Top 3 mindsets that make you feel stuck and what to do about them

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In today's podcast, I want to share with you the top three mindsets that are holding you back from going after your big dreams and big goals and causing you to feel stuck.

These three toxic mindsets, as I like to call them, have you playing it small. Have you stuck in confusion, not knowing what to do.

I'm going to cover why each of these three mindsets are holding you back and I will also offer to you one powerful question that you can answer immediately that's going to help you get out of this mindset and into those big dreams.

You ready, working moms? Let's get to it.  

Topics in this episode:

  • Overcoming limiting mindsets 

  • Addressing toxic mindsets: fear of failure, indecision, and complacency. 

  • Practical advice to move from feeling stuck to pursuing your dreams.  

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Being an ambitious person means that you have big goals, you have big dreams that you want to go after in life, and yet, motherhood has a way of holding us back. 

It can feel irresponsible to go after big changes in your career or in your life, or go after big things where failure can have not just an impact on you, but an impact on your family as well. 

Working moms here in this community, we are all about having an ambitious life, not feeling like you have to choose between your ambitions and your life as a mom. 

And so, in today's podcast, I want to share with you the top three mindsets that are holding you back from going after your big dreams and your big goals and causing you to feel stuck. 

These three toxic mindsets, as I like to call them, have you playing it small. Have you stuck in confusion, not knowing what to do. 

So, in today's episode, I'm going to cover each of these three mindsets and why they're holding you back and keeping you stuck. But I will also offer to you one powerful question that you can answer immediately that's going to help you get out of this mindset and into those big dreams. 

You ready, working moms? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Working moms, hello. So I was having this conversation with one of my clients last week who we were talking about, like, the trade offs of motherhood, and we were discussing how kind of all of life is having to make choices between competing priorities. 

Priorities 

And so I was telling her about how, like, long ago, when I first started working from home, I decided that my priority was not going to be to have a clean kitchen. 

Because inevitably, what I saw happening when I started working from home is that I would get really consumed with making sure my lunch dishes were away, which inevitably was also the breakfast dishes that didn't get put away. 

And so all of a sudden, in the middle of my day I'm washing the dishes and I'm cleaning the counters and I'm clearing out the refrigerator, and I was doing all of these things that was not work. And it was really distracting to me. 

And so I had a little moment with myself where I said, I'm not gonna do this anymore. The kitchen is not my priority. 

And so I even told my husband, I was like, look, I'm not going to do the dishes during the day. And I told him, I said, you're going to come home from work, and the kitchen is going to be a disaster. And he was like, it's cool. It's fine. 

And sure enough, you know, seven, eight years later, I guess it is that I've been working from home. My kitchen is still usually a disaster in the middle of the day. It doesn't get cleaned up until later. 

And so I took a video of my kitchen, and I sent it to her, to my client after we had had this coaching conversation. 

And she wrote back and she was like, oh, my gosh, thank you so much for being so vulnerable and showing me how messy your kitchen was. 

And I was like, huh? Huh? You know, I don't try to just show you the good parts of my life. I'm a coach. I try to be vulnerable in, like, the messiness of life. But of course, social media is inevitably always an edited version of life. 

And of course, I fall into that trap, too. And so I need to do better about showing the messiness of my life, both, like, the inside and the outside mess of life. And so I've made a commitment. 

Keeping it real Thursdays 

I have made a commitment. On Thursdays, I'm going to call it keeping it real Thursdays, where I'm going to give you an inside look into some mess of my life, whether that is the literal mess of my kitchen in my living space or something messy going on inside of me that I'm thinking about messy Thursdays is what I'm going to call it. 

And I just posted, just this last Thursday on my LinkedIn and Instagram accounts, showing you, in this case, I did show my messy kitchen and had a little post about that. 

So if you're not following me on social media and you want more of the inside scoop, like, the real life like experience that I have as a working mom, and I hope that you can relate to. I know that you can relate to. 

