Three Essential Hacks to Get Unstuck

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast, where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life. In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills you need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset mentor and life coach Trista Guertin.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of This Daring Adventure. My name is Trista Guertin, and I am your host.

Today, I wanted to give you three easy hacks to getting unstuck, and I actually did an exercise a little while ago and came up with at least 14 different things you need to know about getting unstuck. And my plan is to put that into a document and share that, but in the meantime, I wanted to share I guess they would be my top three. Maybe there are some others that might rank up there, but they're all pretty important to be honest. And I think they're all extremely helpful, but these three come to mind regularly, quickly. They are the things that I recommend to my clients all the time when they're feeling stuck.

So let's dive in.

The first one is having awareness of what's going on in your brain.

You want to take time every day, if you can, and write out what's going on. You want to be listening to the narrative the script that is playing in your brain. We think, fix it. We think 60, 000 thoughts per day, most of them are a repeat from the day before, and you want to be really conscious of what's going on in your brain and the story that you're telling yourself, write it down, spend some time reading it. Looking at it.

Even if you just spend five or 10 minutes writing it down, you want to see what's going on. You want to have that awareness and just having that awareness starts to change it. It starts to give you an idea of what's going on.

The story that may be keeping you stuck, that may be holding you back. Look at those thoughts, look at what your brain is telling you on a regular basis that may not be helpful. You really want to take a step back, be a little bit neutral, be a little bit objective, and see what's going on in your brain.

Oftentimes, our brain is telling us a lot of stories. It's telling us a lot of problems. It's pointing out the negative. It's telling you what could go wrong. It's telling you what's wrong with you. And you just want to see and understand that this is what's going on in your brain. And you have that awareness. And then you can slowly start to change it. the next two hacks that I want to share are how you can start to change it. And the first one is, stop saying, I don't know. Your brain loves to say, I don't know. And when you say that, it just takes it as a free ticket to stop trying. It takes you at your word. I don't know.

So therefore you don't need to try it. You just block any of your creativity. you block any inspiration, you will keep yourself stuck. If you continue to say, I don't know what you want to do instead is ask yourself, ask your brain great questions. If I did know, What would the answer be? If I was open to new possibilities, what might they be?

Ask yourself a couple of great questions during the course of the week to get your brain searching for that information, to be looking for evidence, to be brainstorming and getting creative and working to solve problems to come up with new ideas.

Sometimes it happens on its own, but most of the time your brain wants to be efficient and It wants to be lazy. It doesn't want to exert any energy. It doesn't want to learn anything new. It doesn't want to do that work. That's part of how our brain has been designed. It's how it's evolved. It's how it kept us safe and alive back when we were living in caves, but it no longer serves us.

So you want to give it a bit of a push. You want to get it working. You want to get those creative juices flowing.

Stop saying, I don't know.

Stop blocking your creativity and ask your brain great questions instead. And the third hack that I have for you is that once you have that awareness of what's going on in your brain, you've done your thought download, you've done that dump, you've written it out, 5 10 minutes.

You want to be able to separate out what is a fact and what is the drama. Just as your brain is looking for negativity, it's looking for problems, it's going to add a lot of drama. It will tell you, you can never, Get it right. You are always late. You're always wrong. There's always a problem. It will add so much drama and it loves to generalize. you want to look at what it's offering you. And if it's not a fact, if it's not something that you can prove in a court of law, then chances are it's drama. And that drama is keeping you stuck. It's keeping you in a cycle of perhaps fear. It's keeping you in a cycle of despair. It's keeping you in a cycle of helplessness. Because you are overwhelmed with this generality of issues and problems and things that hold you back.

Most of it is a creation of your brain. Taking the time to go back over what you've written, find what are the facts and what is the drama that my brain is offering you. Can I prove this in a court of law? Is it helpful? Is it true? What else might be true? You want to go through those sentences that you've written with a critical eye. And if it's not helpful, then you want to start to refocus your brain when it's offering you those thoughts in the future. It's a process. It takes time, it takes work, it takes effort. It's not easy. But it will serve you in the long run if you can patiently start to unwind some of those dramatic stories and lines that your brain is offering you. And what you can do instead is in advance pick some sentences that feel a little bit better. 1 percent better. Something that may be true. If you're going from, I hate my body is disgusting, my body is a wreck, perhaps you can go to, my body is okay, my body is passable, my body is serving me, my body takes me to where I need to go, it does what I need it to do, it keeps me alive. Come up with something that is 1 percent better than what your brain is currently offering you. Something that you have at your fingertips, so that the next time your brain is offering you one of those unhelpful sentences, you can then refocus it to a sentence that is more helpful. And you can slowly move yourself forward.

When you believe that new thought, then you can move yourself with another thought that shifts your perspective, shifts your belief, shifts you more towards what it is you want, what it is you want to create. Something that feels better, something that is more helpful.

All of these, stop saying, I don't know. Get the awareness of what's going on in your brain. Separate the facts from the drama. And start to unwind some of those dramatic sentences and choose new ones.

Ask your brain great questions. Get it thinking. Get it brainstorming. Get it looking for new evidence and new information. All of these things will help to move you forward, slowly but surely. When you're feeling stuck, it always comes back to what you're thinking. The answer is not going to be found externally.

The answer is inside you. It's in your mind. It's with your brain. Your brain is the problem, but it's also the solution.

So this is the work that we do in coaching. Take these three hacks and start to unwind that story about you being stuck.

If you want to learn more, I will put my website and the link to my calendar in the show notes. You want to book yourself in for a consult. Let's talk about how we can get you unstuck, how we can move you forward.

One of the most important keys to getting unstuck and building the life that you want is to build a better relationship with yourself, and I'm now offering a six week jumpstart to building a better relationship with yourself.

It's an exciting new program.

I'm very proud and happy to share this with you, and I will be telling you more about it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, if you want to get ahead, if you want to do the work immediately, get on my calendar, let's talk, and let's see how we can get you unstuck. Thanks everybody for joining me. I'll talk to you next week. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to This Daring Adventure podcast with your host Trista Guertin.

We hope you enjoyed the tips and conversations on how to get excited about life again.

As always, you can head to tristaguertin.com for additional resources and to book a one on one coaching session.

You can also follow Trista on Instagram at tristavguertin.

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Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time.