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The 5 Main Reasons Why People Get Stuck and Stop Growing

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Jared Graybeal shares insights about his book in the podcast The Self Help Book: Practical Ways to Never Stop Growing and the following article.

Do you ever feel stuck in your own routine? If the feelings of momentum and growth seem elusive in your current life phase, you may be interested in learning how to get “unstuck.”

However, I firmly believe that there’s a seriously important step before moving into the action phase. We need to look at why you’re feeling stuck in the first place.

Without first acknowledging some of the things that hold us back, we may never have the humility and maturity to approach growth with the right mindset.

To help you identify the source of your stagnation, I’ve compiled a list of the five main reasons why most people get stuck and stop growing. See if any of these resonate with you.

Reason #1: We stop making an effort to learn.

Unless they’re forced to learn things at work in order to keep their job, most people don’t commit to a life of continued education. This could be because of burnout from the education system, or it could simply be because committing to a life of never-ending learning is hard.

There are a lot of easier and more immediately rewarding things to do with our time after we get off work, like watching TV, scrolling on social media, or hanging out with friends.

Reason #2: We stop setting goals.

According to the latest research, less than 3 percent of Americans have written goals, and less than 1 percent review and rewrite their goals on a daily basis.

Why? I believe lack of self-confidence, fear of failure, laziness, and impatience keep us from looking forward to the things we want to achieve.

Unfortunately, the minute we stop setting goals, we become aimless.

Reason #3: When we set goals, we suck at it.

Studies show that less than 25 percent of us actually stick to New Year’s resolutions after thirty days, and only 8 percent accomplish them. Clearly, there’s something wrong with how we are setting goals.

Why? Because most of us just don’t know how. Brian Tracy, self-development author and goal-setting expert, says, “One of the greatest tragedies of our educational system is that you can receive fifteen to eighteen years of education in our schools and never once receive a single hour of instruction on how to set goals.”

Reason #4: We are one-track minded about growth.

Most people think growth is linear, assuming you can only grow in one way at one time. Then they get stuck on it.

For example, if you’re trying to get a promotion, you dial into the lifestyle it takes to get that promotion and forsake everything else. Or if you’re trying to lose weight, you do a mediocre job at work, maybe hang with your friends when it’s convenient, but give your fitness goals 100 percent of your attention.

The problem with this is that we stay there, and even once we’ve reached our goal, we don’t think to diversify until we’ve sunk into the depressive state of being stuck again.

Reason #5: Growth can be painful.

When I was in high school, I was 4’11” until my junior year. I prayed daily to grow, but nothing happened…until eleventh grade. I grew seven inches that year (and about three inches more since then, thankfully), and I can remember how painful that was. Seven inches in one year is an unusual growth spurt, and it caused a lot of pain to my joints, especially my hips.

But as I was going through that pain, I was also very thankful, because I had gotten the growth I had been praying for. Personal growth can be much like that. Both the work required and the change that comes with the results can be painful at times, and some people aren’t cut out for that level of discomfort. Once you accept that pain is a part of growth, you will also be able to enjoy the fruits of it later on and live a life of constant, positive change.

What’s keeping you stuck?

It may not be just one reason. You may identify with several of these reasons, and that’s OK. It’s not that you’re more stuck or hopelessly stuck.

It’s that you’re human and honest and ready to move forward. Now that we’ve covered the bad news and the not-so-fun statistics, here’s the good news: you can change.

Getting unstuck isn’t that hard—I promise. It’s just a few small, simple steps done consistently over time. You can live a life of greatness, fulfill your potential, and be happy doing it. Most importantly, you can start right now.

Not next Monday, next month, or next January.

RIGHT NOW.

For more advice on personal growth, you can find The Self Help Book on Amazon.

 

About the Author

Jared Graybeal’s mission is to encourage, educate, and empower others to live happier, healthier lives. I am a NASM-certified personal trainer, fitness nutrition specialist, behavioral change specialist, CrossFit Level 2 trainer, and corrective exercise specialist with an education in marketing and psychology from the University of North Florida. I own and operate two companies. One is Superfit Foods, a healthy, subscription-based, fully customizable meal prep company. The other is E3, a business consulting and marketing agency. I’ve done a few cool things, like exhibiting Superfit Foods at Forbes Under 30 and giving a TEDx Talk on nutrition and mental health, and every day I get to work hard at doing what I love.