Please, definitely go follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. I will also link to those social media accounts in the show notes if you need them. 

I think it's really important for me, as a life coach, for working moms to be as vulnerable and honest with my own life as I possibly can. 

I struggle as a parent. I struggle with balancing things from time to time. There are struggles that I experience just like you experience. 

Just because I have tools and I teach this doesn't mean that I don't have to work hard at it. And I want to be able to show that to you and be really real and honest. 

I wish all, all of us could be more real and honest than social media, because there's just. It's so difficult for us to navigate what's true and what's not, and we fall into comparison. All sorts of things happen with social media. 

So I am committing myself to messy Thursdays. So definitely follow me on social media. 

All right, so here we go. Let's get into today's topic. 

I've been talking a lot for a while now more about balance and work life balance and the tools for work life balance, but this is the ambitious and balanced working mom community. 

Being ambitious.

And so there's another piece to this that isn't just about balance. It's about being ambitious. 

And so there are really two types of women that tend to come to me in coaching, and one of them is the one that is just completely on the edge of burnout or is already experiencing burnout is over prioritizing work needs to fix their perfectionism habits, their people pleasing habits, that they really need the tools in order to learn how to manage their time and control their time and their energy and really balance life in the way that we want. 

And we talk a lot about those tools right here on the podcast. 

And there's another type of working mom that comes to me and hires me as a coach. And I think this kind of hits more to the ambitious part of life. 

They're the kind of mom that is feeling really, really stuck in life. They either just don't want to be doing what they're doing right now. 

They're feeling really unfulfilled. They want to make some kind of career pivot, career change, or they just have, like, big, ambitious dreams that they want to go after. 

They want to write a book. They want to start a business. They want to, like, have a  life where they can have flexibility and they can travel and they can do all these. 

They want to make a big move, maybe they want to move towards family. There's something big that they want to do in their life that kind of gets to the heart of their ambition, and they feel stuck in it, either because they don't really know what it is or they do know what it is, and they're just really scared to go after it. 

So that's another type of working mom that I help.

And this podcast really addresses both because all of us here in this community, we have big dreams, big goals. 

We want to make a big impact in life. 

We want to live into our full potential, and we want to experience calm and balance, enjoy and presence at the same time. That's what we're all about. 

So today's podcast, we're going to focus more on that second type of mom, that second type of mom that's feeling stuck. 

Top 3 toxic mindsets.

And so I want to talk about the top three mindsets. Maybe I could even call them like, toxic mindsets that my clients and potential clients experience that sort of perpetuate stuckness that keep you feeling stuck and kind of unable to move forward. 

And so we're going to talk about each of these mindsets. I'm going to share with you why they are creating stuckness within you. 

And then I want to offer to you one question to help you sort of get out of this mindset of stuckness. Because it's all about practicality, right? 

Practical tools for change. 

If you've been following this podcast for a while, maybe you're new to it. I am all about giving you practical tools right here that you can implement today. 

Quick side note on that. If you know another working mom in your life, and I know we all do, that is feeling stuck and can really use the support that I offer here on the podcast, would you do me a favor and just share this episode with them?

We are creating a movement. 

I talk about it like it's a movement, right? Of ambitious and balanced working moms that are not having to choose between work and family, but they're having both. 

This is not easy stuff. This is not stuff that we have learned from usually our moms or other people, higher ups in our companies. 

We are the generation of women that are really forging the path to being at an executive level, director level, high level in your career and being the mom that you want to be. 

There isn't many that have gone before us, and so this is all new. 

And this podcast is about helping you. It's supporting you. It's equipping you to be able to do both, because there isn't enough people out there that we have examples of that we can draw on their experience from. Right? 

So please do share this podcast out if you know anyone that could utilize this, that are feeling stuck and can use the extra support as a working mom. 

All right, let's move on in talking about these three mindsets. 

No.1: I don't know what I want. 

