In this follow-up podcast to a previous one about why girls feel stuck, Dr. Tim Jordan describes the ways girls can take responsibility for their feelings and thoughts, and become aware of the reasons why they feel stuck. This includes reframing any old, limiting beliefs about themselves, overcoming fears, self-compassion, doing things for their reasons versus pleasing others, cultivating quiet, alone time to reflect and access their inner voice and intuition, focusing on what they have control over, and the importance of taking any action step to create momentum and energy.
Previous podcast episodes on this topic:
- Spiral of Beliefs: How girls can redirect limiting beliefs about themselves
- How To Help Young Adults Learn To Deal With Uncertainty About Their Future
What Your High School Senior Needs From You
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Help Your Daughter Become Unstuck
I appreciate you coming by every week for this show. I did one about a month ago or so and it was entitled, Why Girls Feel Stuck. I gave a whole bunch of reasons why I think girls sometimes feel stuck in their lives. I’m especially talking about girls in high school, college, young women, but also girls in middle school. This is part two.
What Is Causing You To Feel Stuck?
This is knowing all the ways that girls might feel stuck and why they’re feeling stuck. This is about what we can do, what they can do, how we can support them in becoming unstuck. First and foremost, girls need to become aware of what is causing them to feel stuck. They need to listen to my podcast from last month.
There are reasons why they focus too much on things they don’t have control over. They’re living too much in the past and the future, and not enough in the present moment. There are a lot of unrevealed commitments that are below their level of consciousness which might be preventing them from getting what they want.
Perfectionism, having a fixed mindset by becoming too externally focused, old limiting beliefs they’ve accumulated based on past experiences, and the spiral of beliefs are described in that episode. Oftentimes, girls feel stuck too because they’re living by other people’s rules. They’re doing things for other people. They’re doing things to please people, to not disappoint people, not doing their life themselves. They end up losing their motivation, it’s not fulfilling, and then they feel stuck.
There are also a lot of fears, which I talked about in that episode. Systemic issues stereotypes, systemic racism, lack of support, and becoming emotionally overloaded. Let me talk about some things that girls can do and also for you to become aware of things that they can do and ways to support them in becoming unstuck.
Limiting Beliefs
One of the things I think that’s a big one that holds kids back is those old limiting beliefs. I described that spiral of beliefs in the last episode about why girls get stuck. They experience something, a trauma, an adversity. They lose their friends, their friends ditch them, a parent doesn’t spend time with them, just life stuff happens. They start to make some thoughts in their heads about why is this happening to them.
They start to create thoughts that’s maybe because I’m not good enough, not pretty enough, not cool enough, I’m not important, I’m not lovable. Those beliefs limit them. One reason why girls get stuck is because they don’t have the confidence to move forward. They have some of those old beliefs about things of that sort.
One reason why girls struggle to move forward is that they lack the confidence to challenge their old beliefs. Share on XThey need to become aware of those beliefs and then reframe them. There are ways that I work with girls in my retreats, my camps, my counseling practice, girls and young women as well, about becoming aware of those beliefs and then challenging them. Is it true that when you were in sixth grade, your friend group ditched you? Is it true that that happened because you aren’t good enough, you’re weird or awkward, or too this or not enough that? Is that true?
Did you get ditched by a group of girls in middle school in sixth grade because they were insecure at that age, they were immature, they were grasping for social power, they were playing playground politics and they were trying to fit in all those kinds of things? That’s why that happened. It’s not because of you. I tell girls all the time, I can see it’s so easy for me to tell you right now that there’s no way in the world that you are not important, are not lovable, or are not good enough. That is not true.
More important than me believing that is you start to think that about yourself. You starting to believe that. It might take some quiet time where they do some thinking, some reflecting, some journaling, and reframe those thoughts and beliefs into what is going to be my story about being ditched in sixth grade, about why a parent is treating me the way they are.
If they can reframe those beliefs into the truth and thus not a negative belief about them, not a limiting belief about them. That’s huge. I had a girl that I saw not long ago whose dad left when she was four. There had been a lot of parents fighting before he left. He was an alcoholic. She had heard things growing up when that’s a little girl about how it was her fault they were fighting. They tended to fight about her and parenting her.
