How to Get Back on Track When You Are Feeling Stuck

You feel stuck right now.  With COVID and this rut of remote school or hybrid school, you feel that there is no end in sight. And so that means that you think that everything is in a holding pattern.

You're holding your breath until the vaccine, or until this season is over. And I just want to encourage you to not wait.

In our last episode, I talked about not waiting until the new year to start working on your goals and your habits.

You are feeling stuck and can't move forward

However, you feel stuck, and you feel like you can't move forward.  I'm here to tell you that you can.  So, how do you get back on track when you're feeling stuck?

Some of you may know that I had cancer. And many of you feel sorry about that.  But here's the thing. I'm not sorry about it. Because of cancer, I had a fundamental shift in my attitude and how I look at things and it created this opportunity in my life.

Cancer led me to start my business. To go on this journey to pay down our debt, which got me into blogging. Blogging got me to think about what else I can do online, which got me into teaching,  and Jeff leaving his job with the state to come work for us full-time.

Then came the pivot in our business, which caused us to start following Brendon Burchard, and go to his conference. We ended up getting pregnant in San Diego after being together for 17 years.  We had Erik, came up with this concept of Small Biz Mama and Bookkeeper Training School.

And now we've helped almost 500 women start their businesses.  All this sprung from cancer.

What do you want to learn from this season?

As you look at this season in your life, figure out what you want to learn from COVID.  What do you want to learn from this time being at home with your spouse and kids?

Where do you want your life to be? What do you want your life to look like when this is over?  A vaccine is on the way.  There is an end to this. It may be six months down the road, but there is an end to this.

You can see it.  So you need to be really intentional about what we want your life to look like when this is over.  Because what's going to happen, if you don't do that, is you're just going to go back to where you were before.  

All the stress, all the meetings, too many activities with your kids, and working too much.

This is a monumental opportunity for you to sit there and say, "No, enough! I'm done. I'm going to decide what I want to take from this experience to bring with me post-pandemic and what I'm going to leave."

Think about it. What are you going to leave here?  For this reason, you need to get back on track when you feel stuck.

What do you want your life to look like right now?

It's important to start now and determine what you want your life to look like right now.

I've got five things that I want you to think about. Five steps to getting unstuck:

1. Figure out what's really important
2. Reconnect with your why 
3. Determine what's realistic but hard
4. You need to be okay with failure
5. Shift the one thing that will have the most impact

Step 1: Figure out what's really important will help you not feel stuck

So the first thing that you need to do if you want to get unstuck, is to figure out what's really important to you.

Take out a piece of paper and brainstorm all the things you are doing. Then brainstorm all the things you want to be doing. Circle the things that are important and cross off the things that are not important.

For me, honestly, the most important things are my family, my health, and the work that I do.

Figure out what is really important to you

Figure out what is really important to you.  You should have about three to five things that are your non-negotiable really important things.

If you're still struggling with this, I  highly recommend Greg McKeown's book "Essentialism." It's so, so good. He also has a podcast that I recommend you listen to.

Step 2: Reconnect with your why will help you not feel stuck

You need to reconnect with your why. Determine why the things you wrote in Step 1 are important.  Sometimes, you believe some things should be important to you, but when you think about your why and why they are important, you realize that they're not that important to you.

But you need to reconnect with why these things are important to you. And again, this is another exercise you're going to want to do some writing.  It's really important to have that list of what's important and why.

Internal struggles

You know, for me, I struggle with this internally all the time. Jeff and Erik are incredibly important and this creates an internal struggle for me.  Because being the breadwinner (you can listen to my episode on this here), being mom and wife sometimes conflict. And so with me, there is this constant internal battle between the breadwinner, and mom and wife. Reconnecting with my why and why they are so important, helps me achieve a balance between those two things.

It's important to ask yourself multiple times a day what is the most important thing you could be doing right now. And this morning after I had breakfast, the most important thing I could do was spend half an hour playing with Erik.