These are in no particular order, but let's start with the first one that feels so near and dear to my heart, and that is, I don't know what I want. 

This one is really near and dear to me because it's the one that really held me back for a long time. And my brain actually still likes to continue to kind of default to this one really often. I don't know what I want. 

And I remember ten years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I was feeling so stuck. I was the breadwinner of the family. I held the insurance. My husband had no clue what he wanted to do in his career. 

“But I wasn’t happy.”

I was good at what I was doing. I was kind of getting promoted. I was working my way up, and I didn't want to be doing it anymore. 

I was not happy, and I was pregnant with my daughter. 

And I had this thought, like, I just. I don't want to be commuting an hour plus each way, which is what I was doing. It was almost two and a half hour commute total over the course of the day. 

“I wanted it to be fulfilling.”

And if I was gonna be doing something away from my child, I wanted it to be meaningful. I wanted it to be fulfilling. Right. 

And so I was feeling stuck in being completely unhappy and having absolutely no idea what I wanted. I don't know. I was just, like, circling in this, I don't know. 

I spoke with another mom just the other day on a breakthrough call. 

A breakthrough call is what I offer. It's a free coaching call if you're interested in coaching with me and learning more about that. 

And so we were having this call. She had reached out because she's really unhappy in her career. She was unhappy before her kids came along. She's unhappy now, except now she really wants to be a role model for her girl, showing them not to settle, to go after her dreams. Except she had no idea what that meant for her. 

And she felt like her options were to either stay where she's at and just try to, like, pivot into a different role, a different project, different team, or to, like, quit and start her own thing. Right. 

In which case, she felt like she probably wouldn't have an income for a while, and that wasn't going to work for her. Right. 

So neither one of these options were great, and she was just swirling, and I don't really know what to do. I don't really have any other options. 

I have another client that is working part time. I think she made that transition a couple of years ago, and she did it because of, kind of family values, that she had some experiences she wanted in her own motherhood experience and her family life. But being a very focused, goal oriented, ambitious person, she definitely didn't want to keep doing this. 

She was very eager and is eager to find a project career shift, something that she could really use her professional skillset in, where she really feels like she's making a difference into the wider world. But she has no idea what that means for her. 

It's one of the reasons why she was coming to me in coaching. And I know so many of you listening right now have these stories yourself can either resonate with one of our stories that I just shared with you, or just you're stuck in your own stuckness and have no clue what it is you want. All you know is you just don't want what you have now. 

This mindset keeps you stuck. 

But the reason why this mindset is so toxic, it keeps you stuck is because no good ideas come from the thought I don't know.

When you think that thought, I don't know. Immediately your brain shuts down and it goes into tunnel vision where it only focuses on what you don't know. It fixates on it. It swirls in all of the questions. 

  • I don't know what I want next. 

  • I don't know if I want to stay in the same industry. 

  • I don't know if I want to stay at the same company. 

  • I don't know if we could afford for me to change jobs. 

  • I don't know if I'll be happy if I make a change. 

  • I don't know if I would rather just be home with my kid for a period of time. 

  • I don't know if maybe I hired someone that would make a difference and alleviate things. 

  • I don't know if I could responsibly make a change right now when my kids are so young.

I hear all of the I don't knows. So many. I don't knows. So many questions come from the mindset I don't know. 

It has you swirling in these thoughts, and it perpetuates more confusion, not more answers. 

So here's how you get yourself out of this mindset. 

You focus on what you do know. 

This is literally the question I want you to ask yourself. What do I know about what I want? It's going to require you to direct your brain away from things. That is all of the swirls of the things that you don't know. It's going to require you to get out of the confusion. Right. And to focus on what is known. 

When I was going through this, like my own career change ten years ago, I didn't know I wanted to be a coach, but what I did know was that the most life giving part of every job I had ever had was mentoring. 

What I did know is that, people were the most important part of my work life and that friends, family, acquaintances, they sought me out during hard times and transitions to help mentor and coach them in sort of an informal way. 