She felt like a bad kid, that there was something wrong with her. She was the cause of all this stuff. Of course, that wasn’t true. Now she’s 17, now it’s time to sit back and say, “What’s my story?” My story is that’s my parent’s stuff. It doesn’t belong to me. Even if they were fighting about me, it still isn’t my fault that they were fighting. They were fighting because they didn’t know how to discuss things peacefully. They don’t know how to listen to each other. They didn’t respect each other. They had all of their issues about why they were fighting. They had nothing to do with you. Even if they were fighting about you.
Fears
I helped that young woman grasp that belief. Now she’s going to have to start working at telling herself that over and over again. Another big thing that keeps girls stuck is their fears. Anytime a girl is afraid of trying something, doing something, whether it’s trying out for a team, auditioning for a play, going for a job interview, applying for a college that they want to go to, applying for jobs.
The young women whom I counsel, who I coach, I want to understand what’s below the surface, I’m afraid I won’t get the job. I’ll buy that but why is that fear there? What’s below the surface of that? What’s below the surface might be some old limiting beliefs about not being good enough. I had a girl whom I was counseling about six months ago who was applying to some very prestigious top-level colleges.
She had this belief system that said, “It’s got to be a top college or bust. If I don’t get into an Ivy League school or that kind of school, my whole schooling up to now has been a waste of time.” That was her belief system. I think she was going to a private school that in many ways got pounded into the kids. I think she heard somewhat from her family and she had internalized that as top college or bust, top college or I’m a failure.
Even below that belief system was having a couple of older siblings who were top performers in sports and top performers in the classroom who had both gone to top colleges. This girl always compared herself to her siblings and always felt not as good as and less than because they were four and seven years older than her. They were out in the world doing these cool things. She always felt she didn’t measure up and she was spending her whole life on a hamster wheel, trying to be as good as them, or even worse trying to be better than them. Thus, if she didn’t get into a top college, she was not going to be as good as them, thus validating her feelings of, “I’m nothing. They’re better than me, and therefore I’m nothing.”
I had a young woman who was worrying about applying for jobs. She was a senior in college, and she worried what if I don’t get this cool internship? Am I going to be able to get a job that pays enough money to pay for me to get an apartment in a big city because her degree program is going to require her job, her career, to be in a big city? A New York, Chicago, or LA thing. She was so worried about being able to do that and it was keeping her stuck. She was so afraid of sending things out. What if she didn’t get the internship? What if she didn’t get the job?
That whole process was also reminding her that she was going to be leaving college and having to be a big girl. She was worried about growing up because growing up meant paying for my apartment, getting a job, being on my own, being more responsible, and being in charge of my life. I think up till that point in her life, her parents had done a lot for her, and she hadn’t been able to experience enough of the adversities and fight through those and overcome those to give her the confidence that said, “Even if it’s tough, I know I can get through this because I have and my parents let me.”
Lacking Confidence
That’s a huge piece of why a lot of kids are stuck today, young people, and young adults. They don’t have the confidence that comes from being able to do things on their own. Solve your problems, as opposed to having your parents fix things, rescue you, and “coddle you.” A lot of kids are not leaving the nest with a compass that says, “I’ve developed a lot of perseverance and grit and resilience and optimism because I know I can handle stuff and I know I can handle pitfalls, the ups, and downs of life because I’ve been allowed to handle and cope with the ups and downs of life.” It’s never too late for them to start doing that.
I did an episode a few months ago about how to help young people deal with uncertainty. There’s a story I’ve told in a previous episode, I’ll say it briefly here, about how lions hunt in Africa. The oldest male lion is upwind of a herd of gazelle and downwind, hiding in the brush are a bunch of young male and female lions. They’re all set up. The oldest lion in the pride is weak, can’t run, and has no teeth, but he can still roar the best of them. The lion sits up and he roars and he roars and he roars and the gazelle hear him, they startle, they freeze, they smell him because he’s upwind. I always ask girls, “What did he do?” They said, “He ran away.” “Which way?” “He went down, away from the roar.” The gazelle get eaten up because there are lions down there waiting for them.
