Feeling Stuck? Here’s How to Find Your Way Forward
Everyone, including business leaders, feels stuck from time to time. Like for so many people, for me, it came at the height of the pandemic. Feeling like my life had fallen apart after I found myself living in a foreign land after some ill-advised advice, I felt like my life was on pause. I couldn’t plan anything— from where I would be living, to what I would be doing later in the year. It was during this time where I taught myself how to thrive creatively and financially within the unstable and uncertain situation that I was in.
So, how do you get unstuck and charge forward? Where do you even start? Here’s how to find your way forward.
Make Space for Change
First thing is first, it is so important to make space for change to occur. Over the past year, I have had to learn to trust myself and the journey that I was on time and time again. Feng Shui techniques and a mental de-clutter significantly contributed in helping me to achieve this.
Feng Shui is concerned with the art of arranging buildings, objects, spaces, and life to achieve harmony and balance. Marie Diamond. a feng shui master, talks about the practice in the infamous book The Secret, which explores the law of attraction and shows you how to attract more success and happiness into your life.
This technique has always been well known for changing and adapting the energy— predominantly, in your home to become more abundant, clear, prosperous, and financially successful. However, you can also apply these techniques to your mental and physical health using Marie Diamond’s Quantum Colors technique.
I’ve mentioned this before in a previous article for Ms Career Girl. However, there are a few colors that can drastically help you de-clutter your mind and allow for new things and changes to come into your life. I wore these colors a lot when I was feeling stuck and it really helped me get a sense of clarity.
Ruby red is a color that can help to activate balance, allowing you to resolve conflicts, make good decisions when weighing options, or balance intense energies and activities. Violet is a very powerful color as it activates forgiveness helping you release, let go of possessions, emotions, or thoughts, or invite new people, experiences, and good fortune into your life. And finally, and possibly the most powerful one, is Opal. This carries with it an energy that activates transformation when you choose to change your thoughts and feelings, improve your career, boost your romance, make more money, live a more conscious lifestyle, or attract the support you need to pursue your dreams.
Lean Into Forgiveness and Let Yourself Feel
After my whirlwind year, a therapist I was working with told me that I needed to lean into forgiveness because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to move forward and nothing in my life would change. Holding on to grief would only hold me back. I often experienced very irrational thinking, and I realized I was scared to feel the feelings I was experiencing.
Instead, I was avoiding them, finding myself believing the stories I kept telling myself in my head, making me more fearful and prone to panic attacks. I will always have that anxiety gremlin inside me, but now I’m better equipped and more knowledgeable about the issue.
Leaning into forgiveness and allowing myself to feel, unapologetically and whole-heartedly, has allowed me to be more trusting in the universe. So, allow yourself to feel, no matter how scary it might be, and let go of any animosity you’re holding onto.
Express Your Gratitude
I became a much happier and more positive person when I began feeling and expressing my gratitude each day. Gratitude really contributes toward loving what you do. Essentially, it’s all about thankfulness and a feeling of appreciation. While it might seem like a simple concept, there is true power in it. Especially when you feel like you’ve hit a roadblock and don’t know where to turn next.
Marie Diamond introduced me to the concept of gratitude. An affirmation she taught me was “I am eternally grateful that I am in the best physical, mental and emotional health and that I can share my gifts with the whole wide world.” As soon as I said it, I felt a slight shift in me. I felt calmer and felt empowered to live my best life.
It is extremely important to express your gratitude. If you start to become too self-centred or start taking people and things for granted, you’ll never get more of what you desire and your energy will become toxic. When you express gratitude on a daily basis and thank the universe, you’ll notice that it will never stop and experience an endless flow of abundance.
Try Something New
Sometimes in order to get unstuck, you have to get out of your comfort zone and try something new. And this something new can be something completely different to what you do in your daily routine. When I worked as a personal assistant, I used to believe I wasn’t productive unless I worked continuously for the eight hours I was sitting in the office. I soon realized that you are actually not productive if you force yourself to work that much.
Nowadays, I tend to wake up early, meditate, manifest and do some hard-core grafting between 6 am and 11 am. Then, I do other things. This slight shift in my routine has been monumental.
While a slight shift in your schedule is one way, some other ideas that can help break up the monotony in your day are:
- trying a new lunch recipe
- wearing a bold color for your upcoming video call
- getting a change of scenery and going for a walk in the park
Whatever it may be – I implore you to get creative.
Try the Emotional Freedom Technique
EFT is an alternative treatment for physical pain and emotional distress. It’s also referred to as ‘tapping’. Therapists who use this technique believe tapping the body can create a balance in your energy system and treat pain. EFT style tapping has been used to treat anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. EFT focuses on the meridian points – or energy hot spots — to restore balance to your body’s energy.
My therapist told me to ‘tap’ my shoulders once or twice a day, as this was where there was an imbalance, and the energy was severely blocked. She also told me to repeat the following affirmation ‘’I am undefeated.’’ By stimulating this area of my body, it helped me to significantly reduce the stress or negative emotion I was feeling from the experience. After one month, it helped me to restore balance to the disrupted energy in my body.
Envision Success with Vision Boards
In my book Born to Do It, I discuss the importance of a vision board. A vision board can help you manifest your goals and desires more swiftly. It is a visualization tool comprising a board (of any sort) that you use to build a collage of words and pictures that represent your goals and dreams.
It’s important that the images you place on your vision board reflect your goals and dreams and include things that you are drawn to and would want to look at every day. Photos, quotes, sayings, affirmations, images of places you want to go, reminders of events, places and people, postcards from friends – just about anything that will inspire you.
It is very important to get into a routine of looking at your vision board several times a day, ideally first thing in the morning and before you go to bed. Looking at pictures related to what you want helps you to feel the positive feelings you want to cultivate more easily. Personally, I look at my mine morning and night, which keeps me motivated and inspires me to stay in alignment with my goals.
Each of these tips have been instrumental in helping me move forward in a time in my life where I was the most unsure of what was going to happen next.
There’s a saying that your spiritual guides (or the universe) have a better plan for you. One that’s bigger and often much better than what you imagined. And I couldn’t agree more with that statement. For everyone who may be feeling stuck, if I could leave you with one takeaway, it’s to trust the universe. You’ll end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.
This guest post was authored by Dr. Rebekah Louisa Smith
Dr. Rebekah Louisa Smith (aka Rebekah Film Dr) is an award-winning consultant and media personality with more than ten years of film festival strategy consulting experience.
Currently, her company has won more than 1,000 awards for their clients. Her team has supported nearly 850 creatives across the world. In her honest, detailed, and personal debut book, Born to Do It: Becoming the Leader of a Business Niche Using Powerful Spiritual Techniques, Smith records her hard-won knowledge to help individuals pondering the leap into entrepreneurship and those already on the journey, but are yearning for more success and profitability. To find out more, visit www.rebekahlouisasmith.com or connect with Rebekah on Instagram @rebekahfilmdr.
