Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. If you are new to this series, I'm doing a series of podcasts episodes that are based on the most common problems I hear over and over again in my membership, the Quitter Club. And so I figured I would bring it to the podcast to help some of you. 'cause I'm certain that if all of the people in my club are suffering from this, then so are you.
And so if you want to check out past episodes, just go to the YouTube channel under the playlist help. And you'll see a bunch of, uh, very common problems that a lot of us have. And I think the reason I wanted to do this series is that we all have these problems, yet we all think that like there's something wrong with me. I'm the only one that suffers from this. I'm the only one that can't figure this out. And I really want you to know that that's just not true. That it's a very normal thing that happens to most of us. And I wanna use this series to kind of help you understand A, why it's happening, uh, and B, how to kind of start solving for it, how to go about dealing with it. So today is another episode, and it's a really common one.
And it's called Help. I'm stuck, and I hear this all the time. So many of you think that you are stuck in jobs that you don't like in relationships, that you have outgrown in places that you no longer wanna live. It doesn't matter. But regardless of the situation, the way to deal with it is the same. And I think that for so many of us, we find ourselves in these situations where we know we don't wanna be in it, but we have no idea what direction to go in. And so we start feeling this feeling of stuckness, of helplessness almost as if we have no control over our own lives and that we're waiting for something else. And I find so many people spinning in this place for months and months, if not years and years. I can't tell you how many students I've had that come to me and tell me I was only supposed to be at this job for a year.
I'm coming up on five years, 10 years, because I just don't know what else to do. And I feel really stuck there. And so if that is you, I want you to know that you're not alone. And I wanna help you get unstuck. The first thing I want you to know, we're gonna start out with some harsh truth, a little bit of tough love is that you're not stuck. And this isn't just like semantics, like I just don't want you to use those words. It's really important that you understand what you're saying when you say you feel stuck. For so many of us, we truly feel as if we don't have another choice. And it's really important for you to, to show your brain that you do that you are not actually stuck. None of us are. You can make another choice. It might be a hard choice, but I want you not to mistake a hard choice with no choice.
For most of you, I want you to think about the situation that you feel stuck in. And I want you to come up with three things that you could do today. They may not be pleasant, they may not be your favorite thing, they may not be fun, they may not be what you want to do, but it is important to show your brain that you can do other things, that you do have other choices because your brain is a very powerful machine that looks for what you tell. It is true. Okay? As an example, like if you look for something that's important to you, if you decide that you wanna buy a certain car, you'll start seeing that car everywhere. It's not 'cause that car just magically appeared, it's that you told your brain, Hey, this is important to me, or this is some kind of truth.
And it'll start looking for evidence. And that evidence will filter through through all the other noise. Same thing is true with whatever beliefs you have, whatever story, whatever narrative you've created in your life. Like if you tell yourself that you're lazy, your brain will start showing you evidence of how you're lazy. Like every time you press snooze on the alarm, it'll be like, mm-hmm. See, remember this morning we didn't get up. We're so lazy. It'll keep reinforcing that belief, right? And so when you tell yourself that you are stuck, when you constantly reinforce this belief of like, I'm stuck, I, I feel very helpless here. Your brain is sort of looking for that evidence. It's looking for how hard the situation is. It's looking to kind of make you right to confirm your own belief. And so then you create this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that becomes stronger and stronger and it starts making you feel more weighed down, right?
It may starts making you feel like, well, there really is nowhere else for me to go because see all of this evidence that I am stuck instead of seeing all of the choices that you do have. And so it's really important for you to be able to shift that attention that you're putting on how stuck you are to simply showing yourself those options. It's not to say that you're gonna take them, it's not to say that it's even the best decision for you, but it's to show you that this lie that you were sort of perpetuating, that you were stuck is not true. So if you're telling yourself you're stuck at your job, let's say I want you to think about like if push came to shove, like right now in the economy is not doing well, a lot of people are getting laid off.
