Stuck Is Not a Four-Letter Word

INTRODUCTION You can feel it coming—the scratchy throat, the sneezing, and the desperate grab for tissues. As symptoms worsen, your head fogs and throbs then exhaustion arrives. After consuming a concoction of drops, drinks, and doses to get through your day, you try to act as if nothing is wrong, but your coworkers keep their distance. At bedtime, you toss and turn, feeling chilled and feverish, with a mouth full of cotton. Rest is hard. So you wrap up in your blanket and enter survival mode. It doesn’t feel like this cold will ever end. You numbly face your work days, feeling discouraged and even hopeless as the cough deepens and the headache pounds on. This is what it feels like to be stuck. Anxiety, insomnia, and hopelessness make you want to retreat, wrapping yourself in a burrito blanket. There is a feeling that despair and discouragement have come to stay and the relentless fever will never end. Even your friends are keeping their distance, not knowing what to say or do for you any more. However, just as medication, vitamins and liquids help heal a cold, so can positive actions mend life conditions when you’re stuck. Gradually the fog lifts, the pounding headache wanes; you regain energy, and your friends move closer, no longer afraid to speak with you. The numbness subsides, the shivering stops; you are no longer trapped in survival mode. No amount of positive thinking, visualizing or clairvoyance can alter a situation, but you can change in the midst of it. STUCK Is Not a Four-Letter Word will help you break through the frustration of being caught in a never-ending maze. The seven positive steps discussed in this volume provide readers with new paths for growth. Included are inspirational stories of professionals who have survived periods of being stuck. Their experiences and life lessons will give you the tools to move your life forward again. Life Situations Some of you reading these chapters may be facing bankruptcy, a broken marriage, a dead-end career, unemployment or other personal or professional life changes. Others may be experiencing health crises that will alter your quality of life in an indeterminate way. Some are even stuck in a body they don’t like! Maybe you’ve just made the house payment and feel like you won the lottery. You may feel that none of the breaks out there are going your way; the circumstances of life are against you; the other person is getting all the big accounts; you are not hired for the gig first; your spouse cheated on you while your quirky friend’s marriage remains intact; the bills keep coming and you can’t seem to get ahead; you are faced with life-changing choices about the care of a family member. Feeling stuck can be a time of feeling alone, isolated, abandoned and ultimately confused about the decision of the next life-move. Getting Un-Stuck In getting un-stuck, hope can fuel the energy to exert courage. You can walk and breathe again. When courage is exercised, it inspires the willingness to risk. You might even start jogging at this point. Taking a risk brings the prospect of change or advancement and now you are running. These actions are vital to getting further un-stuck. Hope fuels courage for you to walk. Courage inspires risk for you to jog. Risk brings change so you can run. I hope to encourage you to face your life with the courage that hope brings, and the bravery to take the necessary steps to move forward. The principles in this book are universal for people in different walks of life. I have gathered inspirational stories from my interviews with a variety of people, from company presidents to entrepreneurs. Through they have walked different life paths than you or I, their experiences reveal helpful principles that are far-reaching in their scope and application. No matter if you’re the president of your own company, between jobs, or a recent college graduate deciding what to do in life, if you are open to learning and growing, you can learn from others. They say experience is one of the best teachers, yet if we can learn from other’s mistakes as we gain wise advice and counsel from others, all the better. Life Stories In putting this book together, I have been inspired, encouraged, awed, and humbled during my interviews with ordinary, yet extraordinary people. Many of these stories would never have been told if I hadn’t taken time to share them, which made the interview and writing process all the more special to me. There is so much to say on the topic of feeling stuck. I hope the following discussion will inspire, motivate, and maybe even stir creative thinking outside the box. In addition, each chapter includes positive steps of application and points to ponder in every section. Throwing Water I don’t want to merely throw water on the subject of feeling stuck. My sons will never let me forget one certain incident when they were growing up. I was raised with two sisters. Even though we had many girl fights, I was not used to the intensity that physical conflict with boys could bring. One time, I honestly thought our sons were going to kill each other. They were lunging and grabbing with great force and passion while I stood on the sidelines, not sure what to do. So I grabbed the first thing I could put my hands on, which was a full pitcher of water. I threw it on them, in our carpeted living room. They immediately stopped, looking up at me in disbelief, soaking wet. It worked—they stopped fighting because we all started laughing so hard at such a crazy solution! Pouring water on my sons did not permanently stop the fights, but did help to ease their momentary conflict. We still laugh about it. I knew I needed to take action, and used the resource immediately available, which was water. Humor is a great resource and can ease the intensity of ongoing conflict, but there are more permanent solutions than water to move through feeling stuck. When you’re in the throes of a crisis, you may not be thinking clearly. A douse of water, a good laugh, or an insightful confrontation might be just the action to disrupt your downward spiral and get you thinking in news ways about how to cope with life’s crises. You Are Not Alone I hope you will re-read many of the sections of Stuck Is Not a Four-Letter Word when you are feeling discouraged or even a little stuck, because you are not alone. There are many people just like you, maybe in totally different circumstances, but wondering if there really is a God, and if a God, Is He a being who cares? You’re wondering if there is writing in the clouds or if there is a positive fork in the road, or if there are concrete answers when faced with roadblocks in life, love or in work. You will create your own answers, but I think you will gain insight and ideas to apply and use for your own journey of becoming un-stuck. Recently, I have experienced tendonitis in my left elbow. I decided to ice my elbow for twenty minutes every morning. The pain in keeping an ice pack on my elbow has made my eyes cross until my arm goes numb. It works because warm blood rushes to the injury when the ice is removed, heating up the area with new blood cells, promoting healing. Baseball pitchers, as my husband was, dip and hold their arm in a bucket of ice water after pitching. It’s painful. But that is why they are able to keep using their muscles in a game with intense pressure and motion. It may be a painful process to go through and apply some of the steps in this book, but they will only transform your life and outlook if you take time to evaluate how they apply to you personally. You can laugh, cry, and understand the principles, but actually applying the ice pack to bring the warm blood of change is necessary for real healing, no matter if you’re sinking in quicksand, trying to run in your dream, or just have gum on your shoe. True transformation occurs with evaluation and application.