You have dreams, right? You have goals—we all do. But for some reason, it always seems like you’re spinning your wheels with no forward progress. You can’t figure out how to get traction, and end up finding yourself sitting in a big pile of frustration. Guess what? You’re not alone. So many of us experience the same challenges and can’t figure out exactly why. 

Luckily, it’s simple. It all comes backdown to mindset. 

All of us can move toward our best lives when we start eliminating the things that keep us stuck. When you’re feeling stuck, chances are one of these three mindsets are probably the culprit:

I don’t know about you, but my mind can run rampant with worry if I’m not careful. The “what if’s” can pile up like a mountain of dirty clothes before the ever-dreaded laundry day.What if I fail? What if people don’t like what I’m saying? What if I’m all alone? What if my kids get hurt? What if, what if . . . what if. 

The possibilities are endless. 

Relationship researcher and best-selling author, Shaunti Feldhahn, writes in her book, The Kindness Challenge, “We can’t feed fear (aka: worry) and then complain that we’re anxious and stressed! We’ve got to look for and confront the ways we are causing the very anxiety we wish we didn’t have.” 

Today I am writing to my single ladies. Those of you who are searching for the right relationship. You are still looking for “Mr. Right” . . . but keep coming up empty. Today’s dating world looks a lot like the  Bachelor/Bachelorette and scouring online dating apps like Match, Tinder, and Coffee Meets Bagel. You could say the dating pool has become pretty murky. The waters are unclear, and they just keep getting more and more confusing. It’s difficult to know when someone is in it for the right reasons, or if they are really emotionally available to begin with. (And truly, we all deal with emotionally unavailable people, whether we are in a relationship or not, so this can apply to anyone.)

As much as we’d hate to admit it, summer is winding down. And if you have school-aged kids, it’s about to get real. . . school is about to start. Life is about to start moving faster than we can keep up. Pretty soon, your calendar will be filled up with things like school registration (and the paperwork that comes with it), Meet the teacher and Back to School nights, homework battles, early morning wake-ups, extra-curricular activities . . . and on and on. I feel exhausted and overwhelmed just thinking about it, don’t you? But hear me out: We don’t have to stay in the place of overwhelm.

When I began my life coaching certification training program in 2008, I was running ragged. My husband was deployed in Iraq for a year and I was holding everything together at home with a four and six-year-old. 

I was saying "yes" to anything that came my way. And the thing is, they were mostly things that I really wanted to do. The problem is, I just didn't have enough time in the day to get it all done. Can you relate?

The work I do largely deals with helping others get unstuck. Whether they feel stuck in their personal lives, at work, in relationships, or with their health, the core of “stuckness” is often faulty beliefs.

To get unstuck, we must evaluate our mindset and exchange our faulty beliefs for these three truths:

We are an airline family, and one of the beautiful perks is the opportunity to fly standby when seats are open on a flight. It isn’t always glamorous. We have countless stories of being stuck in an airport for hours, but many times, it works in our favor. While most people plan vacation travel well in advance, we operate differently. When we have time to travel, we pack our carry-on bags and then hop on the plane that’s open. It feels a bit like the show The Amazing Race, and our approach to travel always makes my “planner” friends cringe. 

If we feel stuck, it’s often because we were created to do something more. The “more” could be as big as moving toward adoption, running a marathon, starting a business, or transitioning to a different career. Or, it could be more subtle, like starting a new morning routine, finishing a book, or inviting friends over for coffee more often. Growth doesn’t have to look like scaling Mount Everest. It could simply be turning fifteen degrees from where you are and stepping out in a different direction. Whether our goals are big or small, one thing is true: we are all created to grow. 

I was recently on a phone call with a friend who is a marriage counselor. I had a counseling client struggling in her marriage, and I recommended that the couple consider working with this friend and colleague. I was thrilled when she and her husband agreed. The couple signed a release statement, allowing my colleague and I to consult with each other in hopes of working as a team. While recent events stacked the odds against this couple’s relationship, I still had hope. I had hope that once they began doing the work together, things would shift. These two wonderful people had somehow become disconnected through the challenges of life. 

Six years ago, while moving into our new home, we stumbled upon an estate sale at a neighbor’s house. Even though we were knee deep in boxes of our own stuff, we couldn’t resist popping in and checking it out. While most of the items didn’t fit our needs, we were excited to find a seven-piece set of pots and pans. We were anxious to get rid of a well-loved set we had used since our wedding, almost fifteen years prior, and this was an affordable replacement.

I don’t know about you, but this time of year is enough to make anyone’s normal anxiety flare off the charts. Between the shopping, parties, envelope stuffing, school performances, wrapping, class party gifts, decorations, baking, and travel, it’s amazing that we are able to enjoy this season at all. And that’s sad, because it completely takes our focus off of the one we are supposed to be celebrating, and leaves us feeling more like Scrooge.

I have a friend I haven’t seen in a long time. Though we live in the same neighborhood and were even in the same church small group for a while, our paths don’t currently cross in our daily routine. We’d been trying to connect for a while, but aligning our schedules seemed to be an enormous challenge. 

I was excited when I had a window of time open up, so before I started my work day of back-to-back clients, I reached out to her via messenger and asked if she could meet for coffee the next day. She responded that she was free, and I was thrilled that it was going to work out. I jumped into work and didn’t think another thing of it—until I checked my phone after my last client.