's say one of my goals is to be completely debt free, but I have no idea The steps I need to take to get there. If that's the case, then I'm just making excuses. Like I'm never going to be debt free. I can't be out of debt because I have these bills and those thoughts and those feelings make us feel unmotivated and unable to go step by step by step because we're confused.

We're telling ourselves we're confused. If you're telling yourself you're confused, that's the first thing to make you notice that you might be stuck.

When you wake up and you're just feeling blah throughout your day, that also can make you feel unmotivated and unproductive. That also can lead to  telling yourself a lot of excuses and you're just in a feeling of being lost. Then, you know, you're probably stuck. And the problem with being stuck is it feels very personal.

It feels very uncomfortable and it feels like a mess. 

Particularly when you are stuck from a money setback, it can feel very hopeless and helpless because you do not know how to get unstuck and what are the steps. But the good news is there are many things you can do and we're going to talk about that right now. Get ready to feel hopeful and excited because you can get unstuck.

 The first thing you need to do to get unstuck is to get clarity. Get very clear on what you want. If you're constantly focused on what went wrong, what was bad, what is bad? You're creating more and more of that negative energy and negative thoughts, and that will just make you more stuck. It will just dig that hole and make it bigger.

So you need to be focusing on what you do want and less about what you don't want and what has happened. If you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling a little lost, I guarantee you it's because you don't know what you want. Now in Dr. Adam Alter's book, "The Atomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most", he talks about a friction audit.

 The process of doing a friction audit is about figuring out what your biggest sticking points are. What are the problems in your life so that you can start to see that and you can make forward motion to less of that and more of what you do want.

This idea of a friction audit brings awareness to what's not working in your life. And now I know I just said, don't focus on what's not working figure out what you want to do,  you're going to do both together.

So, so stay with me. So in this friction audit, we're first looking at becoming aware of what are these big problems that we need to remove that are getting us stuck. And maybe we need to remove them. Once we become aware of what they actually are, then we can see what we can do about them.  In this process of auditing, we are going to decide on things that we're going to take out completely of our life, or we're going to decide on things that we accept that they're there.

We can't change them, and we're going to have to change our attitude about them. We label it, we name it, we acknowledge that this is just part of life. Everything in life is not wonderful. That is just a fact. Life is 50 50. There's 50 percent greatness and 50 percent not so greatness. That's just how life is.

 Accepting that this is just one of those 50 50 things. I can't do anything about it and so I'm going to change my attitude and I'll tell you an example of this from my own life. Several years ago,  in a corporate job and, I was the product developer for a  very technical piece of software.

 I thought that my boss didn't think I was technical enough to have that job. That thought just grew and grew.  I just found evidence after evidence about that. This situation got so bad in my mind that I found it hard to talk to her. I couldn't look her in the eyes. It affected my attitude at work.

Then a series of events happened. We had a merger. The organization changed and all of these changes that were happening added to my general attitude that I wasn't good enough to be in my job. This went on for some time, like maybe it was a year. And as I kept building evidence and having this bad attitude, I kept having  issues.

What really made me realize that this was my mind causing all my problems was  when my peer got promoted above me , he got promoted and I ended up working under him and I felt very much like this wasn't fair. Like I am the better person for that job.

All of these thoughts  also expanded  this bad attitude. Then one day,  I don't really know how this happened, but I came to realize that, okay, what if it's true that I am not technical enough to have this promotion and this job. Why do I think that that should have been mine?

And I realized that I have a lot of managerial and leadership strengths and product strengths  and I am  very strong in certain skill sets. And yes, true, all of the technical  coding type things are not my strength, but that's why I lean on my development partners for.

And after talking myself through. I decided that, okay, maybe I'm not as technical as some other people, but I have other skills that are even more important. And I'm going to show those. From that day forward, I went to work saying, I'm going to add value and I'm going to have leadership energy in everything I do.

And over time, things drastically changed.  I actually became grateful for not getting that job and that promotion, because it helped me see that I really wanted to do more of these other things. These  leadership, project management. More of that and less of the technical intricacies because that's what I was good at.

So this whole several year process helped me see that my attitude and thoughts about something were making me show up in a certain way. When I changed them and decided something different and different thoughts, I showed up in a whole different way.  This led to  better satisfaction in my job.

I actually moved to a different job that used  my skill sets and I added value. People were talking about my leadership and the value that I added. And it made a huge  difference in my work.

