If you've ever felt stuck, frozen or paralyzed in certain areas of your life, you're not alone. Feeling stuck or stagnant is one of the most common reasons clients seek out mindset coaching. They say things like, "I know what I want to do / I know what I need to do, but I just can't seem to get myself to do it."
When we notice that we're in a state of freeze, our immediate reaction is to panic. After all, freeze -- like fight, flight and fawn -- is a nervous system response to a perceived or real threat.
It's an involuntary, defensive/self-preservation physiological response to situations that feel threatening, but where the options to fight or flee feel unsafe, and stillness feels protective.
While it would be great if we could "just take the action already," when we're in active, full-body resistance, our ability to think logically and execute is offline.
So what can we do?
A helpful question to ask here is, "Why did my body go into freeze?" Another way to ask this could be, "Why does not taking action feel so dangerous that my body goes into a freeze state?" As I share in this episode, this is where we start to see how we can traumatize ourselves by our own thinking.
I recently walked myself through this process when I realized I was in a freeze state with this podcast. As I share in this episode, self-coaching uncovered a thought that spoke to my deepest fear: that I was someone who might never be able to get beyond my current level (i.e., I was moving through my days subconsciously worried that I would not be able to overcome my limiting beliefs about myself which, in turn, would mean I would never be able to live the life I truly desire).
And yet, despite this underlying thought, my deepest desire was to direct my own life, to pursue mastery at something that I was passionate about, and to use this passion as a vehicle to serve and help others. It makes sense that my seeming inability to take action toward this end would cause me to panic as my happiness and success were on the line.
Discovering this was incredibly helpful, and just the shift I needed to get to work.
Being willing to take an honest look at the quality and orientation of our thinking allows us to see that the source of our emotional suffering is within our ability to influence and control.
When we recognize we have the power to ease our own suffering, the perceived danger fades. We're able to acknowledge and truly see that what we believed was a threat to our physical and/or emotional survival, was, in reality, just that our thoughts had shifted.
Whenever we can bring awareness to our thinking, we allow ourselves to get to the place of decision. We can continue our current thinking, knowing what it will continue to create for us, or we can ask if we'd like to think something different instead.
The more we do this work, the more we see that our ability to move forward is always within our grasp -- if we're willing to accept full ownership of, and responsibility for, our thoughts, our emotions, our actions, and, ultimately our results in life.
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Cited in this episode:
Books:
Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo
The Miracle Morning: The Six Habits That Will Change Your Life Before 8 A.M. by Hal Elrod
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Original intro/outro music by JMW
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If you know the only thing holding you back in life is you, mindset coaching is for you. Mindset work is about uncovering what works for you and what doesn't, and giving yourself permission to rethink it all. For a free 1:1 deep dive coaching session, email me at [email protected] or visit my website at https://kariwatterson.com.
