You Can't Fast-Forward Growth

On the importance of working through feeling stuck

Welcome! I’m Dr. Jillian, a physician leader, mom, and coach who is on a mission to help other high achieving professionals and recovering perfectionists live less stressed, more satisfying lives. Today, I’m here with a piece about the importance of accepting and working through feeling stuck as a path for making changes in our lives. If the full post doesn’t show up in your e-mail, come over to the webpage or Substack App to see the whole thing. Subscribe here to get future posts straight to your inbox:

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

“What do you think I should do?” my client asked, gazing expectantly at me.

“What do you think?” I countered, watching disappointment flicker across her face.

After hesitating for a few moments, she offered a thought. It was more like a question at first, but then it built momentum. Soon, we were off and running.

In the years that I’ve been coaching, I’ve had some version of this conversation more times than I can count. Many clients come to me with the hope that I will tell them what to do.

And who can blame them?

I had hoped this too.

A few years ago, I found myself feeling stuck.

I was ~5 years into my career, and it had dawned on me that I had achieved every goal that I’d ever set for myself. I had no idea what to do next. I wished that someone would materialize out of thin air to tell me.

Between recovering from burnout and then surviving the first year of motherhood, I was worn out. And I had recently decided that I was no longer interested in pursuing the leadership path that I’d wanted during the first years of my career. Recovering from burnout had taught me that I no longer wanted to give all of myself to a workplace that would never love me back. I wanted to have some of myself left over to give to the rest of my life.

In order to continue working in medicine, I needed to find a different way to work and live. But I was stuck.

Fortunately, I’d been accepted to the individual coaching program in my organization. It could not have come at a better time. Over a 6-month period, I would have the opportunity to work with a coach who I hoped would help me sort my life out and get me on my way.

Easy-peasy, right?

If I’d known then how wrong I was, I may have given up before I even started.

My struggles began as soon as I sat down to fill out my intake form.

After answering the first question easily, the second had me stumped.

“What long-term goals do you want to focus on in our coaching?”

My mind was blank.

For the first time in my life, I truly had no idea. And, as a person who had always had a 3-5 year plan up until that point, I panicked a little. So, I did what I often do when things are uncomfortable: I closed my laptop and went to do something else.

Later, still at a loss and running short on time to submit the form prior to my first session, I gave it another shot. Without giving myself time to judge my response, I wrote down the thing that was completely true for me in that moment:

“I’ve honestly been so busy running on the fumes of motherhood and working all of the time that I have no idea.”

I completed the rest of the form with similar honesty and hit send before I could change my mind.

A few weeks later, I reviewed my answers with my coach during our first session.

To her credit, she didn’t judge me. She just asked me questions and prompted me to reflect. It was extremely difficult to admit the depths of my stuck-ness out loud.

As someone who had always had a long-term plan, it was extremely frustrating to wrestle with questions that I couldn’t immediately answer. More times than I could count, I wanted my coach to bail me out and tell me what to do.

Of course, she never did.

Instead, she showed up non-judgmentally session after session to ask me questions, hold space for me to wrestle with the answers, and to reflect insights back to me when I had them. Much of the time, I hated the experience. I specifically remember gritting my teeth through part of a session where we discussed what I liked to do for fun.

“Fun?” I asked, “What’s that?”

Just acknowledging how ludicrous this was out loud allowed me to truly start to think about how I needed to pivot my life in order to get where I wanted to go (read: not spending all of my energy on work). It would not have been possible if she had spoon-fed me generic answers about what to do with my life or if I had fast-forwarded past the struggle I experienced in those sessions.

As difficult as the experience was, I am grateful for the transformation that I experienced through working through being suck. And I am grateful to the worn-out version of me who was too tired to answer the intake form with anything except blatant honesty. Without wrestling with myself through the process, I wouldn’t be writing these words to you today. Humans Leading was a direct result from this time in my life.

Originally, I thought I was going to coaching in order to figure out a new professional goal: a new 3–5-year plan.

But, in the end, I never made one. During my coaching sessions, it had dawned on me that what I actually needed was to figure out how to align my life with what is important to me (including fun!). More than any leadership title, this would be my marker of a successful life.

It turned out that I had already known what this was before I started coaching.

To the question, “What would you like to do or accomplish during your lifetime in order to consider your life well-lived with few or no regrets?” on the intake form, I had answered:

Be present for my son, family, and friends.

Help others grow and learn to experience life satisfaction

The challenge I faced in coaching was merely to get out of my own way and allow my inner knowledge to guide me. I’m still in the process of getting better at this.

As a coach myself now, I see time and again that my own clients already have the answers but are being held back by something.

Like me, they are looking for someone to tell them what to do because that would be easier than going through the type of struggle that I went through. But it would also be less successful at getting them to the life they want to be living.

They (and you) don’t need me to tell them what to do. They need me to sit with them as they wrestle with their own inner struggles, to ask questions non-judgmentally, and to reflect their insights back to them. They need someone to help them stay in the discomfort long enough to experience transformation.

While it is helpful to have a coach to do this with, it isn’t essential. You can do it for yourself through a practice of self-reflection.

1. To get started, ask yourself this question: “What would you like to do or accomplish during your lifetime in order to consider your life well-lived with few or no regrets?”

2. Once you have your answer, ask yourself: “What is the first small step that I could take to move me toward this goal?”

3. Then, ask: “What do I need to address in my life in order to make this happen?”

4. Then, address your answer in #3 in order to do the thing in #2.

5. Reassess often and keep taking small steps.

Working through feeling stuck isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

You don’t need to have all of the answers or need a 5-year plan. You need an idea about what would make your life meaningful as a way to guide your actions and a commitment to keep going when things get hard.

How do you keep going when you feel stuck? I’d love to hear in the comments.