We need to understand that sometimes we change the thing, or sometimes we change our attitude about it.  And the other thing that we need to make sure that we do is look at the good things in our life. That's also another piece from that book, The Gap and the Gain, is focusing less on gaps, the things you missed, the goals you didn't make, and more on gains, your accomplishments, the things you did make, the wins.

Because looking at your wins makes life better. If you're tracking, we're doing an audit and we're seeing friction points and we're seeing good points. And I'm going to talk specifically about a couple different tools to actually do this, but in general, we're really becoming aware of those things that are causing a problem for us and also really shining a light on those things that are good.

Some people think that to make life better, you should do more of the good things, throw in more fun, and take these friction points and take them out.

If you have a lot of good things, but you have a lot of things that are bad, then that can drag you down.

Your bad things have a lot more power to drag you down than good things lifting you up.

We are  as good as the worst thing on that friction list. If you feel like your life is full of friction, but you also have on paper all the good things, the best thing you can do is not necessarily add more good things, but take time and attention and deal with those top friction points. Throw everything you have at them, whether it be resources, money, time, work on getting rid of those big friction points. You do this by taking action. When something is a friction point, the natural instinct is to turn from it, hide,  For instance, if you are in a money setback and your bills are just piling up, your natural instinct is to leave them in the pile, not open them, not think about it, not look at it.

It's likely you're saying to yourself, I'm going to focus on something else. Something that makes me feel good. I'm going to go to the mall and buy something.

I'm gonna get on social media and look at people's amazing vacations . But when we're not looking at our bills and we don't know our numbers, we don't know where we're at, so we don't know  the steps to move forward.

Unless you open those bills, figure them out, you can't actually deal with them.  You're not going to be able to raise them up, and they can end up being bigger and bigger problems.

Okay, let's talk about some tools. These are some of my favorite things. I do these and I highly recommend you try them. Dr. Alter's book talks about different ways to do this friction audit, but some of the ways I like to do it are from Alex Banayan. He has two things. One is the sun and the cloud and one is the 30 day challenge. So I'm first going to teach you the sun and the clouds, because this is actually been life changing for me. 

First thing you do is take out a piece of paper. Hopefully you can see this and draw a line down the middle and then draw a line at the top, like a T. Then on one side, you're going to draw a picture of a gray cloud.  On the other side, you're going to have a picture of a bright sun. 

Then you're going to set a timer for seven minutes and you're going to write all bullet points of everything in your life that feels like a cloud hovering over you.

For me, some of these are, I feel heavy and sad when I'm not making progress on my goals.

I feel heavy and sad when I'm not feeling good about a relationship. 

I feel a cloud over me when I'm not keeping my promises to myself. You get the idea here. Now I'm going to say this again and again. You need to do it for seven minutes. The first two minutes are easy. You're just going to be like all the things, but where the magic comes in is as you get to minute five, six and seven, you are getting two to three levels deeper.

And those are the things you're going below the surface, things you haven't thought of, and it's going to be really illuminating. Now you've got your list of clouds, things that are hovering over you. I guess these would be the things that are causing friction. Then on the other side, you set your timer for seven minutes.

And you think of everything that makes you feel like the sun is shining on you. Be very specific on  both these sides. For example, spending time with my kids, growing myself and learning new things,

getting to the gym every day, walking in nature. These are all things that make me feel like the sun is shining on my face.  So we've done the seven minutes of clouds and seven minutes of sun. Now the next thing you're going to do is you're going to read these to yourself every single morning for seven days. 

This will seem very repetitive at first. The first couple days will seem like you're just reading it and nothing happening. It's  like when you've gone to the gym every day for a month, you've done the stepper every day for a month, but you're looking in the mirror and nothing seems that different.

At some point down the line, if you're consistent and you do it  you do see change and there is change. It's the same thing here. You're not going to have immediate breakthroughs, but you have to stay consistent and keep going and then you will start to notice as day three and four, that different things are coming up in your mind, different thoughts, different clarity around things that are a problem and things that you want to make solutions to.

Alex talks about doing this exercise with a Google executive and his team.  This guy was positive and happy. His life is great. He really didn't need to or want to do the exercise. He's thinking, I'm not stuck. I don't need to do this. But  he does it anyway. His team's doing it, so he does the exercise.

And at the end, he tells Alex, he broke the exercise. He says, my life felt a lot better before I did this. He was very clear about all the suns. But he had no awareness about any clouds in his life, but he filled up a whole page of clouds. After reading it every morning on the third day, he noticed there were things that he had been avoiding for years, tough conversations he needed to have with his family, tough  decisions he needed to make at work with his business.