I didn't know what the next thing was. I didn't know what I wanted, but I did know that I wanted it to be about people. 

I didn't know I wanted to use that people part of my skillset in whatever I was doing next. 

Feel how different it is to start thinking about the things that you know versus the things that you don't know. 

And ultimately, because I started focusing on the things that I knew, and I knew what I wanted to do next was people focused and so forth. That really helped lead me down the line of eventually becoming a coach. 

This amazing mom that I spoke with the other day on the breakthrough call, who was feeling really confused about her next steps and kind of stuck. 

After we spoke for a few minutes and she was telling me about her confusion and her options, or what she at least thought her options were, I said, wow, it sounds actually pretty clear to me on what you want. 

You want a fulfilling career, something that you look forward to doing every day, and you want to feel financially secure at the same time. That's what you want. 

She paused for a moment. I actually watched her, like, write down that thought. And I said, well, what are you writing down? And she said, that feels so clear to me. That's exactly what I want. 

And I said, I know. It was very clear to me as you said it. Now we don't know exactly what that career is. 

That's what we're going to work on together in coaching. I'm going to help you figure out exactly what that is. 

But it's so much easier now to start down a path of figuring out wanting these two things. 

Now that we have some, like, guideposts, at least it's going to help guide us down the next, like the next series of questions that we have to ask together as we embark on coaching together versus this very wide open. I don't know. I have no direction. There's nothing known about what's next. That's such a closed mindset, right? 

Sometimes when you answer this question, what do I know? Instead of focusing on the specific thing, I really encourage you to focus on what you know about yourself. 

  • I know that I will figure this out. 

  • I know that I'm somebody that never gives up. 

  • I know that being a role model for my kid is one of the most important things that I could ever do right now. 

  • I know that I will pick something that is not going to pull me away from my family. 

  • I know that I'm worthy of whatever's next. 

Do, you hear how powerful these thoughts are as you start focusing on what you know about you? So good. 

All right, so that's the first mindset you gotta get yourself out of I don't know. Just eradicate that one from your mind. 

No.2: What if I’m still not happy?

Okay. Mindset number two. What if I'm still not happy? To be honest, this mindset could sound a little bit different from person to person. But at the heart of it is the fear of failure. 

What if I make a big change? I leave my job, I go for the promotion, we move closer to family, I start that dream business, and I'm still not happy and it doesn't work out for whatever reason. 

I have a client that is currently interested in going after a promotion, but she's afraid to speak up and go after the position because she doesn't want her colleagues to know or her boss to know. Because if she doesn't get the job, or if they tell her she's, like, not the right fit in some way and it doesn't work out, then they might think that she's not really happy. Right. 

And then she's gonna feel stuck, and then eventually she's gonna have to leave her company because, you know, she's put it out there that she wants something different, and she didn't get it. 

I have another client of mine that worked with me a couple of years ago. She recently kind of came back to me, and she was talking about going through another job searching, and she told me she was really, really nervous to go through this job search because she had tried to go through the job search a couple of years ago, and she just didn't find the right job. 

And so she ended up staying where she was at, and she's still not really happy there. but she's afraid to put all of that energy back out there into the job transition and it not work out again. 

You will remain stuck if you think this way. 

Whatever it is that you want, right?Whatever's on the other side of that transition or that change, whether that's more flexibility or more happiness or less stress, stress or more recognition or better work life balance, whatever it is that you want on the other side of the stuckness, if you will, of the transition, if you're thinking it might not work out, then you're going to remain stuck. 

Now, here's the question I want you to ask yourself. If this is you, if you are stuck in, what if the grass isn't actually greener, what if I'm actually not going to be happy and that's keeping you from moving forward, here's what I want you to do. 

I want you to ask yourself, if that happens, what will you make that mean? Essentially, what is the story that you're going to tell yourself if this fails and it doesn't work out the way that you hope right now?