Understanding your why and knowing what's really important is game-changing when you're stuck.

Step 3: Determine what's realistic but hard will help push you out of stuck

The third thing that I want you to do is to determine what's realistic but hard.   In the corporate world, they call these stretch goals.

There's this exercise I have people do in Bookkeeper Training School. I did a whole episode on it where you spend your time on paper.  You figure out how you are going to spend your week.  It's amazing because I have all these women that need 200-250 hours.  But you know what, you only have 168 hours in a week. That's all you get.

So how are you going to make this work? A lot of it is being realistic about what you can actually accomplish. And the reason that I say realistic but hard is not that I want your life to be difficult, but because I want you to push yourself a little bit.

How groups can help you not feel stuck

For example, there's this group called 99 walks.  What you do is you pay a fee and you set a walking goal for yourself. Your walking goal can be whatever you want it to be. You just set a number of miles for the month.

Some of the women in this group are just so motivating. There was a woman who posted in the group the other day that when she first joined, she was doing 250 steps a day. And she walked 80 miles last month.  Think about that, to go from 250 steps a day to walking almost three miles a day.

So the women in the group that do that have to start with what's realistic, but then they also have to look at what's hard.

Because if you say you can only do this many steps a day or you can only do this distance a day.  You never say that you're going to try a little bit more.

Or you can only generate this much income in your business and you never try to do a little bit more.  If you don't think realistic but hard, you're never going to push yourself forward. You're never going to get a little bit better than today.

Step 4: You need to be okay with failing to help you not feel stuck

You have to be okay with failing. If you do not allow yourself to fail, you cannot do realistic but hard. You can't because you're always going to play it safe. You're always going to default to stuck because putting yourself out there is too scary.

You have to be okay with failure. I think a lot of women who go into business fail because they don't want to hear no. Because that's a failure. So you won't put yourself out there and reach out to people. You won't pitch yourself or go for the sale because you're afraid to hear no. What I teach in Bookkeeper Training School is the goal is not to hear yes, the goal is to hear an answer.

Sometimes that answer may be a yes or a no, but you achieved your goal. And that's a win. You have to change the outcome of your goal. 

Step 5: Shift the one thing that will have the most impact to help you not feel stuck 

I talked about this a little bit in our episode on how to figure out your goals if you're not sure what to do. Go back and listen to that one.

Shift one thing that will have the most impact. And for you, that's a different thing than for someone else.

Because what happens is, if you find that one thing when you're stuck, it creates a ripple effect on everything else. You can have a ripple effect either way. It can be a positive ripple effect or a negative ripple effect.

And so one of the things I struggle with between CEO and mom-life is spending time with my family, but also getting the work done that I need to get done.

And so one of the things I started doing last week was I started working at night from seven to nine and then go to bed. However, I found that if I work at night my brain will not shut off. I wasn't going to bed till midnight.  But what I did figure out is that I can do household stuff at night and still fall asleep.  

So that one shift to say I'm not going to work at night but I can do stuff around the house, which means I'm going to bed earlier. I'm getting up earlier. And I'm getting more work done overall. With the added bonus of sleeping better. That one shift has made so much impact on everything else.

If you're not sure what that thing is for you, post in the Small Biz Mama group on Facebook, post about it and we'll help you work that out.

Find that one thing that will help you not feel stuck

Find that one thing, because then there's this momentum shift and you get unstuck.  But don't try to change all the things. Change one thing that's going to have the most impact. It might be your health or sleep. Or it might be your relationship with your spouse or kids. It could also be that you just need more sleep.

So figure out where you think that big deficit is.  Write down a whole bunch of things that you might want to try or a new habit you want to create.

Find out which one of these will cause a shift for some of the other ones.  Then try it to see how that works.

Hopefully, these steps will help you start to think about how you can get back on track, get unstuck, and get ready for post COVID. Because we are closer than you think.

I'd love to get your feedback. Please leave a comment below and let me know what is the one thing you will change.