You don’t know what you want or need but know that it isn’t what you have right now. You know what you want but can’t find the courage to go after it. Or you are overwhelmed and crippled by the chaos that surrounds you.

Life is short, fragile and does not wait for anyone. There will NEVER be a perfect time to pursue your dreams and goals.” – Unknown

Clarity, confidence and chaos are the three things I see that keep people stuck again and again. 

It doesn’t matter whether you are in the post room or the board room, on the school run or building a business empire. The lack of clarity, the drop in confidence or the chaos of the fast paced world we live in (or a combination of all three!) sends us into a very unhelpful space and stops us creating a life less ordinary.

Clarity – You don’t know what you want but its not this!

If you don’t design your own life plan, you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much!” – Jim Rohn

A lack of clarity is something that crops us for lots of clients on a day to day basis. Some people need crystal clear clarity to even engage in a task never mind redesign their life. If you don’t know where you are heading then how can you possibly start to take action and make progress? You stick a postcode in your Satnav right? So you need to do some reflection and create the destination for what you really want. 

I am not sure if I have always been goal orientated or have just become really good at creating clarity out of ambiguity. It doesn’t really matter but what I do know is that when I start to feel stuck or that I am not making progress I check in with myself or use my coach to act as a catalyst to getting the clarity I need to start taking focussed action.

Confidence – you know exactly what you want but crippled by low confidence.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” – E. E. Cummings

A couple of weeks ago I was on what felt like a ‘coaching binge’ with back to back clients for most of the week.  Every client had a very different story, a different role in the business and a different goal. Their personalities were different – some extrovert, some introvert, some high energy some low. The coaching conversations and exercises we used were all slightly different but as I drove home I realised that the one common thread that ran throughout was low confidence. (Read my confidence blog.)

Susan Jeffers is famous for her ‘feel the fear, and do it anyway’ approach and I have to say I am totally with her. I think we practice fear and then wrap it up as low confidence like its a disease that we a re stuck with. The truth of the matter is that you are going to experience peaks and troughs when it comes to confidence and the only way though it is to work on your mind-set and find a way to take action anyway or live a life of regret.

Chaos

He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.” – Robert Jordan

And the expectations we have of ourselves! Overwhelm can come at you from all directions and most often it is a multi root cause. Stress and overwhelm probably deserves a blog all to itself so I’ll keep this succinct. 

Most commonly chaos as a barrier manifests in the ‘I’m just so busy, I haven’t got time,” camp of excuses, all of which sound logical and rational. I find that there are three issues to address to move forward quickly and they are:

1. creating and sustaining healthy boundaries 

2. slowing down to speed up

3. self talk

If we slow down enough to do some quality reflection if allows quality thinking and the solution is often right there but instead we run on autopilot and just keep ‘doing’ creating even more overwhelm. By pausing we not only get clarity of thought but often see where there is a lack of boundaries that can be put in place relatively easily and quickly reducing one of the main sources of ‘busyness’. At the same time we need to tap into the self talk and the expectations we have of ourselves are often the most demanding. 

So if you are feeling stuck and like you are not making the progress you want, work through the 3 C’s above and I guarantee you will start to create traction.