It's just that it's a story, but it's holding you back. 

So for that past client that doesn't want to go back through the job search again, when I asked for this question, she said to me, if I went back through the job, search process again and I didn't get a job that I wanted, I would make that mean that I'm incapable. Like, I could never get the job that I wanted, that somehow I. It's. I'm, like, broken. Like, it's just not possible for me. That's the story, right? 

Of course, if she's perpetuating that story in her mind, that's holding her back from going back through doing the thing that she wants to do and making the change that she wants to do. 

Now, for me, in my story, after I had determined that I wanted to be a life coach, so I went through that, decided that I started my life coach certification process. That took me almost two years to do. 

I was so paralyzed by the idea of failing. 

But even after that decision was made, it took me almost a year to take the next step because I was so paralyzed by the idea of failing. 

I was so paralyzed by the idea of not being able to make money and make this change because I was the breadwinner and I felt overly responsible for the money and the benefits and all the things, right. I was feeling held back, like, what if it doesn't work out? Then where are we going to be? 

And at this point, I wasn't even, like, leaving my job to start the business. I was actually doing this kind of transition thing where I was going to be a contractor for a while. 

I was going to work part time doing what I had been doing, which was event management, while I finished certification and started my business. 

But I again, feeling so paralyzed by the idea of, like, total failure in my business, I couldn't do anything. 

The story I was telling myself…

It took me almost a year, and it was because the story I was telling myself is that I would be a failure. 

And, if that happened, I would be inadequate. It would mean that I'm not enough. It would mean that, you know, other people could figure out how to make a business work and do all this, but maybe I didn't have what it takes. And then there would be shame, and there was guilt. Sounds really harsh, right? But it's the story that was holding me back. 

Now, of course, the story isn't true if you don't get the job or the business doesn't work out or you don't get promoted over, whatever it is, it doesn't mean that you're inadequate or that you're incapable or that you yourself are a failure, right. 

What you do and who you are are two very, very different things.

That you're not good at what you do or you're not a good human right in any way, because what you do and who you are are two very, very different things. 

But it is in the intermingling of those two things that we get stuck. It's in the story of what we make it mean about ourselves that we get stuck. 

For my client that wants to go after the promotion, the story she was telling herself was that people would write her off, that she'd no longer be a valuable asset to the team because they would know that she wants something different. She's not happy in her career in some way. 

And so that story just went on and on and on in her head, and it was keeping her from being able to go after the things that she wants. 

So if the transition doesn't work out for you for whatever reason, if it doesn't bring you the happiness or the joy or the balance that you want, what would you make that mean? 

And here's the second. It's like a two part question. Why would that not be true? That is the question I want you to answer to get yourself out of that stuck mindset. 

All right, let's dive into the last one, the last mindset that is causing you or perpetuating more stuck stuckness and is a toxic mindset that's holding you back. 

This one just, like, sends, like, shivers down my spine, because every part of me that is an advocate for working moms wants to get in the ring and fight this one out with you, right? And that one is complacency. 

No.3: Complacency.  

This is the belief that there isn't more for you. That things are just fine and okay, and that's okay. 

This comes up every once in a while on breakthrough calls. So people reach out. They schedule this call. They're interested in coaching. We talk about coaching, and when we start talking about the changes that they want to make. And I ask them, you know, what would actually happen if you didn't make a change? Like, what if things stayed the status quo? 

And their answer to me is, oh, you know, things would be okay. I mean, things aren't really that bad now. They would just kind of keep going the way they are, and it would be fine. You know, fine is not what any of us want to live. 

Living an okay life is not what anyone here that is listening to this podcast wants to live. 

You are here listening to this podcast because you have big dreams. You're goal oriented, you're ambitious. You want to live into your full potential, and that is not found in an okay life. 

Your potential is not found in complacency. It is in naming scary, big dreams that have you going up and down on a roller coaster of, failure and success. Until you get there, things are fine. 