This thing, the clouds and sun that you're reading every day is a mirror to yourself. It's like weighing yourself every day. You look on the scale so you can see where you're at. So you can understand more. So you can be an observer of your life. I am very much like this. I don't like to think about the clouds of my life.

I would rather be positive, think positive thoughts, think things that make me happy, but the world is not like that. It is 50 50. There are always clouds. They always are.  So you need to be aware of them so that you can decide what to do with them and if they're helping you in your life, and if they're not, what you want to do with them, if you want to accept them or extricate them.

But you have to become aware of them. The purpose of these tools are for growth. They're to become aware. And to make a decision and then to learn and grow because we can really only grow from a place of clarity. In doing this process, these audits, inconvenient truths will come out of the closet. That doesn't feel comfortable.

Sometimes it doesn't feel good. Sometimes you wish you didn't have to deal with them. But this is how you grow and learn and your life gets better. This is how you get unstuck. It's also great to see how much sunshine there is in your life. Our brain is wired to continually remind us about all the negativities.

That inner critic is in there just telling us what's bad, what went wrong, how we're a failure, and it's good to see the sun  remember all of these things that are great in your life. That is healing to do every day.  Try the sun and clouds. It's a fantastic exercise. I do it probably every quarter.

I just did it again today and sure enough have a whole list of both and I'm excited to repeat it for the next seven days and see what emerges.   If you want to go deeper, Alex has a 30 day challenge . The 30 day challenge is focused on finding clarity for your next path or your next chapter after a setback.

Let's say you had a divorce and  you want a new chapter in life and you don't know what that is. You're kind of stuck and you don't know how to get in touch with what might be next for you.  This is a great way to start to see from the wisdom within yourself what might be a good path.

The rules are very simple. You're going to first go to the store or on Amazon or wherever and buy a new notebook. This is very important part of this process, and get a notebook that you love. Alex actually has research that people that got a new notebook that they love and did this process for 30 days actually had better results.

So first stop is get a notebook. Then you're going to schedule 15 minutes every day to answer three questions, the same questions every day. Put 15 minutes in your calendar, or set a reminder or some way that you can remember to do this 15 minutes and answer these three questions every day and don't skip a day.

If you skip a day start from the beginning It sucks, but just do that or don't skip a day.

When I do this challenge, one way I don't forget to do it is I put the notebook on my pillow so that I see it before I'm going to go to bed and it reminds me to do it every day. It's easy to forget if the notebook is put somewhere else. So put it in a visible place, maybe have it stack it with something else.

Maybe put it by your coffee machine  or whatever you need to do to remind you to answer these three questions every day.  The three questions that you need to answer every day, they're very simple, but you would be surprised how much you'll get out of it. Oftentimes the simplest questions and practices when done consistently can have the most profound effect.

Now, when you're answering these questions, don't hold yourself back. Don't worry if they make sense or not. Don't judge yourself. Just let it flow. Don't overthink it. Don't analyze it. You're dumping everything from your mind. The three questions are one, what filled me with enthusiasm today?

It doesn't have to be life changing. It could be a podcast episode. It could be a quote. It could be that a stranger smelled at you just write down what gave you enthusiasm today. The second question is, what drained me of energy today? This is easy for me because a lot of times it's boring meetings.

It's having surface conversations with people. Just download everything that drained you for the day. Then the third question is, what did I learn about myself today?  These are the three questions fairly simple, right? If you're feeling called to try this out, I really encourage you to do it It only takes 10 to 15 minutes a day and you will be shocked by the breakthroughs.  Just like the Sun and the clouds repeating it for seven days  this can be at first feeling very repetitive.  Just like the gym analogy, you're not seeing some big difference, not having some big breakthrough and you're wondering why am I doing this? But just keep doing it because at the end of the 30 days, you're going to have one hour where you're going to study what you wrote and how you answered these questions for the past 30 days. You're going to study it and you're going to find patterns.

You're going to answer the same questions, but for the month. So what filled me with enthusiasm this month? What drained me of energy this month? And what did I learn about myself this month? 

You're going to be analyzing and start to see patterns and make this fun. Maybe go to your favorite place for dinner or, have candles around. I don't know, if some way to be commemorating this 30 days that you have spent looking at and focusing on the things that make you feel good in life and the things that drain you.

 Give it a try and just see what comes up. The purpose of it is to get clarity around what might be the next thing you take on in your life. So let's say you have a financial setback, and you're evaluating. These things that make you feel good or drain you for 30 days, you can start to see how you might want to change things and create a different life for yourself.

However you choose to do an audit, whether it be one of the tools we just talked about, or just a thought download and listing all of the things that might be causing friction in your life, however you choose to do it, bringing awareness to this is going to help you get unstuck.

You're also going to be demonstrating to yourself through your behavior

that your life has a kind of purpose and that you're the kind of person who can seize an opportunity and get unstuck. There's something very valuable about signaling to yourself, especially when you're feeling that overall blah stuck,  that you can reach a goal, that you can get yourself out of the hole and you can make things happen.

You are the kind of person who makes things happen. It's not the goal for the goal's sake. It's a fact that you're moving towards something that says, I can get things done. I've done this thing.

When you're lost, our GPS is not connected. It's like that spinning sensation. Like we're waiting, we're waiting to reconnect. And so we don't know where to go. We get confused. When we set a goal, we're saying to ourselves, I'm the kind of person who can take a goal and achieve it.

Whatever that goal might be, whether it's something big, like.  getting completely out of debt or something little like, I'm going to pay this bill. When you do this, you're prepared to move forward and with the thing that perhaps really matters to you in the moment, because you've done this audit. So you know what matters most to you, and now you have clarity on what to take action on to get unstuck. Because we always find evidence for whatever we believe. These thoughts that seek evidence either put us in a place of being a victim or a victor.  Moving towards goals is proving to yourself that you aren't a victim and that you aren't stuck.

Because being stuck is disempowering. You feel like you're not being the best version of yourself. You feel powerless and it's not very fun.

 If you think about creating this goal that's meaningful to you, it counteracts and contradicts that feeling of hopelessness. And once you know this about yourself, you are in a much better position to try something, to tackle something that's really big and meaningful, and to get unstuck. So the best single thing that you can do if you feel stuck is to take action, whatever small action moves you forward, that's what you want to do. Try to think about what this tiny action might be. For example, you don't have enough income coming in to pay your bills, the tiniest piece of action might be just making a list of alternative things to bring in income. It could be a side hustle. It could be selling stuff. It could be getting a job that pays more. It could be reducing expenses like cutting out this or that.

 Just writing down a whole list of things that come to mind that could bring in more income and help you pay your bills. Just that one tiny thing can help you move forward. It's one action. Then you can actually go through the list, sort them out, do some pros and cons. You can start figuring out which makes sense, which don't, but even just the small act of writing it down is going to move you in the right direction.

It's enough to signal to yourself that you've got forward progress.  You started to get the ball rolling. That's the biggest trick. It's doing the small thing so that you're not static and you're not stuck. You're actually moving in the right direction, signaling to yourself that you're the kind of person who can move.

Let's put this in an analogy of working out. Cause I feel like that is always  people's goals. If you're on this mindset of being curious,  you're going to start an experiment. You're not necessarily going to get six pack abs

you're just being curious. So you're going to spend the next 30 days figuring out what kind of workouts you even like. Am I going to spend 10 minutes every other day doing jump rope? Or am I going to learn Pilates? Am I going to try a HIIT class? And if you turn it into this experiment It is no longer about getting it right.

It's just about getting yourself moving and see what you like.

Because it's an experiment, some things are going to feel good and some things are going to feel bad.

If you think about this with the not having enough income , you could just start trying things. If you decided that you wanted to bring in more income from a  side hustle, maybe you start learning to sell things on Shopify or create websites for people, or whatever you're interested in, you could start thinking about and experimenting with what that might look like.

You have no idea what that might turn into. So think of your next step. action as whatever small thing you can do to start giving yourself forward momentum and experimenting on what is possible.

Thank you for joining me today. If this episode was helpful to you, please share. If you have someone in your life that's stuck, please pass it along. It can help them see why we get stuck and how we can get unstuck.  I hope you can see how you can get yourself unstuck, that it's doable, it's possible, and there are steps to  get there. Next time you're feeling stuck, try the sun and clouds, try the 30 day challenge, try to do a friction audit, and notice that you are able to move forward, give yourself momentum, you have everything you need inside you to figure this out and to get unstuck.

Don't forget to visit hermoneycoach.com and subscribe to my free weekly newsletter for more tips and tricks to manage your money mindset. Until next time, remember you have the power to change your financial future, and I'm here cheering you on every step of the way.