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Have you ever felt stuck at any point in your life?
You know that you want to make positive changes, be happier, get things done, discover the exciting possibilities available to you and yet something is holding you back.
Something like perpetual doubt and negative statements informing you of your inabilities and past failures in the form of a loop that won’t stop playing in your mind.
It’s a frustrating place to be in and the longing for better things in life gnaw at you. But where do you begin? Change is uncomfortable and so even if you are already uncomfortable with the way your life is, its familiar and therefore nesting in your familiar, uncomfortable unhappiness seems to be the easier thing to do.
Curious, though.. How do you get unstuck in life? Out of a rut and into the good stuff that others seem to be enjoying?
Life Coach Tim Brownson is full of useful insights and he shared them with me - and I couldn’t be any more grateful. So forwarding the good advice along, I hope these keys are as helpful to you as they have been to me.
No Fighting with Your Feelings
The thoughts and the feelings come. It’s what they do however you can do one of two things. You can be angry/stressed/upset about your current state of mind, perhaps stoking the flames of the negative emotions into an even larger fire or you can step back and observe your feelings. To observe your emotions is to actually become aware of what’s running rampant in your mind.
What’s going on?
What is it that you’re telling yourself over and over again?
If you know what you’re working with, you can do something about it.
Tim’s lesson in this is don’t judge your feelings. The act of judging your feelings alone creates an even greater deficit. This is a simple instruction but admittedly tougher than it sounds since you’re dealing with the habit of judging your own thoughts. Which leads us into the next point.
Uh Uh! Catch Those Thoughts
Negative thought loops can be slippery little fellas that are hard to catch and here’s why. You become so used to the thoughts and the feelings that come along with them that they become ho-hum background noise in your mind. It takes a level of consciousness to catch them and change them. So here’s what you do. If you can remember to check in on your thoughts, you can grow your level of consciousness and work on them. One very useful suggestion Tim shared with me was to utilize post it notes to remind myself to check in. He also mentioned that I move them around because after a while, they too can become “background noise”. In other words, if you get really used to seeing them in their usual position, you stop paying attention. This little exercise is worth trying out because it took me a few days to realize that the reason I was falling back into a slump was because I was back in sync with my negative loop! I had forgotten to check in. So from little alerts on my cell phone to a little post-it in books that I’m reading, I make it my business to consciously change my thoughts. In my opinion, its quite a bit of leg work. But then again, so is a long continuous stream of dissatisfaction. It is my intention to be able to do this more and more without the reminders but its a great place to start.
Who Cares What People Think?
One very surprising source of stress can be the gross preoccupation with what others think of you. You may not realize it at first but if you’re constantly worried about where you are in life in comparison to your peers or what they think of what you’re doing with yourself, your decision making can be hindered (for a long time at that) and concentrate on an outcome that doesn’t genuinely make you happy. That’s where that unsettled dissastified feeling may come from. You may read - until you turn blue - that you ought to find something that you’re passionate about. But what happens if you don’t think what you’re passionate about will bring you the status or income that another job might? What happens if you’re constantly afraid about appearing inferior to others? Your choices are no longer yours. If you want positive change for yourself, you have to advocate for what really matters to your irregardless of what others might think.
Bless the hearts of those who are already past this stage in their life. Tim did an exercise with me which perfectly displayed my own discomfort with having others think I’m silly. Quite honestly, merely thinking about going against the grain in certain situations was as comfortable as swallowing a grapefruit whole. But it also helped me realize a very empowering fact. Many people spend exorbitant amounts of time worrying about their own appearances in front of others. Some of the major decisions I needed to make for my own life have been thrown askew by what So-and-So might think. This can go on for the majority of your life or it can decrease because you’ve decided to live for yourself. It’s an unabashedly liberating feeling that comes with one conscious action after the other.
Life: Your Subjective Experience
For many of us, life seems to be something that happens to us. It’s easy to think you can’t help the level of your own happiness because of things that may have occurred in your life or words someone has said to you. But the more I work with Tim, the more I have come to realize that a good lot of it is a game of perspective. A situation could be a) the worst thing that has ever happened to you or b) the best opportunity that has come your way to date.
So what is the positive spin on something that is making you unhappy right now?
I struggled with this at first but I realized that a shift in perspective is indeed life changing. Since I am particularly talented at being hard on myself, I had a lot of material to work with 
But I can attest to this truth - the more you rephrase your thoughts in the form of its Positive Spin, the easier it gets to see things in your favor.
I strongly recommend Tim’s e-book Know Yourself, Change Yourself because a lot of the very valuable work he has done with me can be found in it.
In closing, I must say that it’s an eye-opening experience … talking with someone whose focus is to help you shift your perspective from the negatives that plague you into the positives in the possibilities that life has in store for you. I also felt a strong sense of validation when, in speaking to Tim, I realized that I am not the only soul in the world going through certain things - no matter how much it seems that I am. That’s helpful because you then know that you can indeed pull yourself out of the rut that you feel stuck in. You know - for a fact - that people do it all the time. The thing is a good Life Coach can give you the right tools but it really is up to you to utilize them. You can read this blog post and have it go over your head or you can take a stab at it and try the advice that Tim has shared with me.
Your perspective IS the world of difference.
It’s how you get unstuck.
Photos by: Kent Barrett and eastling.
