An Executive Coach's 5 Step Guide To Getting Unstuck

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Are you feeling stuck? Trapped in your life? Does it seem like you're living the same day over and over again, like the news reporter in Groundhog Day? Here's the good news: executive life coaching can help you getting unstuck and moving again! A good executive life coach utilizes a five-step method:
1. Gaining Insight: Your coach will explore with you the obstacles — both inner and outer — that lie at the root of your difficulties. The problem may simply require a situational change, as in the case of a job or a marriage that is well beyond repair. In that case, your life coach can help you to muster the courage needed to make a change.

Very often, though, part of the remedy involves increasing your emotional intelligence, as well as your understanding of people and their motives. A good coach can help you develop the ability to listen with the third ear, so as to understand what people are really saying.

What may also be lacking, on your part, is self-knowledge. Even the wisest among us has his blind spots. Paradoxically, ...
... you are likely to discover that you are the one blocking your own path! That's why self-knowledge is the ultimate liberator. In any case, your coach will be able to discern the real reason that you feel stuck and propose a remedy.

2. Dissolving Habits and Routines: Even if you do gain powerfully transformative insights, you must still contend with the force of habit. Outmoded habits, routines and ideas can hold you fixed to the old you. What, then, to do?

Your coach will devise special practices that require that you do things differently. A practice might, for example, involve dressing differently, changing how you walk or eat. Changing these little things can, surprisingly enough, break old habits and routines and help precipitate major life changes.

3. Changing the Environment: There are a host of environmental forces — both physical and social — that can keep you stuck. A familiar workspace can send out visual and tactile cues that reinforce old habits and ways of thinking. Thus, unless you make certain key changes to your workspace — for example, rearranging the furniture — you will remain stuck. Sometimes, a more radical change is necessary, i.e., finding a new job. If so, executive career counseling is recommended.

The same is true of your relation to family, friends and co-workers. These relationships were founded on you being the person you no longer really are. If you try to relate to people differently, they will seek to re-revoke the old, outmoded you. They might even get angry with you for disappointing their expectations. A life coach can help you to deal with the fallout from making these social changes.

4. Dissolving Anxiety: If you do begin to break through some of the obstacles in your path, you won't feel stuck, but you are likely to feel anxious for a time. This is because anxiety always accompanies any significant change or life transition. Relaxation exercises can be of value, but only to a degree. That's because anxiety is not the same as stress. Rather it involves the feeling of existential groundlessness, which results when you lose contact with the old, familiar you.

Gaining emotional clarity, coupled with taking decisive action, goes a long way towards dissolving anxiety. There also exists certain type of insights into your predicament that leads to both wonderment and emotionally liberating laughter. Hopefully, your coaches will posses expertise on these joyously healing insights.

5. Cultivating Mindfulness: There exists, especially at the beginning stages of a significant change, the danger that you will regress to the old you. If that happens, you will be feeling stuck again. That is why your coach will help to devise special practices that cultivate mindfulness, or wakefulness. You must learn to be alert for the old you returning. This might require that you keep a journal or that you meditate. If you do catch yourself acting like the old you, you can then stop yourself.

Conclusion: If you follow these five steps, you will get unstuck. Indeed, you will experience the emerging buds of a new life. It's a wonderful feeling. Ultimately, only you can make the change, but a life coach or an executive coach can act as a kind of spiritual midwife, helping you to give birth to the person that you are aspiring to become. Life coaches, who provide these spiritual delivery services, follow in the footsteps of the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates. That is not a bad person for a coach to emulate.

Dr. Mark Dillof, the author of this essay, is an executive life coach, with clients mostly in NYC, but with many clients throughout the world. For more information, please see: www.platosattache.com and www.deeperquestions.com