My friend Liz Goodchild, who you may remember from the New Year podcast, helps people make changes in their life and has written a guest post.

Being stuck is horrible.

And gritted-teeth frustrating.

Being stuck sits just below the surface of your life and it creeps up slowly, weaving its way in. You don’t notice it at first, but over time, you start to notice that each morning, as you wake up (by the ERGH ERGH ERGH ERGH of an alarm clock you want to smash to pieces with a hammer) you’re thinking, “Is this it?”

Everything seems fine. Everything is kind of fine. You have a house and a job and a partner, and the kids (if you have kids) are happy and all, and yet something feels off and you can’t quite put your finger on what it is exactly. You feel unfulfilled, tired of being tired, sick of just bumbling through your days all the while knowing you need to do something to change and yet you do diddly squat about it.

Often, my coaching clients come to me with this stuck feeling and want to know how they can become unstuck, and I always say the same thing: MOVE.

MOVE? Huh? When you’re feeling stuck, it’s normally the last thing you want to do. And yet, in my years of coaching, I’ve seen client after client move from stuck to unstuck by doing exactly that, moving.

Now, by moving, I don’t mean physically moving, although we all know that moving your butt regularly is excellent for improving what’s going on up there in your head. What I mean is mentally moving. Switching gears. Changing lanes. Thinking. Differently.

If you’re feeling like this, if you want to feel less stuck. If you’re tired of feeling foggy, flaky, farty and flat, but you’re not sure where to start – my 4 tips below may just help you to get going again.

1. Write down what you want.

“The mind is everything. What we think, we become.”
– Guatama Buddha

We spend so much time talking about what we don’t want from our lives. You know, the job that sucks (and the terrible boss, to boot), the flailing relationship, the debt, the feeling so tired all the goddamn time, the inertia, and yet, how often do we truthfully say what we do want? Not so often. I know this. You know this.

If you spend most of your time whining about what you don’t want – to your friends, your mum, the woman you sit next to everyday on the train to work who knows your life story but you don’t even know her name –  guess what you’re going to get? All the things you don’t want. Ok, so let’s change that right now:

Take out a piece of paper, draw a line down the centre, and on the right hand side write down everything you want from your life, and I mean everything. Everything beyond the obvious “Bigger house, better job” malarkey. If you had the bigger house and better job malarkey, then what? What is it that you want from your life? How do you want to feel? What lights you up and makes you come alive? Maybe you want more mind-blowing sex thankyouverymuch, or to feel more grateful about what you already have (instead of rolling your eyes at everything all the time). Maybe it’s to be comfortable in your own skin, to second-guess yourself less, to not give so much of a f*ck about what people think about you. Write it all down.

If you’re struggling to know what you want, on the left hand side of the paper, write down everything you don’t want. You can then write the opposite on the other side.

2. Know what your best day looks like.

“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.”
– Oprah Winfrey

Remember when you were a kid and you used to tell people all the time what you wanted to do when you were a grown up, or better still, what problems did you want to solve? What raced around your 7-year old un-bogged down brain, before the days of coming home to find that AGAIN, NO-ONE HAS BOTHERED TO EMPTY THE DISHWASHER, or fed the cat, or noticed that you’re really bloody tired too. What did you imagine you’d be doing with your life when you were older?

Imagine your life a year from now.

Take out some more paper and start to write down your responses to the following questions. Just go with it, don’t try to over-think what you come up with or self-edit, or, you know, start noting things down that you think you should write.

Where are you a year from now? Where do you live?

How do you feel?

Who are you with?

What are you doing?

Where are you going?

Whose company are you enjoying?

What are you looking forward to?

If you go to work each day, where are you going?

How do you feel in your body?

What doesn’t matter anymore?

What are you letting go of?

What are you saying? Who are you saying it to?

Who inspires you?

What would you say to the person you were 1 year ago, what advice would you give?

3. Make a decision.

“Stop complaining and do me a favor. If you want to make a difference, all you’ve got to do is one thing… Make a decision!”
– Eric Thomas.

The 1-year vision can be used as a framework to set a goal, make a decision or create an intention from. Once we know what we want, the next step is to start moving towards it s.l.o.w.l.y.

Pick one thing from the 1-year vision that you wrote down that really stood out for you. Maybe it’s to present a Ted Talk (ok, that’s mine) or feel lighter or go travelling, or just feel more you.

Now, grab a timer and spend the next 9 minutes writing down as many action steps you can think of, towards that thing that you want. Imagine that you are stood on one side of a river, and the thing that you want is on the other, and the action steps are like stepping stones across the river. They’ll get you there. Once the 9 minutes is up, pick one step and put it in your diary to start tomorrow. Nothing changes if nothing changes. You’ve got to start right now.

4. Know that you’re not always going to feel like it.

“You are never going to feel like doing what you have to do to make that change.”
– Mel Robbins

My own coach told me this and, I shit you not, it changed my life. Before she said this to me, I believed that people who got ahead in life – people who were living the lives they wanted – were somehow super human and the most intensely motivated people in the world. Not so! I’ll let you in on something, everyone feels deflated and scared and don’t know what they’re doing half the time. It’s normal. And human.

And the kicker here is that once you know that those stepping stone actions you wrote down above will sometimes feel overwhelming and frustrating and on some days, you’re not going to feel like doing them, you’re less likely to throw in the towel.

Remember, taking action, slowly moving from stepping stone to stepping stone may just be the difference between feeling blah and stuck, and fully alive and excited about life again.

Which one would you prefer?

I hope this helps.

Love,

Liz xo

There are 3 places left in my upcoming life coaching course, it starts in February.  It costs £67.00 for the whole 6 weeks. Maybe today’s the day to make a decision. To get clear on what you want going forward this year. To make that change (did you also just sing that in your head like Michael Jackson’s ‘Man In The Mirror’? Hop on over here to book your space.