Where to start when getting unstuck

When you are trying to get yourself unstuck, it can be hard to know where to start. Feeling stuck can be very overwhelming, but a great place to start is examining what you absorbed growing up. Then you can start to make changes moving forward. 

In your journey you can sit down and assess several things:

• What generation were you born into?

• What ‘should haves’ have you adopted over the years?

• Where are you developmentally in life?

• What is different in your life now than previously?

Recognizing where you are compared to where you were is a big step in the right direction.

Many high-achievers remember having very clear expectations of what they were going to do with their lives. But, once they meet those goals, they often find themselves unhappy. This is a sign that it’s time for them to hop off the hamster wheel and take back control! Sound familiar? Let’s talk about what’s next.

Once you have gotten a sense of what expectations you have adopted for yourself you can start to piece together the identities you have taken on throughout your professional career as well. Many of the ideals that you adopted as your ‘should haves’ got you where you are today, so how do you separate those from who you are today, and where you want to go?

You can start by creating a timeline of your development.

I walk you through these steps in my book. You’ll move through different stages of adulthood that you have experienced and reflect on your milestones such as going to college, how many times you’ve moved, and any significant events.

Once you have your history mapped out, you’ll move on to reflecting. Think about your future self reflecting on this timeline, what would you like to have done differently? What would your future self tell you to stop doing or change? Reflect without judgment and be compassionate. 

Now that you know your history and your identity foundation, you can start to create clear goals for yourself and begin thinking about yourself outside of the ‘should haves’ that you have taken on over the years!

How to Get Started on Improving Your Habits

We all have habits we want to improve.

Often our habits overlap too. We may have eating habits, exercise habits, cleaning and organizing habits that we want to start. Gretchen Rubin calls this list of common habits the "essential seven" because so many people want to work on them.

But how do we get started on changing our behavior?

That's the topic of this week's video. Check it out below.

I'm excited to talk to you today about how to get started to improve your habits and this is a really common technique, but something that gets overlooked too often and something I even forget to do myself sometimes.

Monitor what you’re doing now

When you want to improve a habit you want to change your behavior, one of the first things we want to know is what are you currently doing? And that means, are you tracking or monitoring your current behavior? I see this a lot with clients when they say, “I want to take control of my time” or “I want to change my schedule.” And I say, “Well, what does today look like?” “What did yesterday look like?” “What are you doing tomorrow?” And all of those moments seemed to be lost. They're not sure and maybe they can get a little bit of it, but without tracking, writing it down or putting it in their phone, they struggle to see where the time has really gone. It's such a powerful step to see all this in person when you can see it on paper, see it on your phone, in a document.

Change your behavior based on what you see

Some ways that this – this has really helped me two ways specifically even here in 2017, one would be that I knew I wanted to know where my extra money was going, that extra income of things I could spend whatever I want on.

But I resisted apps on my phone about it like, “I'm not gonna use that app. I'm just not feeling it out.” But my planner, my paper planner this year actually has a spot to track that extra money. And so, I was just able to write down every day here's what I spent and I get into that routine. Sure enough, all of that financial advice they say about lattes add up, yeah, they really do. And so, I was able to see not only do they add up, I can see exactly where they add up for me specifically, so things like that. That's one way I use the power of tracking in the past couple of months.

Watch good habits snowball

The other way would be from trying to brush my dog's teeth. I have two dogs, Calvin and Rosie, and the vet of course recommends brushing their teeth every day and I thought I probably only brush their teeth maybe once a month when I think about it, which is pretty bad I suppose. But I hadn't thought about this and I said, “Okay. I'm going to track when I brush their teeth.” And I have something on the side of my fridge where I can use a little dry erase marker. And I said, “Okay, I'm going to track.”

And I got excited to get the momentum going of wanting to check off all seven days of the week and then it snowballed of course, right? Because I want all seven days, I want the gold star so to speak – gold star junkie if we haven't met – literally, I give them out to my students – so, I wanted to check it off and then I could start to see the benefits. After a couple of weeks of brushing my dog's teeth every day, I could see that this really is helpful to them and I could make it part of my routine. But it was only through tracking and monitoring that I was able to enact those two behaviors.

So I want to ask you today, what is something that you want to work on in your life – a habit and how can you track it?

Is it on paper? Is it on your phone? Is it a recommitment to tracking that you've tried to track before but haven't been able to do it? What might it be?

I look forward to hearing from you about what you're tracking or monitoring and this new thing that you want to change.

Share your thoughts in the comments!