The moral of the story, the metaphor is that in your life, when you hear the roar, i.e. feel your fear and get anxious about something, the tendency is to go away from it to avoid it. You get eaten up by your fears just as those gazelles did. If instead you heard the roar and felt your fear and then went to it and through it, it rarely has as many teeth as you thought.
When I’m working with girls who are 14, 18, or 23, they’ve got a lot of life experience where they have been worried about something coming up and got themselves all worked up. When the time came, it rarely was as bad as they thought. They handled whatever came up. They have lots of life experiences that say, “I can do it.” I tell them to remember those experiences in those moments.
Remember all those times when you got worried and started ruminating worst case, but then when the time came, it didn’t happen? That should tell you that this present situation, what you’re worried about and making a big story about probably won’t happen. Even if something happens, you’ll be able to handle it. You’ll be able to deal with it and you’ll be able to get through it.
Self-Compassion
Going for the roar is one way girls can get unstuck and not get stuck in their fears if you will. I also teach girls about self-compassion because one of the things that can make them stuck or feel stuck is that they get down on themselves because they made a mistake or things didn’t go their way or they start ruminating about the worst case and they start to have negative self-talk.
I tell them that if they’re in that state of mind with a ruminating worst case and having negative self-talk and beating themselves up, of course, they’re going to be stuck. They’re going to lack the courage and they’re going to lack the oomph that comes from self-confidence. I tell them there are a couple of different parts of self-compassion that could be helpful.
The first one is to imagine that there’s somebody in your head who loves you dearly, who sees the best in you, and knows who you are. It might be your dad, it might be your mom, it might be your best friend, it might be one of your professors. I say imagine if that person was in your head right now, what would they be saying to you?
Would they be saying, “You are never going to be able to make it, you’re not good enough, you can’t do this, you’re overstepping your bounds?” Of course, they wouldn’t be saying that. They’d be saying, “You got this. Go for it. I have complete faith in you.” I tell them to imagine if that person was in their head and then say to themselves what that person would be saying to them if they were here or if they were in their head. That creates a whole different emotion within you if you have in your head affirmations and encouragement instead of discouragement.
The second part of self-compassion is to remind yourself that a lot of people have been in your shoes before. A lot of people have been seniors in college and they were worried about getting a good job and being able to pay for themselves and worried about growing up and being responsible and all those kinds of things. A lot of people have been in the shoes of whatever it is that you’re going through. They got through it and because they were able to get through it, so will you.
It’s this universal experience that says, “I’m not the only one who’s been through this.” I’m not the only one who’s ever faced this because other people throughout history have been able to overcome these kinds of things, and that gives me the confidence that I will be able to do too.” The third part of self-compassion is to stay in the present moment. Don’t live too much in your past, especially discouraging past experiences, and don’t spend too much time ruminating worst case about the future, what-ifing it.
Burnout Or Frustration
Bring yourself back to the present moment because, in the present moment, it’s okay. There is nothing to worry about or be scared of in the exact here and now. Another thing to help girls get unstuck. A lot of them get unstuck because they’re burned out, they’re frustrated, they’re not happy with what they’re doing, they start doubting what they’re doing, and they’re not getting much fulfillment from it.
It’s almost always in my experience because they’re not doing things for their reasons. They’re still doing things to please other people. They’re making decisions to not disappoint people their parents or professors or teachers or whatever. Because of that, they’re not doing it for their reasons and therefore, they lose motivation.
They lose a sense of fulfillment because it’s not their thing. It’s not their passion. It’s not their path. It’s somebody else’s vision for them. That may work at certain points in your life for a while, but it won’t work in the long run. You will always spiral down and feel stuck and discouraged because it’s not your thing. You’re not doing it for you.
You will always spiral down and feel stuck and discouraged when you do something that's not your thing. Share on XI tell girls to start doing some experiments where they start to take care of themselves and start to figure out what they want. A lot of girls and young women get in the habit of when people ask them, “What do you want or where do you want to go for dinner?” “What would you want to go to?” They had this knee-jerk that said, “I don’t care whatever you want.”
