How to Get Unstuck

In the last session of the Art Connection Circle, one of the participants was feeling very stuck in her life. She felt her identities of wife, mom, and teacher overshadowed her own wants and dreams for her life. With more than twenty years of teaching under her belt and another decade to go before retirement, she was feeling really stuck in her life, not sure what to do next or how to feel better.

Getting unstuck involves a whole lot of things, but at the beginning it involves knowing three very important things.

knowing where you want to go (or more importantly how you want to feel when you get there)
understanding what is keeping you from getting there
trusting that you have agency—that you have the power and the ability to get yourself out of it. That you have a choice.

We worked first on her vision—what would, as Glennon Doyle in Untamed puts it, her “most true and most beautiful life” look like. And we talked not just what it would look like, but what it would FEEL like. What essences does she want to embody in her life? Her vision included essences of purpose, peace, love, creativity, freedom, adventure.

Second, she had to recognize what was keeping her from feeling those things. Her work environment, as many schools are these days, was feeling very stressful and toxic. Employee morale was very low, and she wasn’t finding the joy and her purpose in teaching because of all of the bureaucracy of education. She had visions and dreams of opening a pottery studio, but felt stuck because leaving teaching meant forgoing her hard-earned teacher retirement benefits.

Knowing where you are and what you want starts to open up your choices. After one of our coaching sessions, she realized she didn’t have all the information about her retirement options, and her stuckness was an assumption rather than truth. So she met with someone in her state’s retirement system and got all of her options. She researched pottery studios in her area and truly allowed herself the option to make any choice she wanted.

When you feel you don’t have a choice, you’ve lost your power to that thing weighting you down. By allowing herself the possibility of choice, she claimed her power back in the situation. And ultimately, for now, she decided to stay.

But knowing she wanted to FEEL a sense of purpose, of freedom, of adventure, of peace, of creativity, she looked for ways to add that into her life and work NOW. She booked some travel and art retreat experiences just for her. She stepped up as a leader at her school and created a committee to improve morale. She started an arts gifted program so she can lean into the purpose and love she feels while teaching.

She’s now living into those values, making decisions to improve her life, and relieved her of that feeling that she is stuck and that she has no choice.

From the outside, her life looks the same, but on the inside, she has experienced so much growth and renewed energy.

This work is so freaking powerful.

I’ve done this work (and continue to do it) for myself, and it is now my great joy to help people through this process of getting unstuck—of creating the life of their dreams.

Are you feeling stuck? Is there something you really want lingering in the back of your mind but you don’t know how to make it happen?

I’d love to have a conversation with you to learn more about you and what you are facing and how I might help you reach your most beautiful life.

Please send me a message at this link if you would like to book a call to chat about the possibilities.