A lot of people who thought they were stuck, who thought they couldn't leave now have no other choice, right? They have to leave. And so they have to figure out what plan B or C or D is, right? And so I want you to just like go to that worst case scenario, even though it's not fun, ignoring it doesn't help anything, right? Like bury our head in the sand, refusing to look at what could go wrong, doesn't help us plan for it. So we're gonna just take a look at it. Like if I wanted to leave, if I had to leave, if I was forced to leave, what would I do? Maybe I'd go start driving for Uber or I would do Instacart. Maybe I would move back in with my parents. Maybe I would downsize. Maybe I would take on a roommate. Maybe I would go couch surfing.
Maybe I would take on, you know, whatever local job is at the grocery store. Maybe I don't wanna do that. It's not to say that those are the things I want to do, but what are all the things I could do if I had to leave? It's important for me to see that. So I want you to like get really clear on this that like you are not stuck, you just don't love the choices that you have to make, right? And we're gonna get to that and that's okay. But that is a very different thing than telling yourself that there's nothing I can do. When you say that I'm stuck, it allows you to sort of be helpless in your situation, right? It allows you to decide that there's nothing that you can do and you're sort of a victim in this and somebody else has to come change something, which isn't true and it makes you feel really helpless and it makes you feel really hopeless.
And it takes the responsibility off of you to have to make a change. Because if I'm stuck in this, if I have no other choice and there's nothing I can do, when I do have a choice, when I do have the responsibility, it is a lot harder because now I'm the one that has to take action. But it's only after I accept that that I can start actually doing something. It's like the first step to me really taking control of my life, even if it's hard. And so I want you to truly understand that even if you don't know, what you're gonna do is get this phrase out of your vocabulary. You are not stuck. I want you to like rephrase that. Every time your brain wants to tell you I'm stuck, I want you to just think I have a hard choice to make right now.
Because that's the reality of it, is like I just have a difficult choice that I don't wanna make. That's okay. How very human of us, none of us wanna make those choices, but it's time for me to make that choice. So that's step one. Simply reframing this belief that you are stuck getting out of this idea that you are stuck, that makes you feel as though you are caged somewhere and you have no other option. And understanding that like you might be a caged bird, but that door is wide open and you can fly through if you want, if you choose to. Now you may not want want to, but you could, right? And so I want you to now we go to the second step and we really think about, okay, right now I'm in a place that I don't wanna be in. Maybe my relationship, I've outgrown it.
We're no longer compatible. Maybe the job is just not it. This is not it for me. Okay? Now what the reason so many of us feel stuck, the reason we get in this place is because like I said, there is no easy choice here. If there was, you would've already made the decision. When we have easy choices, we don't think about 'em that long. We just move on. We make the decision and we go. The reason we tend to get quote unquote stuck on these other choices, big life choices, is because they're the hard ones. They're the ones that there is no one answer. There is no like a hundred percent slam dunk. There's gonna be pros and cons. It's going to be 50 50. There's gonna be parts of it that are good and there are going to be parts of it that are bad.
You have to accept that. But there is no answer here. That's all rainbows and butterflies. That's all gonna be a hundred percent great. That's okay. There rarely is with really big decisions in life. And that's why we shy away from these choices because we're so scared of like, what if I make the wrong choice? Or what if like the cons are really outweigh the pros? Or what if there's just a lot of things that come with it that I don't want, and we're so scared to deal with those repercussions that we stay stuck, that we keep ourselves stuck because better to the devil I know than the devil, I don't, as long as I stay at this job, I'm not really changing anything, which is what we love to believe. And so I don't have to deal with all of the regret or the bad things that might come if I do change it.
But you are dealing with a lot of bad things. You're dealing with the restlessness and the helplessness and the increased emotions that make you hate where you're at. You're dealing with a lot of things. It's just different than what you would be dealing with if you make that choice. And so we have to understand, like of course it's hard for me to make this choice because there is no right decision here. There isn't one slam dunk secret option that's gonna be all of my dreams. And yet I still have to make a choice. And that choice is gonna be 50 50 whether I stay or whether I go, some of it's gonna be good, some of it's gonna be bad. And I have to decide which 50 50 I want, which decision I wanna pursue. And it's not to say that you have to make that decision right now, that you have to decide to like stay or leave. I'm gonna tell you how you can sort of make this decision. You just have to know that that is what's keeping you stuck, is not making a decision, is sitting in this indecision, which by the way is a decision, right? You're, you've made a decision to stay for the short term, and I just want you to make that decision consciously. I just want you to make it intentionally.
