When You Feel Stuck

Have you ever had that feeling of spinning your wheels, stuck in a rut that you can’t get out of, or being held down by some force that just will not allow you to move?

Perhaps you’re going over and over the same thought endlessly and analysing a situation from every angle possible. Perhaps you’re stuck between weighing up the pros and the cons, trying to imagine every possible outcome, and you just can’t figure out the way forward.

That feeling of being stuck can relate to all kinds of things in life - your job, your relationship, your health, your finances, where you live, or simply what direction you want your life to take.

And it can be incredibly draining. It eats away at you, and as it does, time ticks by. Time you can never get back. It steals from you — your mental capacity, your emotional capacity, your energy, and at times, it can almost feel like it is stealing your sanity.

I know what it feels like to be stuck. I can remember sitting in my study at my computer desk with my head in my hands, thinking something along the lines of: What do I do? If only I knew the answer. It felt like there was just way too much on the line.

I would look at the situation from every possible angle. I’d weigh up the pros and cons. I’d try to imagine what life might look like years into the future depending on which direction I went. I researched. I thought. I analysed. And then I analysed some more.

The problem was that none of that thinking seemed to give me the certainty I was looking for. I was trying to listen to my head, my heart and my gut, and at times they all seemed to be telling me different things.

And being stuck came at a cost. It cost me a lot of mental energy. It cost me sleep. It affected my focus at work and, at times, it took some of my focus away from my kids. Most of all, it took me away from living life as fully as I could.

That’s one of the difficult things about being stuck. You can become so focused on figuring out the future that you stop fully living in the present.

You don’t have to figure everything out right now

If you’re in that place at the moment, the first thing I would want you to know is that you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure it all out right now.

When something feels really important, it can feel as though you need to somehow find the perfect answer before you move. You want certainty. You want to know that the decision you make is the right one and that everything is going to turn out okay.

But sometimes that certainty simply isn’t available to us.

For me, one of the things that finally helped was opening up to someone I trusted about what I was going through. They had been in a very similar situation themselves.

Firstly, I had someone who was listening to me and who understood. But I also had someone beside me who had been through something similar and had come out the other side. That was incredibly reassuring.

Sometimes simply talking openly to another person can help us see something that we haven’t been able to see while everything has been spinning around inside our own head.

For me, the conversation also reinforced something my gut had been telling me for a long time. At some point, I realised that I had to be bold enough and brave enough to take the next step.

I couldn’t know exactly what was going to happen. I couldn’t control every outcome.

It became a little bit of que sera, sera — whatever will be, will be.

And underneath that was something even more important: knowing that no matter how everything turned out, I would be okay.

Getting clear on what really matters

Sometimes getting unstuck isn’t about thinking harder. You may already have thought about the situation more than enough.

It can be about slowing things down and getting clear about what is actually important to you.

What matters most?

What kind of person do you want to be?

What are you trying to protect?

What are you afraid of losing?

What is your head telling you? What is your heart telling you? And what has your gut perhaps been quietly telling you for some time?

You still may not suddenly have all the answers.

But you may begin to see the next step.

And sometimes that is all you need.

Where coaching can help

This is also where life coaching can be really helpful. Working with a coach can give you somewhere to unpack everything that is going around in your head.

It can help you gain clarity about what’s most important, see things that you may not be able to see on your own, and work out your own path forward.

A coach isn’t there to tell you what decision to make.

They can help you make sense of what’s keeping you stuck, give you a different perspective, and help you work out the next steps that feel right for you.

Sometimes having another person beside you can make what feels like an impossible situation feel much more manageable.

You don’t necessarily need to know exactly where the road is going to lead. You just need enough clarity to take the next useful step.

And perhaps that is the biggest thing I have learned from my own experience of being stuck: No matter how stuck you are, and no matter how scary the next step may be, you will be okay.