Feeling Stuck?

How to get past the 3 beliefs that may be holding you back

(Ground Picture/Shutterstock)

Have you been feeling stuck, unable to move forward in important areas of your life? That’s rough. I’ve been there.

In the decade after college, there were long seasons when I felt the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be wasn’t shrinking nearly as fast as I wanted.

The worst part was that I knew my own shortcomings were largely to blame, but I didn’t know how to change.

I wish I'd had a mentor during those years—someone who really knew me and my struggles and could’ve coached and encouraged me. I think I wouldn’t have felt stuck for so long.

But gratefully, over time, I’ve been able to figure out many of the obstacles that were holding me back. It turns out that many of them were unhelpful mindsets that I had picked up along the way—mostly through overly idealistic books and websites I had read and internalized.

It’s true that you’ll need to learn these lessons for yourself. Don’t expect that simply reading this article will do the work for you. In my own life, the value of reading about other people’s journeys has been two-fold.

It helps me to imagine new possibilities. Sometimes you get stuck because you have no vision for how things could be different. Perhaps the greatest value of art, of any kind, is to broaden the horizons of someone’s imagination.

It helps me to put words to my experiences. I have a friend who regularly visits a therapist, and he claims that the real value for him is in hearing someone else describe his experiences back to him. Somehow, this allows him to see these experiences in a new light and makes them feel more manageable. Reading often does that for me.

I hope my words can be that for you. What follows are a few tips for avoiding the kind of unhelpful beliefs that might cause you to get stuck.

1. Don’t Overvalue an Easy, Pleasurable Life

I think it’s obvious to most of us that attempting a life of pure hedonism would be foolish. However, on the margin, everyone feels that their particular life would be better off with a little more pleasure and convenience. I know I did. I now see this belief as one that held me back and one that’s likely wrong for most people.

It’s a mindset that makes your world smaller. Instead of pursuing hard and challenging goals that expand future possibilities and add a sense of purpose to each day, you’re left optimizing your existing life to avoid inconveniences and various activities you don’t enjoy. This, ironically, has the effect of making you increasingly fragile toward all sorts of discomfort.

If there were only one piece of advice I could give you today, it would be this: Find the hard work you nonetheless enjoy—and go do it.

2. Don’t Wait for the Perfect Plan

When it comes to action, everyone loves the idea of it. We think that in the moment of action, we will feel confident, certain, and powerful. Instead, I find that when I take action, it’s almost always accompanied by self-doubt. Even as I write this article, one of hundreds I’ve written, a significant part of me wants to stop and go do something more comfortable.

You could try to combat this feeling by doing as much planning as possible. But in almost all cases, this would be the wrong choice. I’ve consistently underestimated how much faster I learn by throwing myself straight into a problem. And anyway, most of the time, I already know what needs to be done; I’m simply avoiding the discomfort of starting. Of course, it doesn’t feel like avoidance when I’m doing it; planning feels like the real thing, but it’s usually not.

The way to combat this tendency isn’t a mystery—you need to start before you feel ready. If there really is more planning that needs doing, it will reveal itself soon enough. But chances are, what you really need is to push past the inertia of the status quo and make progress.

3. Don’t Wait for Motivation

One mistake that had a huge opportunity cost for me was believing that I needed to solve the puzzle of motivation before I could really commit to a course of action.

Why did I feel this way? The people I admired most had incredible levels of energy and focus, and I figured that cracking this nut would be the highest value problem I could solve for myself.

It turns out that motivation is a fickle thing. Much like deciding that you will become happy or humble, motivation doesn’t lend itself to direct pursuit—certainly not from a standstill. Unfortunately, I spent far too much time (read: I procrastinated for far too long) on trying to learn about motivation and new methods of becoming a highly productive individual.

My thoughts on the subject, after so many years of searching for answers, are now rather simple. High-level, abstract motivation for a goal doesn’t easily translate into actually feeling motivated in the moment to get started. One of the best things I did was to carve out a specific time each day to work on my most important work and treat that time as a sacred commitment. It didn’t matter how I felt that day; I was going to sit down and do the work.

Over time, your willpower muscle will grow stronger, but perhaps more importantly, the progress you make in this focused effort will provide a propelling sense of motivation to keep going.

Just Go

What getting unstuck boils down to is not waiting around for ideal conditions before getting started. Don’t wait for motivation. Don’t wait until you have a perfect plan. And don’t wait for something that feels easy.

Find a project at the intersection of your curiosity and fear, and jump right into it. You’re far more likely to regret not taking action than having chosen a path that you later diverge from.

In this sense, getting unstuck doesn’t require a flash of insight so much as a willingness to bravely push forward in the face of uncertainty.