And so when I, you think about this, I want you to realize like there is no right decision. It's gonna be 50 50 and you can't know how it's gonna turn out. That's the hardest part for most of us, is like we want some kind of guarantee. I wanna know if I take this other job, then I'm gonna love it and it's gonna be the best thing that ever happened to me. Or if I break up with this person, I'm gonna find the love of my life and that's gonna open me up to a love, you know, better than I could have imagined. The thing is, is nobody can tell you if that's gonna happen. There's no way to know that. And so for so many of us, we stay stuck because we're waiting for that guarantee. But you will wait forever. So really the decision is do I want to open myself up to the possibility that that could happen?
Do I wanna open myself up to growing and trying different things? And maybe it's not the first thing or the first person I date, but would I rather be this person who doesn't maybe settle for this love or doesn't settle for this job and tries new things and grows and has failures and has heartache and things may not go the way that I want and I figure it out and I keep going and I find something better and I grow with it and I learn and I keep going. Or do I want to hold on to the thing that I have because I know it's good enough or it's something I can handle. That's the decision I have to make. And it's a tough one. I'm not saying it's easy, it's definitely not easy, but staying stuck and telling yourself you're stuck and spinning in the same place and thinking you don't have a choice is also not easy.
So we're gonna pick our heart, right? We're gonna decide which way we wanna go. And when you, you know that about your decision, I think one of the biggest things about this is just really knowing that like of course there isn't going to be a right choice or a choice where I know the outcome or a choice that has no cons. So I have to stop waiting for that. I have to decide between these choices that I have, do I want any of these? What do I wanna do from here? And I want you to, like I said, to make the next best decision from where you're at. Okay? And what that means, and I teach this as a concept in my membership, is this isn't like one final decision for the rest of my life. That's way too much pressure. And I think a lot of us make decisions like that.
Like I have to make this decision, it has to be right, everything has to turn out well, and it's the last decision I ever make, right? It's the last job I take, it's the last relationship I'm gonna be in. And like that's an unbelievable amount of pressure because we can't know how it's gonna turn out. So instead of that, I want you to really think about like what's the next best decision I can make for myself right now here with the information that I know, with the information that I have that might be like, I need to stay here for now. Let's say my decision for this job is I have a lot of debt I need to pay off. This is like a good paying job. Anything else I would go to, maybe if in another industry I would take a pay cut. And right now I can't afford that.
So I'm gonna stay here for the next year or two years and save my money. Okay, great. Now we've made a decision, now we can stop lying to ourselves and telling ourselves we're stuck. And we can focus on the short term of like, I am not gonna leave here right now for very specific reasons. For reasons I like, for reasons that are gonna help me. I'm gonna choose to stay here. And I'm, instead of every week getting up and dreading it and telling myself I hate it here and I should really leave and spinning over the fact of whether I should quit or I should stay or whatnot. I'm gonna really focus in on like, no, I am staying here. I'm gonna hook my future self up. I'm gonna, you know, pay off the debt that I need to pay off. I'm gonna save the money that I need to save, or I'm gonna make the connections I need to make.
I'm gonna learn the skills I need to learn, and then that's gonna set me up to leave in a year or two years or three years. It's a great decision and it can stop so much of this feeling of helplessness and stuckness, right? Or maybe you decide, you know what, I've put this off for five years. I've worked at this job thinking I didn't wanna be here for too long. I wanna leave. It's time for me to leave. It's time for me to make this decision even if I don't know what the next chapter holds, even if I don't know how it's gonna unfold, even if I know I likely will fail at something and I will have to recalibrate and pivot and learn and keep moving, but it's time for me to make this decision and decide where to go from there. And that's the first decision that you have to make before you can even start planning.