 

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

Take Action to Develop as a Leader – Eric’s Story

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Taking actionI’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In this post, we will take the next step in the innovative leadership development process: taking action. This post will discuss how to start effectively and mitigate any potential barriers.

Start Effectively

First, you must believe you can accomplish your short-term milestones. If you’ve been closely following the previous posts and participating in the exercises, and you’re serious about chasing your life goals, then you are more than capable of accomplishing these short-term milestones. You may seem intimidated and overwhelmed, but that’s what you want. If you’re not exiting your comfort zone, you’re not growing.

Secondly, this process will not only take you out of your comfort zone but will require some consistent commitment. If you must, do not start out too extreme. Take it slow in the beginning, familiarize yourself with the routine, and gradually push yourself to greater limits.

Overcoming Barriers

Most importantly, you’ll need to allow yourself some flexibility in your plan because you will likely face obstacles that may require you to modify your routine temporarily. Below is a worksheet to help you overcome your barriers. Feel free to refer to my answers to see how to answer each space. The goal I’m referring to is how I want to increase my productivity with work.

Barrier Action Planning Worksheet
Category Barrier Impact of Barrier How to Remove or Work Around Support I Need to Remove or Work Around This Barrier
In my thinking I over-analyze small details, which take me on tangents about unrelated things. It distracts me, removing my focus from the actual task, and I think about something completely irrelevant. Maintain perspective on the overall goal of certain tasks to better understand the functions behind the smaller details, requiring less thought later on. Personal support to hold me accountable each day.
In my behavior I try to multi-task way too much. This impedes my productivity. Focus on one task at a time, do it right the first time, and practice “essentialism.” Personal support, casually reminding each other about essentialism.
In our beliefs We depend on third parties to do their part of a task too often. This slows us down because we wait for them to finish. Rely less on external sources’ work and consider doing their part by ourselves. Professional partnership support to find out what we can do without a third party.
In how we do things We multi-task as a group. It impedes productivity. We are reminding each other to focus fully on the tasks at hand. Remember that I must also focus and ask others to do the same.

Real World Application: Create a Barrier Log

Review your responses for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet and create a spreadsheet document. Label the first column “Barrier”. Move one column to the right, and label the next five columns, from left to right, “Attempt #1”, “Attempt #2”, and so on. In the column labeled “Attempt #1”, write how you plan to overcome the corresponding barrier, perhaps using the response you put for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet. If you fail on the first attempt, write a new or refined way to overcome that barrier, plus what you did wrong in the previous attempt in the Attempt #2 section, and continue this process until you eventually overcome the barrier. On the attempt where you finally succeed, highlight that box in green. As new barriers rise, add them to the log; however, after you complete a barrier, it is critical that you keep it on the log and do not delete it.

This barrier log will be useful because you can track what did and did not work to overcome a barrier. You will likely come across barriers similar to previous ones, so knowing what worked (and what didn’t) in advance makes the barrier easy to overcome. As time passes, and you begin to see a long list of old barriers with green boxes, signifying success, your confidence in overcoming barriers will increase. It may be grueling to add more attempts because you keep failing but understand that only true failure is failure to try.

Feel free to include barriers outside the leadership development process, such as academic, social, and even health barriers. Save this document in a cloud storage service for both safety and convenience. Update it regularly. Also, if one of your mentors from the Build Your Team section is an “equal” or someone in the same situation as you, have that person make a barrier log and share logs with each other online or during meetings.

In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to strengthen our understanding of how we’ll take action.

Photo Credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua

Plan Your Career Development Journey Part 2 – Eric’s Story

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IGoals’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In the last post, we discussed identifying a skill/behavior that you would like to improve to help you reach your next career milestone, with the understanding that our long-term life goals comprise a series of short-term goals. In this post, you’ll identify the skill/behavior you’d like to improve upon and then create a plan outlining how the current state of that skill, future goal, daily routine/actions, deadline for completion, and a way to measure progress.

Your goal should be S.M.A.R.T.

We recommend that your goal be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (S.M.A.R.T.).