If you say that every once in a while and you don’t care, that’s okay but for a lot of girls, it’s their go-to, it’s their automatic. What happens then is they teach their friends that what they have to say and their needs are not important and therefore they’re not important. That’s what you teach people when you don’t let people know what you want. I tell them it’s important to start doing experiments when you’re out at a restaurant to start ordering for yourself.
Every time you get a chance when someone says, what do you want? If you get some initial feel of, “My gosh, I don’t want people to be mad at me.” “What if they don’t like what I want?” “What if they get discouraged about me, whatever.?” I say, catch yourself, take a quick break, breathe, calm down, and then check in and say, “What do I want? What do I want to order? Where do I want to go? What movie do I want to see?” Figure that out and then tell the other person who asked what you want.
The experiment is to see what the results are because they fear that people will say, “My gosh, you’re so selfish, you shouldn’t have wanted that,” or people will be angry or disappointed or mad or whatever. The truth is that 90% of the time nothing happens. The other person says, “Great.” They start to accumulate evidence that says, “It’s okay for me to ask for what I want.” “It’s okay for me, not only is it okay, but it’s really helpful and valuable and important for me to ask for what I want, to know that my needs are important too.”
If they do that, they start making choices that are right for them, they’ll be happier, they’ll be much more fulfilled, and that creates energy and momentum to keep going forward. It’ll help them become unstuck if you will. There’s an old story that I read years ago about a young girl whose family moved to Europe. I think it was France. Her name was Muriel. She got on the soccer team in France, I think it was France in Europe, and she was a really good player right from the start.
When the family moved back to the States in middle school, she was way ahead of her peers. She was playing a couple of years older than her age. When she was 13, she was playing with 15-year-olds all up the line. She was awesome. At every level, she was the top scorer. She got a full ride to college and her whole life was soccer, club soccer, all that.
She went to a good university with a good soccer program and the coach of her soccer team in college had each of the girls come to his office one at a time at the beginning of the season and he asked them what are your goals for the season? Muriel’s answer, she just blurted it right out, “I want to be the best.” The coach said, “What does that mean?” Muriel paused because she hadn’t thought about that.
That was the answer she thought people wanted to hear, and she was used to doing things for other people. She didn’t have an answer for herself. Her coach, after she sat there flabbergasted for a moment, got up and walked over to the light switch in the room. He turned the lights off, he turned the lights back on, and off and on, and he said to her, “It’s just a decision, but you have to make that decision every day about being the best,” and then he walked out of the room, leaving her with her thoughts.
For the first time in her life, Muriel sat back and took a little time to think about what do I wanted. Why am I playing soccer? What are my goals? What do I want to get out of this? Why am I doing this? She had never done that. She was so good, everybody just assumed she would keep playing and she was doing it for the accolades and because she was at these high levels, all that. For the first time in her life, she had to sit back, go inside of herself, and say, “What’s this about for me and what do I want?”
What she decided was she did want to play college soccer and she wanted to make the World Cup team and she wanted to make the Olympic team. For the first time in her life, she applied herself fully. She had gotten by a lot on talent so she started training harder and she got focused more than she had ever been in her life. When she was in college, I think she won four national championships. She became the captain of her college team at North Carolina.
She did get to play on the Olympic team and she won a gold medal. She did get to play on the World Cup team and she won the gold cup with the US women’s team. She was their captain and when Muriel retired, she was the leading international scorer in international soccer history. Muriel, as an adult, went by Mia Hamm.
Intrinsic Motivation
Mia Hamm had her little epiphany when she was a freshman in college. I think you can start earlier with your daughters asking them all along the way, why do you want to do what you do? Why are you being in plays? Why do you like playing soccer? What do you like about drawing? I’ve noticed that you’ve been making all these crafts, but what’s that about for you? Why do you like that so much?
Help them to go inside and say, what is that about for me? Why does it feel so good? You mirror back what they say and they internalize those feelings, which is their intrinsic motivation. When girls are running their lives by their intrinsic motivations and their intrinsic internal reasons, they won’t feel stuck. They’ll feel happy, more passionate, and more fulfilled.