Kind of like really understanding, okay, if I make this decision, that doesn't mean I necessarily have to go like resign tomorrow. It just means that like I've now made this decision that like the next path for me is to leave this job. What does that look like? Is that in the next two to four months? Is that in like six months, a year? What do I need? How much notice do I have to give? How much do I have to have saved up? Maybe that means I go in and give my two weeks notice. You know, for each person it's gonna be differently. But then you can start planning. You can start looking at like, okay, what are the obstacles that are gonna come up that I kind of need to plan for? What are the things that, like I have this other job lined up and I don't know how it's gonna go, but I'm willing to give that a shot to see if there's the possibility that it's better for me and I'm gonna learn a lot from it.
I'm gonna make my next best decision from there. And that's all you can do. That is the only way to make a decision. And then you're gonna have your own back. The last step is what a lot of us do is we make these decisions and then if it doesn't go exactly the way the way we want, we go back and we beat our past self up, right? We start like shaming ourselves like, why did you do this? You should have known better. Like you always make irrational, impulsive decisions. You can never be happy, whatever it's, and what you're doing is like you have taken a bunch of steps and learned a lot more information. Maybe you started that job and you're like, oh, I'm working with a lot of people I don't like, or I don't actually like this work. There's no way for you to have known that before you had taken the job and now you're going back and you're beating yourself up.
Who was a person who didn't have this information? And so one of the main things in learning how to make better decisions and learning how to constantly like trust yourself is to have your own back. Regardless of what the decision is, is knowing like at the time I made the best decision with the information I had, now I have additional information and I have to make the next best decision from here. I have to learn from it, I have to evaluate it, I have to pivot, which is what I think a lot of people don't do because they're so busy beating themselves up. They're not even looking at like, why didn't I like this? What did go wrong? What red flags was I ignoring? Like there's so much learning that could happen from whatever decision you make, but most of us don't even get to that part because we're busy just beating ourselves up.
And so that's what I want you to do, like as a whole, like this framework of when you think you're stuck, I want you to understand that you're not and show yourself how you're not. I want you to just list all the options that you have here. And then I want you to think about your next best decision. And I want you to think about what is this decision that I wanna make where I don't know the outcome, I don't know the right choice. It's gonna be kind of both good and bad. Which one is, you know, in my best interest, which one is gonna gimme the most growth? Which one is gonna get me closer to the life I wanna live? Which one is gonna teach me a lot more? Which one is going to set me up financially or is gonna secure me the future I want?
I want you to ask those questions. You're not gonna know how it's gonna turn out, but you can answer a lot of questions of why you wanna make this decision. And then after you make that decision, I want you to have your own back and I want you to learn from it. You're never going to make a hundred percent the right decisions. Nobody in history has ever done that, where it's like every decision you've ever made turned out exactly the way you wanted and everything was wonderful and you never had a problem. And so to have that kind of standard for yourself where you beat yourself up if something doesn't go exactly the way you thought it should have gone is absurd. Learning how to make better decisions and trust yourselves doesn't mean that you have to get 10 out of 10 on every decision.
It means that like you learn from those decisions, you start figuring out, what was I ignoring? What you know, why did I go after this? What was appealing to me? How can I remember this the next time I'm making a decision? And then you get better at making decisions at the skill of making decisions, and you learn how to make decisions faster and faster. And you learn how to let failures kind of roll off your back and you learn how to evaluate it and learn from it and pivot, and then you get closer and closer to the thing you want it to do. You get closer and closer to the road you wanna be on, you get closer and closer to the person you wanna be. So those are my three steps, my friends, you are not stuck, I promise you. It doesn't matter what the situation is.
And if you wanna prove me wrong, feel free to reach out. But I guarantee you that you're not stuck. And if you want help getting unstuck and helping you kind of figure out these different options and which decision you wanna make, and if you want help managing your mind around making a decision that isn't a hundred percent slam dunk guarantee and not staying stuck forever and spinning because it's not, I want you to come and join me in the Quitter Club, which is my membership where we coach on all this stuff where I help you kind of come up with these plans and help you work through a lot of the feelings and the thoughts that you have that are keeping you stuck in fear. So you can do that at lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub. Otherwise, I want you to go out there and get unstuck and make those hard decisions and stop spinning and start taking action and having your own back.

All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode. Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life, and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.