Some people experience mid-life crises, others feel trapped in a job they hate, while still others haven’t truly discovered who they really are. While it may feel like there is no way out, there is good news. Getting out of a rut is completely doable no matter what stage of life you’re in. Whether you need to discover your strengths, finally work through hurt from earlier in life, or you need to reconnect with your core values, taking the right steps can get you unstuck and move forward in an authentic way.
Discover Your Strengths and Inner Self
Sometimes people make decisions in life based on who and what others want and not based on who you are or what you’re good at. One of the most important and powerful things you can do is to finally shed all of those expectations by discovering and leaning into your own strengths.
You can take a personality assessment that helps you explore parts of yourself that are positive and not just negative. While some tests focus on either neutral or negative traits, there are others that highlight the parts of you that help you think, connect, and behave in ways that benefit you and others. These kinds of tests help you evaluate parts of your inner self that you can leverage in any situation whether at work or home.
Work Through Difficult Circumstances With EMDR
Many people carry past wounds and traumas. Whether it’s from cPTSD due to a difficult childhood or PTSD from a single traumatic event, working with mental health professionals can give you the ability to finally work through and process the emotions related to those circumstances. EMDR is a type of therapeutic reprocessing that many therapists offer to help people no longer experience the same level of pain and discomfort from things that happened in the past.
Instead of focusing on talking about the trauma, therapists use EMDR to help patients recall past events and then use specific eye movements to cause the brain to reprocess and store what happened in the past in a different way. The mind no longer has the same response when the memory is recalled once EMDR has been successful. Clients often do EMDR for multiple sessions until the memory is no longer as distressing.
Reconnect to Your Core Values
Values help drive your actions, and often if you are feeling stuck in life, it could be because you are not acting in alignment with your core values. These values help to anchor you even when life isn’t going quite as planned. When you live based on what you truly believe in, everything fits better together and you’ll be more likely to choose jobs and relationships that are in alignment with those beliefs.
Build New Habits
Once you’re better aligned with your values, you can determine the kinds of habits you want to have in life. Whether it’s a habit related to fitness, how you treat others, spending time with people, or even your hobbies, the best habits spring from an inner knowing of who you are and what you believe in. Over time, these habits will form your identity, so it’s important to make them count.
While you may have been taught to just put in more effort, when you focus on the wrong things, that effort goes to waste. Building new habits that you can connect with make them easier to stick with long term. You wouldn’t want to make a habit of reading four books a month if you hate to read. But you might make a habit of listening to a book a month in the car on the way to work if you can learn in that way.
Create Healthy Boundaries Without Isolating Yourself
Healthy boundaries are a powerful way to reinforce your values. When you respect yourself and you care for others, it’s easier to set boundaries in life. These can relate to what you’ll say yes or no to, how to let people treat you, the kinds of people you spend a lot of time with, and more.
Boundaries are not about trying to boss others around, instead they are about you. What you are willing or unwilling to go along with. And if something comes up that breaches your boundaries, you get to decide how you want to move forward. Additionally, boundaries should help you create and maintain healthy relationships. If you find yourself isolating and blaming it on boundaries, you might want to look at what’s going on inside of you.
Developing the right mindset and focusing on your mental health can be exactly what you need to get unstuck in life. Whether you need to re-evaluate a relationship or reconsider your career field, these tips can help.
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