When girls are running their lives by their intrinsic motivations and internal reasons, they won't feel stuck. They'll feel happy, passionate, and more fulfilled. Share on XBeing able to touch you and know what you want and doing things for your reasons is one of the most important ways I have found for girls to become unstuck. That includes girls who have parents who discourage them from doing things. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had girls tell me that they told their parents that they wanted to be an artist or they want to be a writer or even sadly wanted to be a teacher.
Sadly, their parents try and dissuade them because they can’t make much money. I want you to do a job where you can make more money, and be able to take care of yourself. We’re turning away artists and writers and musicians and teachers because of money. A lot of those girls feel stuck because they end up doing things that weren’t their passion.
For those girls, they have to overcome a lot and be able to be grown up enough and powerful enough to sit down with their parents and say, “I know. I understand what you’re saying and thank you for caring about me this is what my urges are telling me to do. This is what I want to do. This is my passion. This is my interest. This is what fulfills me.”
Focus On What You Can Control
Now that means that part of being unstuck is that girls need to learn how to slow down, get quiet, retreat from life, unplug from their devices, and check in with themselves. They’ve got to learn how to access their inner world, their inner voice to hear their urges, to be able to follow your heart, you need to be able to access your heart.
To follow your intuition, you’ve got to be able to access your intuition. You can only do that if you have quiet, reflective time. We’re not doing a very good job of teaching girls how to do that. They’re also in this day and age with all the devices and social media, they’re so distracted, spending four, six, or eight hours a day on devices, time that could have been spent doing things like journaling or artwork or soul-searching, if you will.
I want them to know what they want. I want them to know what’s best for them. I want them to be able to make decisions based on that. One of my dear friends got engaged during her fourth year in college, this is years ago, and to the point where they sent out the invitations, the wedding was a month or so away, and she started having a lot of doubts. She ended up stopping the plans and she ended up not marrying this guy.
It was a huge decision because the wedding was planned, the invitations had gone out. I asked her one time, how did you make that decision? She was about 21 or 22 years of age. I said that’s a huge deal. How did you end up knowing? She said, “I used to spend a lot of time at nighttime on our campus just walking around, sometimes with friends, sometimes on my own. That was a good way for me to think. I thought I was much better at thinking through things when I was walking, especially walking outside.”
How many girls today do you know who do that? Number one, we’re so afraid they’re going to be abducted. We don’t let them walk outside or go outside. Number two, a lot of times, they have a hard time being alone and quiet. They may go walking, but they’ve got their earbuds in and they’re listening to a podcast. Thank you for listening to my podcast They are listening to music. They are talking to people. There’s very little quiet time where they’re alone with themselves. They’ve got to learn to cultivate alone, quiet time to be able to access their inner voice and to know what they want, what they need, and what’s best for them. Otherwise, they’re going to get stuck and have a hard time getting unstuck.
I also encourage girls when they are feeling stuck, especially when they’re stuck because they’re worried about making a mistake or making a bad decision. I encourage them to interview every adult that they know, adults who cross their paths. It might be relatives. It could be their friends or parents. It could be teachers, coaches, or just people in their lives they bump into and ask those adults when you were my age and beyond, did you ever make a bad decision? Did you ever make a mistake? If you did, which we all did, what happened?
Their fear in their belief system is that if I make one “bad decision” at the age of 18, 21, or 23, my whole life will be derailed. It’ll mess me up for the rest of my life. That is just not true. I tell them that and I say, “If you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine, but just keep asking adults that question.” Read biographies and you’re going to find that most adults, every adult, most adults had periods of self-doubt. They made choices. They went back on it. They made a choice that ended up not being a good decision and they moved on and their life was okay. It didn’t ruin their life.
They get so worked up about making the wrong choice or a bad choice that they get paralyzed. I want them to have more confidence that say, “It’s okay to make a choice.” If it ends up not working out, it’s okay. I can learn something about myself, about what I like, and what I don’t like. I’m learning about my aptitudes, what I’m good at, and what I’m interested in. I’m learning about what fulfills me.
