Top 3 Reasons Why Women Get Stuck

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So many of us think that success is hard and failing is easy. Wrong! It’s a lot harder to be unsuccessful. Why? Because getting stuck and STAYING stuck requires you to adopt behaviors (turn them into habits) that take a lot of work to create and maintain. Today, let’s take a look at the top 3 reasons why women get stuck.

What Does it Mean to Get Stuck?

It means that you want something different, but you can’t seem to get it. You talk about it a lot. You think about it a lot. You may even be doing ‘some’ things to make it happen. But still, you can’t make changes.

Staying stuck requires you to rely on limiting beliefs, adopt a negative attitude and remain committed to a system that has not been successful. Ever. It’s accepting an invitation to stay in a situation that guarantees failure. You didn’t realize that’s what you were signing up for, did you?

Staying stuck is a skill. Occasionally in life, you would normally luck up and succeed at something. The fact that you stay stuck, means that you are working hard to maintain a system that guarantees you remain the same.

You know me well enough to know I’m not going to leave you with that feeling without any solutions.

How Do You Get Unstuck?

As devoted as you have been to the behaviors and skills that keep you stuck, you will need to bring that same commitment to the behaviors and skills that will free you.  Use the same energy, but direct it towards successful activities to change your results.

I told you staying stuck was hard work, and it is. If you can do that, you can do something different to be successful.

Reason #1:  You Fail to Make Decisions

Want to get stuck and stay there? Then don’t make any decisions. By choosing not to make decisions, you are choosing to stay stuck. And more than that, you are choosing not to participate in one of the most important areas of your life–deciding who and what you will be.

Failing to make decisions doesn’t mean the situations that need a decision go away. It simply invites stress into your world by placing you in situations that you may not like and could have prevented. For instance, if I failed to make a decision about filing my taxes… Do I need to finish that sentence?

Life is messy enough, we don’t need to create more mess by avoiding decisions. To keep life as simple as possible, make decisions and then act on those decisions to reach your goals.

How To Make Decisions Quickly

1. Give yourself a deadline. Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to make a decision and then hold yourself accountable for the decision. Your deadline could be 5 minutes or 1 month from now, but set a deadline to get the necessary information and then decide.
2. Use your goals to guide you. Make decisions in line with your goals and you’ll rarely go wrong. Saying yes to one thing is saying no to another. Make sure you are saying yes to the right things based on your goals.
3. Let your values guide you. Is your inner wisdom telling you to say yes or no? Will your decision impact something that’s really important to you? Based on what and who you value, which decision feels right? Trust yourself.

Right now, are you struggling to make decisions? The more you practice making decisions, the better you will get. You can’t move forward on any of your goals until you decide.

Reason #2:  You Change Your Mind Constantly

Another reason we get stuck is that we make a decision but we re-make that decision over and over again. All the energy you’re spending changing your mind can fool you into thinking you’re actually doing something constructive. You’re not.

I have written about the 3-day monk concept before. A 3-day monk is someone who gets obsessed with something in spurts, but quickly loses interest. What does this look like? Well, you could decide to go to medical school, but 3 months later you decide you want to be a professional chef. So you go buy killer professional cookware, but before you can really get that career going you decide you want to become a teacher. This is exhausting.

All of that activity feels like movement, but there is no forward progress happening. It’s tough to create momentum when you change your direction and goal constantly.  Because you keep changing your mind, you stay stuck.

How to Stick to Your Decisions:

1. Realize what your constant mind-changing is costing you. It’s no different than starting in St. Louis, driving three hours toward Miami, then three hours toward Philadelphia, and then three hours toward Phoenix. You are not likely to end up where you planned to go, or where you want to be. Staying stuck has a cost.
2. Keep your feet to the fire. You can only change your mind if you let your mind wander. Stay focused on today and avoid getting distracted by all the work that you will do in the future. Tackle each day one at a time.

You don’t have to be perfect and neither do your decisions. We get stuck when we keep re-thinking what we’ve already decided to do. You will dramatically improve your results and reduce your stress if you simply stop changing your mind all the time.

Reason #3:  You Want to Change your Life But You Don’t Want to Change Yourself

OK, big-girl truth coming. There is an entire universe between the desire to change your life and the willingness to change yourself. Should I repeat that? It feels so much better to think about all the reasons that we are not making changes as long as those reasons are external to us. That’s much cheaper–it doesn’t cost us blood, sweat, or tears. A LOT of people want to lose weight or start a business that earns $1 Million. However, those things won’t happen if we don’t do the work. And the work starts inside us.

No matter the goal, changing yourself is your most important and most significant work.

For example, you might want to lose 25 pounds, but are you willing to:

• Eat healthy, whole foods
• Exercise regularly
• Make lasting changes in how you approach health and fitness

It’s easy to want big things in life, but the real work is challenging. It’s not easy to transform yourself in order to accomplish bigger and better things.

How To Transform Yourself:

1. Ask yourself what type of woman you need to become in order to achieve the results you desire. How would she tackle work? How would she spend her time? How might your priorities need to change? 
2. Determine which habits you want to drop. If you want to save to buy a house, impromptu shopping trips might need to go away. For a while. Look at your habits and determine which ones aren’t serving you.
3. Determine which habits you want to add. Look at others who are already successful in the ways you wish to be successful. Copy their positive behaviors. What can you do each day that will ensure your success?
4. Give yourself time. It’s tempting to try to make lots of changes quickly, but this doesn’t work. A few small changes each week are all that you need to get started.

Transforming yourself is work. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Making a significant change in your circumstances requires making a significant change in yourself. You must become the woman that can handle the success you want. After that, everything is gravy.

There are many reasons why women get stuck. Failing to make decisions, changing your mind frequently and avoiding the inner work are just the top 3 reasons why women get stuck.

Trust yourself, stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish and know that you are worth the work. With a change in focus it’s just as simple to be successful as it is to stay stuck. Make small, sustainable changes and you’ll be amazed at how things begin to shift.

Are you ready to start? Click here to get the Get Unstuck Worksheet! It’s a quick tool to help you identify some of the barriers that have been holding you back.

Do you have other ideas about why women get stuck? I’d love to hear them. Share them with me in the comments below.

Tweetables:

Saying yes to one thing is saying no to another. Make sure you are saying yes to the right things based on your goals. ~Allegra Sinclair Click to Tweet By avoiding decisions you're opting out of deciding who and what you will be. ~Allegra Sinclair Click to Tweet There is an entire world between the desire to change your life and the willingness to change yourself. ~Allegra Sinclair Click to Tweet No matter the goal, changing yourself is your most important and most significant work. ~Allegra Sinclair Click to Tweet

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