Join me this week as I share what to do when you feel stuck.
You’ll learn:
- Why it’s a good thing it’s not working for you the way you’re trying to do it
- How to source wisdom from an old ‘forcing it’ pattern
- The 1% different strategy
- How to create compassionate, generous, self-led change (vs. pushing, forcing, urgent change)
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Let’s become a generation of creative women who are examples for the people in our lives of what it looks like to prioritize our work (AND recognize our impact).
x, Jen
Full episode transcript below:
Welcome to today's episode, If You Feel Stuck. If you feel stuck, the first thing for you to do is to look for what you might be missing. Everyone I know gets stuck in gear in one place, over and over. And it's often incredibly frustrating, which is totally understandable I like to think about and share this quote, it's by Herman Hesse and it goes like this "We are not going in circles. We are going upwards. The path is a spiral. We have already climbed many steps." I take this to mean that every time that you go around, it feels like you're going in circles, but you're actually going in a spiral, a spiral that is expanding outwards and upwards. Every time you go around, you're making progress, you're learning new things, which are vital lessons that you probably can't or aren't learning any other way. And the other thing I want you to notice is that whenever you feel stuck, or wherever you feel stuck, you're probably trying to do something in a way that doesn't work for you. And thank goodness it's not working, because you don't wanna finagle a way of doing something that doesn't ultimately work for you. I think you know this deep down. I have personal experience with this, and I've talked to a lot of people, who I think in our minds we're like, if I can just figure out how to do this, like if I can just figure out how to like finagle a way, if I can just figure it out and get it to work, then I'll be able to relax. Then I'll be able to do it the way I wanna do it. Then I'll be able to live more of the way I wanna live. But, as I shared in a past episode, whatever you have to do to get something, you have to do to keep it. And so we don't want to build something in a way that is going to require us to maintain it in that way. When you feel stuck, and when it feels like something isn't working, that's a really good signal for you instead of hitting the gas, and trying to push forward, what do you do instead? So the first thing is to pause and notice that you're feeling stuck. You're probably feeling frustrated. You're like, if I could just get this into gear and going, then it would solve all my problems here. Then I would have what I want. Of course, that's not true, but that's what we think. And so instead of doing that, which I'm guessing you've already done that probably many times, what I want you to do instead is to look for why this old pattern might exist. What purpose does it serve? Why might it be intact today? It's probably protective at its core, and there may be other reasons why it's still intact and playing out in your life. But before you try to change it, we wanna see what is important here? What is this protecting? What is this guarding? What is this keeping intact for you, that you either need, or maybe you feel like you need, you might not need it anymore, but maybe you did in the past? We don't wanna change it or force our way through it until we get the wisdom from it. And once you've gotten that wisdom, then the next step would be to notice how you might do it another way. What would it look like to do it just 1% different? If you're like me, that's probably a question that you'll wanna ask yourself and then wait for an answer. You might get kind of a body feeling about it. What pops into your head? It's not something you have to think really critically and hard about. It'll be a feeling, or a gut feeling, or a nudge that arises. And 1% different might feel like not enough, but this was really transformative for me to realize, 1% different every day for a year equals 365% different, 365% change growth improvement. If you're willing to slow yourself down in the short term and build this new operating system, let's say, 1% different every day. All you need to do is just make 1% shift each day, in 365 days, in one year, you will be in a totally different place, and this will look 365% different. That's massive when you think about it. The last thing I wanna share here is I wanna encourage you to not be in such a rush to change. The desire for things to change, especially when it feels immediate and urgent and important and like I gotta do this right now, is often rooted in wanting to feel better. And that's one way to go about it, right? Changing something in your current reality, but that's ultimately disempowering because it's putting your ability to feel how you wanna feel outside of yourself, into something else that changes at its core, but could also be temperamental, and not fully in your control. The opposite is that you can feel better now if you stop fighting against what is, and you stop trying to do something that isn't working for you, and instead look inside for a teeny tiny 1% shift you can make right now. And then you do that. After you do that teeny tiny thing, you just rinse and repeat this process over and over. And this is the way that we can make change in a very compassionate, self-led way that is imbued with care and self-respect and nurturance and generosity towards self, rather than pressure and urgency and rushing. Yeah, that pressure that, I'm just thinking, it just leads to burnout, which I'm, I'm guessing maybe you're familiar with if you're listening to this. There's another way of doing it, and the first step is slowing down, how fast we're moving, slowing down how much we want something to change right now in this immediate second, taking care of a probably primal need that you have. Maybe your body- hungry, tired, needs a rest, needs movement, needs something to care for it. And then looking the 1% different option you can make right now, doing that, and then building on that, Like I said, just rinse and repeat. You just keep repeating that over and over, and as you make those incremental 1% shifts, you're gonna feel more of how you wanna feel, which means that you'll probably be feeling better. And you're going to be giving a vote towards the type of life that you wanna have, and we get to make that choice in a lot of moments of our lives. That's what I have for you today. I am so glad that you were here and that we get to walk our paths together. See you next time. Same time, same place. Bye for now