All of that is information you’re supposed to be gathering when you are 14, 16, 18, 22, or 24. That will eventually point you towards your calling and your passions what you’re going to be doing and how you’re going to make your mark in the world. I don’t want them to be paralyzed and stuck because they’re so afraid of making a “bad decision.”
I also let them know that another way of becoming unstuck is to focus on things that they do have control over as opposed to focusing too much out there on things that they don’t have a choice about or things they don’t have control over. A lot of young women I work with do that. They also become way too focused on the destination. They don’t spend enough energy focused on the journey.
I’ve talked about that with girls as early as middle school and high school who are so stressed out about their grades and different kinds of things, and they get so worked up about the result. They don’t spend enough time, number one, focusing on the journey and enjoying the journey. Instead of worrying about the grade, just focus on your study skills. Focus on how much time you want to spend on your studies.
No matter what you’re doing, if you focus on the moment if you focus on the journey, the destination will take care of itself. If you focus too much on the result like that girl who has to go to a top college, if you focus too much on that, what’ll happen is what happened to her. She got so anxious and so worked up and so stressed out because we don’t always get the result that we think we’re supposed to get.
She’s not enjoying the journey. She is so stressed out, she’s not enjoying her last year of high school. You have control over what you focus on. She has no control over whether she gets into those colleges or not. She has some influence because of her grades up till now and all that. That’s true but there are a lot of kids with 4.4 GPAs and 36s on their ACT scores who get turned away from good colleges.
If she learns to focus on what she does have control over, partly which is how you think about yourself, your emotions, and how you frame things, focusing on the journey, not the destination. If you focus on what you have control over, a lot of the anxiety goes away. If anxiety and stress go away, it’s much easier to make choices. It’s much easier to move forward because you won’t be so worked up and then ruminating and all that.
Catch Yourself
Another important piece to getting unstuck is learning to catch yourself when you’re ruminating worst case. Catch yourself, and use self-compassion to say very gently to yourself, “I know what I’m doing. I’m starting to ruminate worst case. I’m getting all anxious and worked up. I know what that means. If I don’t do something to quiet down, I’m going to get all worked up. That’s going to be hard for me to make a choice or do anything. I’m going to catch myself and then gently bring myself back to the present moment where I can make a better choice.”
They can learn some breathing things. They can learn to do some slow breathing. They can repeat mantras. They can remind themselves of the truth about them. They need to learn to catch themselves from ruminating so that they don’t end up paralyzed and stuck like that girl with the top college. Is it true that you have to go to a top college to be successful in life? Of course not. If you believe that that’s true, it’s not true. I’ve done podcasts about that too. One of my most listened-to episodes was about, does it really matter where you go to college? Go back and look for that one.
Make sure you focus on what is true. That helps you to bring yourself back to reality and bring yourself back to the moment. Any time girls are going through a transition from middle school to high school, from high school to college, from college to the next leg of their journey, there are always a lot of emotions that get stirred up. I did an episode in the past about touchpoints, a concept I learned from my old mentor Dr. T. Barry Brazelton.
Touch points are times in our lives when we’re about to go through a big leap in development. Just before that growth, that leap in development, people tend to fall apart. They get crabby, moody, out of sorts, lots of emotion. As they’re trying to wrestle and dredge up the energy to make that leap. Sometimes girls feel all that emotion and that causes them to get stuck because they get upset, they get anxious, and they get worried about being worried as opposed to understanding that it’s normal for them to have all these emotions at this point.
It’s okay. They’re just feelings. It’s just emotions that are telling me that I’m about to grow up a little bit. I’m about to do a transition. I’m about to leap in development. I’m about to make to start another leg of my journey, wherever that might be. With that, at the beginning and just prior, comes some unrest, feeling unsettled, uncertain, some anxiety, but it’s okay. Allow yourself to feel it, let it pass through you, and then move on.
Take Action
Understanding what touchpoints are and what they do for them is another important thing. A couple more quick thoughts. One of them is that when girls feel stuck, I tell them they need to do something. Take some action, anything, even a tiny thing to start creating some energy to move forward. Otherwise, if they don’t do anything, then they lose energy, they lose motivation, then it gets harder and harder to dredge up what it takes to take the next step. Making a decision, or at least starting the decision process.