That is a mindset that is holding you back, and it is keeping you complacent and satisfied in a less than satisfying life. 

Now, I want to throw in a quick little caveat here, because I truly believe that your life can be amazing and great, and you can have a wonderful set of circumstances and love your current life and want more. 

So the goal here is not to turn what a good life is today bad. I don't want to do that. I just don't want you to lose vision of the more of the bigger picture. 

I have several podcast episodes that talk about loving your current life. 

That is such an important part of creating balance is loving where you're at today. 

But that doesn't mean being complacent. 

That means loving where you're at today and knowing that there's more out there for you and that you could achieve more and do more and have more if you decide to go after it. 

So, quick caveat here. I don't want you to turn your good life into a bad life in order to get out of stuckness. No, no, no. That is definitely not what we want. 

So, for my clients, when I'm on these breakthrough calls with them, I always push them a little further when I get the answer, like, life would be fine, I always say, okay, look, I know this is really uncomfortable to think about, but your brain needs to see the result of you staying the same, right? 

If your life stayed the same, your brain needs to see why that's a problem. Because if you continue to tell yourself that things would be fine if they stayed the same and things would be okay, then you're not going to make a change, right? 

Change is a roller coaster. 

Because change is sort of a roller coaster. It's really hard and it's uncomfortable and your brain hates change. 

And so if you want to commit to something more and something bigger, then you're going to have to see how, why staying the same is not actually what you want. 

Name your big dreams. 

So let's get big. Let's name those big dreams for you, right? This conversation I have day in and day out on these breakthrough calls for an ambitious person. 

I could think of nothing worse than believing that there was more inside of you, more to give more impact, to make more success, more anything and not going after it, not living into your full potential, feels awful to an ambitious person. 

It is holding you back and keeping you in this stuck life. 

So if this is you, if you have kind of held yourself back and are playing it safe and you know that you're playing it safe, it's sort of a protection. It's a safety mechanism. I want to be honest. 

It's a protection that your brain is holding for you so that you don't fail.

And you don't, you know, for me, it was like, so my family doesn't starve and become homeless, that sort of thing. It's a protection mechanism. But if your brain is holding you back from making change by using this excuse, everything is fine. It's all okay. Here's what I want you to do. 

I want you to answer this question:

What's possible for you and your family if you were to make a change? 

I want you to focus your mind on a on big vision. You don't have to know exactly what that big vision is. You don't have to know what the goal is, what the job is. You don't have to know any of that, any of the specificity of that. 

I just want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine yourself five years from now, ten years from now, having gone through the big change, the big transition, whatever it is, having gone through the ups and downs, and now you're on the other side of it. 

And I want you to imagine how much better life would be. 

I want you to imagine what's possible, the opportunities that might have come to you because you did that. 

I want you to imagine yourself, what you look like, what you feel like, what you wear, the house that you're living in, how you interact with your family, your friends, your kids differently because of whatever this transition is that you went through, right? 

Living into your full potential. 

I want you to take your mind to that place so your brain can see there's something else out there for you that you can go after. And it feels like you living into that full potential. 

Working moms, I do not want you to stay stuck. 

Today I offered you the three most common toxic mindsets that hold you back and keep you exactly where you are, safe in your little cocoon of life that is not allowing you to go after the big things that you want. 

But if you are ready to take that big step and you want to guide the fastest, most efficient way that you will get to those big dreams and those big goals, to naming them, going after them, not allowing yourself to be held back, is to hire a coach. 

And I might be that coach for you. 

I would love the opportunity to talk to you on one of these free breakthrough calls where we can discuss exactly what coaching would look like, what this big dream might be for you. And then I'll tell you exactly how we're going to get you there over the six months together in coaching. 

All right, working moms, you can, go to my website if you want to learn more. And if you want to book that free breakthrough call, it's www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com

And until next week, working moms, let's not be stuck and let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson