Transcript
[00:00:01]
You're listening to the Her Leadership Coach podcast for the quietly determined career woman who's looking to step up into her first or next level leadership role. If you're looking to make a bigger, more positive difference in your organization, you've come to the right place. Well, hello. Welcome in. It's Rochelle.
[00:00:22]
This week on Her Leadership Coach podcast, we're talking about feeling stuck. And I feel like this applies to a few people at the moment, so it's a little bit timely. I find sometimes we just feel stuck, right? We are stuck in a rut. We feel stuck with how things are.
[00:00:45]
We're stuck with not knowing what to do next. I'm wondering if this has ever happened to you, or maybe you're even feeling stuck right now. I know it's definitely happened to me in the past. Thankfully not right now. It could be that you're feeling stuck in a relationship, which is definitely where I've been.
[00:01:04]
You don't want to stay. You're not happy. You maybe don't think you love your partner anymore, but you don't feel like you can leave either. It might be that the finances don't stack up. It might be you feel the kids are too young or you're not sure what he'll do if you're no longer there.
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It could be feeling stuck in life in general. It's just boring you to tears. The same things on the same day with the same people. Even the conversations seem to be the same. Or perhaps it's feeling stuck in your job.
[00:01:44]
Maybe it's one that you've studied years for and so you can't possibly leave and throw that all away. Or it could be that you've worked really hard to get to this point, only now that you're here, it's not what you thought it was going to be, or you've been doing it for so long now, you can do it in your sleep, but you're sort of not sure what else you might be capable of doing, so you feel stuck where you are. I have a colleague who is a lawyer, and, you know, that takes a lot. All the years of law school, of getting a job in the first place, of working her way up, to be now respected and well paid. And while she didn't hate it, it just wasn't as fulfilling as she thought it was going to be.
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She really felt like there was something else out there that was meant for her. She didn't know exactly what it was. She just didn't feel like this was it, and she didn't have the time to look for it because she was really busy. And besides, in her head, she thought if she left law, she'd be letting her parents down. And isn't that a common feeling?
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The thought of, well, what would my friends think if I stopped being a lawyer? I think you get tied up in this identity of being a lawyer, and the thought of stepping out makes you feel like people aren't going to see you in the same way, aren't going to respect you as much. So, yeah, she felt stuck in her career, so we can feel stuck in relationships and jobs just in life. And yet really, when you think about it, are we actually stuck? I mean, no one's physically holding us down.
[00:03:44]
No one's making us do the things on the days. So what is it that makes us feel stuck? When I think about the times I've felt stuck, it comes down to feeling like we don't have choices. And really, when you think about that, it's sort of giving our power away, right? If we're feeling like we don't have choices, then we feel like we have no control.
[00:04:19]
We feel like we have no power over our own lives. But I believe we always have choices. Sometimes we don't want to make them, which is in itself making the choice to not make a choice. But I think we always have choices. They can be hard, though, right?
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I mean, our younger kids, when they come and stay with us, they can't even choose what they want for dinner if we're out. So how we meant to make choices about leaving a partner or a lucrative career path that's taken years to get to. All right, so let's look at that. I'm going to go through three steps for you to work through how you can get your life or that feeling of stuckness unstuck. First step, this is possibly the simple one, is make the decision that you're going to stop feeling stuck.
[00:05:20]
Look, I get it. Sometimes it just feels good to wallow in this feeling of stuckness, right? It means we don't have to deal with it. We don't have to deal with the scariness of the unknown while we're sitting there bored or unhappy or even frustrated with where we're at, at least it's knowing. I wouldn't say it's exactly comfortable.
[00:05:44]
I think feeling stuck isn't comfortable. And yet somewhere in there and that feeling of, well, I know this, there is a sense of comfortableness because the thought of making the decision to stop feeling stuck means we really do need to step into uncomfortableness. So once you make a decision to become unstuck, something's going to have to change. And that can be scary. That takes us to number two, step two, which is you need to gain clarity about what you want and what you don't want.
[00:06:30]
Because I think often being stuck is a lack of clarity and particularly around the choices that are available to you. So you feel like you don't have any choices, and that's because you don't have clarity around what the choices are. So I hope that makes sense. But there are a lot of ways that you can gain clarity about what might be next, about what might be a choice you can make that's going to get you out of feeling stuck. So I'll go through a couple.
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One is to journal, and this is probably one of my favorite. I love posing interesting questions or being given interesting questions to really reflect on life and get my thoughts out of my own head because sometimes my thoughts are stuck in my head. So a couple of questions that you might want to journal on that will help you gain clarity. If you have a million dollars in your bank account and absolutely no debt at all, you've paid your house off, you paid your car off, kids are gone, no debt, what would you do with your life?
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So write that question down and whatever comes to mind, don't judge it, just write it. See what happens at the end of that. The second question similar, but it can also bring up different thoughts. If I was living my best life, what would I be doing right now?
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You may also want to talk out those questions or perhaps your options for getting unstuck with a friend. And so grab a coffee, ask them if they're happy to just talk some things through with you and almost like a pros and cons list or expand the possibilities list depending on where you're at. The only thing I'll say about talking with a friend is you do need to watch for judgment. So your friend normally has your best interests at heart. If they're a good friend, they have your best interests at heart.
[00:08:43]
However, they have their own interests at heart as well. And so sometimes what's best for you they may not feel is best for them. And even when they're trying not to let that cloud their judgment, we're human and it does. So by all means, go and talk out your options with a friend, help them expand your possibilities and go through the pros and cons of each different choice that you might have, but be aware of the judgment. And that takes me to work with a coach to gain some clarity because the coach's job is to stay out of judgment.
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And this is definitely something that I help people with, getting career clarity without the judgment. So when you're looking for a coach, a career coach, or even a life coach, if it's the lifestyle, find one that you click with. You definitely want to have a rapport with a coach, but not one that's going to be too soft on you. You want one that challenges you as well and doesn't let you get away with your own ball stuff. Just to keep this from being an expletive.
[00:09:58]
Okay, the next way to gain clarity, and this is probably the most powerful way, I think, is to take a step, any step. Take action. Taking action brings you clarity. And what happens when you take that step is you find out if it feels closer for you or further away from what you want. So sometimes it can be a step and you know immediately that it's the wrong direction.
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And it only needs to be a small step. It doesn't need to be some big grand leap. It might be talking to someone about a role you think might be good, but you're not sure. So if you feel like you're going to be good at project management, for example, go and find a project manager. Take the step of talking to them about what it's really like to hold that role.
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It might be signing up for a class of some sort. So, again, if you decide you want to be a project manager, sign up for a project management class. You'll soon know whether it feels right for you or not. It might be if we're talking relationship issues, it might be having a weekend away by yourself, just two nights, one night even, and see how that feels for you. Does it feel good?
[00:11:15]
Does it feel yuck? Just taking action brings clarity. Making the choice to do nothing does not, and it is a choice. You also want to tie this clarity. So when you start looking at your options and taking steps and talking things through, and you're getting closer to deciding what it might be that's going to get you out of this feeling of stuckness, start to tie that clarity to your values.
[00:11:45]
Now, if you're laughing out loud right now, thinking, what values? Rochelle? You might want to go back, check out episode eight where we go into how to make your values work for you. But basically what I'm talking about is the more closely an action ties to your values, to the things that you feel give you value, to the things that you value, the more motivated you are to take that action. Even if the action still seems scary, the motivation outweighs the scariness.
[00:12:16]
So let's say you're the lawyer I mentioned earlier, or maybe, let's say, the project manager, right? So if you're currently in a policy role at work, and you've spent years building up your knowledge and your skills, and you're finally at the top of the individual level in that field, only now you feel stuck and you've done some of these activities, gained some clarity, you're thinking about a complete change to becoming a project manager in software development. So if you take each of your top three values one at a time and find ten ways that that value will be met by becoming a project manager in software development. So let's say one of my top values is making a difference, which it is. If I tie that to becoming a project manager, I can think, well, I can focus on supporting others to do their best work, which is making a difference to their lives.
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So tick I can include customers from the beginning of my project so that the end product, the end software makes a difference to them rather than producing something that they have no interest in. Tick that's true. I could keep people informed, maybe stakeholders, maybe customers along the way, so they're not feeling anxious or stressed about what might be coming their way. That's another way of making a difference. So hopefully you could begin to see if you pile on the ways that this new course of action will meet your values, your fear of taking that action will start to give way to excitement.
[00:13:56]
And if it doesn't, or if you can't find ways to tie this new course of action to your values, then you might want to rethink that course of action as the answer to getting out of your stuckness. And that brings us to step number three, which is you need to make a choice. And that will be a choice to either take the action that you've clarified or to accept where you are and be grateful for it. Because that too will get you out of the feeling of being stuck. So you've made the decision, you're not going to be stuck anymore.
[00:14:43]
You've got some clarity. The action that you're going to take doesn't have to be some big grand gesture. The lawyer I was talking about earlier, she got some coaching that helped her gain some clarity and she did some work with her values as well. And out of all that, she decided she wanted to start her own business. She didn't quit lawyering one day and become a successful entrepreneur the next.
[00:15:12]
She started with cutting back on the extra hours at work. Now that she'd made the decision that she didn't want to progress in that career pathway, she was able to let go of working all of the extra hours and she used that extra time instead to start a business on the side. If you're going from a policy career to a project manager, the first step might just be take a course. It might be working out ways to use some of those skills, the project manager skills, where you are now in your policy career so that you've got something that you can add to a resume, so that you're more likely to get a project manager role. You don't have to suddenly quit one thing and start up another overnight.
[00:16:00]
Now, the good news is that simply by taking those small steps, you unlock that feeling of stuckness. Even though the lawyer was still lawyering, she no longer felt stuck lawyering because she knew she had choices and she was working on them. Now, sometimes it might be that you make the choice to say exactly where you are right now and you still make the decision to stop feeling stuck while you're there. Again, simply recognizing you have choices can help you understand you're not stuck. You are actually choosing to stay.
[00:16:39]
One of the reframes my husband uses, there are days where he is not excited about going to work. He will sometimes slip into, I can't believe I've got to go to work tomorrow. However, when he's thinking about it, rather than saying, I have to go to work tomorrow, he says, oh, yeah, I get to go to work tomorrow. And that changes his outlook on going to work. I get to go to work tomorrow.
[00:17:09]
How many people don't get to go to work tomorrow? You can also reframe it. Another way of saying this, which I love as well, is I choose to go to work tomorrow. Because, of course, you can choose not to. You're not stuck going to work.
[00:17:24]
You can choose not to go. It's just that you also choose the consequences of that decision. If you choose to stay where you are, you might also want to apply the values exercise to that choice. How are your values being met? Or how can you change the way you're seeing this status quo, this where you are, so that you feel like your values are in alignment with where you are?
[00:17:54]
So, again, it might be reframing just the sentence. It might be looking at those values and going, yes, I can see now that where I am really is meeting my values. And so it might just be realizing that I have a choice to stay and a choice to go, and I've chosen to stay. I'm not stuck here. And you can unmake that choice at any time too, right?
[00:18:20]
And then you want to use that new awareness to start feeling grateful and practicing gratefulness for where you are right now. Because when you focus on what's good about where you are, you'll find more good things about where you are. And you also, interestingly enough, find more good things flow to you, whether it's about where you are or whether you start seeing that there are more choices than you initially thought. So we've talked about making the decision you're going to stop feeling stuck. We've talked about gaining clarity about what you want and what you don't want and how to tie that to your values.
[00:19:02]
And finally, we've talked about taking action or making the choice and accepting and being grateful for where you are right now. And as a leader, you get to help others become unstuck. And that's super exciting. Well, it is to me at least, and I hope it is for you as well. All right, that's it for this week.
[00:19:25]
Thanks for joining me. If you want to talk more about getting unstuck, why not join us in the Women and Leadership Facebook group? You'll find the link in the show notes, or you can search Woman and Leadership in Facebook. You might find joining in the conversation itself gets you out of your rap right now. If you got value out of this episode, I would love it if you could share it with others.
[00:19:49]
And of course, if you've been listening to podcasts or any amount of time, you'll know that rating the show and leaving a review helps others find the show, and I would really appreciate that. Until next week continue to lead the way her way.