When girls feel stuck, they need to take initiative or make a move. Otherwise, they lose energy and motivation, and it gets harder and harder to dredge up what it takes to take the next step. Share on XThere was a girl I saw, a young woman, she was in college and she was unhappy and she was thinking about transferring to another college and she wanted to. Plus they had a program that she wanted to go to but then she was afraid, “What if I can’t make friends at the new place? I’ve already been to this college for two years. I’ll be starting with people who’ve been there for two years at the new college. What if I don’t that place? What if I don’t the new major I’m going to go into?”
She had all this rumination going on and she was paralyzed. I told her to start taking some steps, any step. For instance, she had visited it during high school, but not since. I said, “You might want to spend a little trip, taking a visit again, and just set an appointment with the person who’s in charge of that department that you’re thinking about going into,” or doing a Zoom visit with that person to gather information.
You might look and see what the housing is for that campus. You might want to also go through your list of friends and think about high school is there anybody I know who actually might be going there, and then make a phone call? For some girls, it’s about looking online for the housing thing. They have these little sites where you can go like a dating app. You can go and look at people and their profiles, looking for roommates.
Start looking for places you might live that are on campus or just off campus. Do something. If you want to get a job, but you’re worried about the interviews and all that, just take a step, go online, and just download an application or fill out one application. Any action or anything starts to create a little momentum. That little bit of momentum creates a little bit more energy and a little bit more confidence, and before you know it, the ball is rolling down the hill. You’ve got to start someplace.
Talk To Someone
One last thing. Some girls, some young women who are feeling stuck, sometimes they need to go to a counselor or someone like me who does what I do. Does counseling, does coaching. Sometimes they need to talk to someone who’s not Mom and Dad. Not because Mom and Dad are not bright or because Mom and Dad don’t know anything, but because sometimes they’re too close to it.
Sometimes they need a space to make choices and they need another adult to bounce things off of. I want girls and young women to bounce things off their parents, but sometimes when they’re feeling stuck, they need someone outside of that. They may need to think through their old beliefs, their limiting beliefs.
They may need some help learning about their unrevealed commitments that are keeping them stuck. They might need to learn some skills about how to catch yourself when you’re ruminating and to switch it, how to go for the roar, and things of that sort. Sometimes they might just need a little bit of counseling to get them over the hump, through the touch point, and then they’re off and running.
I would encourage them sometimes to be willing to go, maybe talk to someone like me, to get some different feedback, someone who can give you another way of looking at things, help you reframe things, if you will, to help them get unstuck. They don’t need to stay stuck. There are certain times in our lives when it makes sense why there’s uncertainty, anxiety, there’s touch point feelings that come up. It’s all normal, it’s okay but doesn’t mean you have to be stuck and paralyzed to the point where you miss out or you avoid things.
You can learn some tools, you can learn some awarenesses to help you get through those tough spots. Those are just coping skills and even if you haven’t learned many good coping skills up till now, because maybe your parents have done a lot for you, now is a good time to start. No matter where you are, it’s never too late to start to learn to take responsibility for yourself and your emotions, learn to think for yourself, access your intuition, trust your gut, follow your gut, follow your urges, and start to create the life that you want where you don’t feel you’re settling and you’re stuck.
I would encourage you to tune in to this with your daughter or son, for that matter. Hopefully, it will spur some conversations about maybe ways your daughter might feel stuck and what support she might need from you. That would be a great conversation to have. Thank you so much for stopping by once again. I come back here every week with a new episode.
If you have some topics that you think would be fun for me to talk about. Go to our website and contact me. Send me a note and I’d be glad to look at those kinds of suggestions or if you have some feedback about things you like, or don’t like. I listen and I appreciate feedback and comments. I always appreciate you coming by here, and spending your time, whether you’re walking right now or driving or whatever. Thank you so much for spending your valuable time listening to these podcasts. I’ll be back here in a week. I’ll see you back here then.