  • Specific: clearly defined. When goals are specific or clearly defined, it is easier to know when they are reached. Specify the goal by clarifying what is expected, why it is important, who is involved, and where it will happen.
    • For example, I want to increase my focus/productivity by 200%, independently, each month during internship/work hours because I can get twice as much work done and be better prepared for when I enter the workforce upon graduation.
  • Measurable: establish criteria for measuring the progress of each goal. This shows what and how much change we are expecting.
    • Focus/productivity will be measured in how many tasks I accomplish during work hours each day. Let’s say I complete two big tasks each day; I will eventually focus on limiting distractions/overthinking to complete four big tasks each day.
  • Attainable: identify the most important goals to you, and you begin to find ways to make them come true. You develop attitudes, abilities, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin to see opportunities you otherwise may not see as you realize the importance of such goals. “Attainable”, in this case, refers to how reasonable the goal is overall, regardless of your ability to do it.
    • Doubling daily productivity or reducing time to accomplish each task in one month is attainable for many people in my situation. Many interns can do that as they develop knowledge and skills.
  • Realistic: to be realistic, the goal has to be something you are personally willing and able to work toward. You are the one who determines when it is completed, so make sure it is something you can realistically accomplish. “Realistic”, in this case, differs from “attainable” because it specifies whether you can accomplish the goal. There may be something unique about you, making you better/worse at accomplishing a task than most people in your situation. If it is too easy, increase the difficulty or tighten the deadline. If too hard, decrease difficulty or push back the deadline, but only after you’ve tried it for a bit – don’t give up too easily!
    • Doubling daily productivity is realistic because I am increasing my knowledge and skill of my work at a higher rate than I could have ever anticipated.
  • Timely: goals that lack time frames also lack urgency. When setting the time frame, set an actual number or defined time, like “one month” or “one school year”. Don’t just say “soon”, “ASAP”, or “eventually”. Would you rather your professors tell you, “You have an exam soon!” or “You have your exam one week from today”?
    • “One month from today” is a defined time.

Ensure your goal is written down in a way that meets the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. Next, we will use the Development Planning Worksheet. This chart should be simple enough to make in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet. Follow my lead:

Eric's development planning worksheet

I highly recommend using a digital calendar with cloud capabilities and managing time well. This link will help you manage your time during the academic semester: https://howtostudyincollege.com/time/. While the link specifies making time for studying, it is still a great time management strategy and will help you find time for your goals.

Now you have a great sense of your short-term goals and your strategy to reach them, plus some potentially life-altering time management advice! In the next post, you will be provided reflection questions regarding the entire journey planning process. After that, you should have a very firm understanding of how to plan your journey as an innovative leader and outstanding college student.

Plan Your Career Development Journey – Eric’s Story

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Journey withinI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. I just completed the reflection questions associated with identifying my strengths and opportunities. It is now time to move to plan our journeys understanding that our overall life goals will be achieved by accomplishing many short-term goals. This is the third step in becoming an innovative leader while you’re young.

Short-term goals may consist of milestones that move you closer to your overall achievement, such as internships, degrees, jobs, or promotions. Other short-term goals, which are equally important, consist of personal development, such as learning new skills/behaviors, building on current strengths and minimizing weaknesses. The goals of personal development are very important because as you make progress through your academic and professional careers, you’ll have greater responsibilities and bigger challenges. That being said, to plan the short-term steps that will lead you to the long-term life goal, we must identify which career milestones we will need to get us there, and then choose which personal development goals to accomplish to help us reach the nearest milestone. For each milestone in your life, you may need to create new personal development goals. To optimize personal development (for short-term and long-term), one must include in his plan all four parts of the human experience: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual/purpose.

Short-term Goals: Career Milestones

As you’ve done for previous posts, research and list the steps it takes to get that “dream job”, or long-term goal. Then identify the nearest goal. For example:

    • My Goal: Marketing/management consultant and founder of a nonprofit
  • My Milestones:
    • Do marketing/consulting internships
    • Graduate with relevant degree and great GPA
    • Get marketing/consulting job upon graduation
    • Go to graduate school for MBA
    • Get a great job in marketing/consulting
    • After sufficient experience, create a highly successful nonprofit organization
  • Nearest goal: Job upon graduation

Short-term Goals: Personal Development

Look at your nearest goal, and think of everything you can possibly learn, strengthen and/or fix to achieve the nearest milestone. This will help you find which personal development goals to set to reach the next milestone. The human experience consists four parts: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual/purpose abilities. Enhancing all four of these types of abilities, you will optimize overall personal growth. We separate these four parts into two categories:

  • External abilities (physical and mental):
    • Body: exercise, weight lifting, yoga, relaxation, etc.
    • Mind: reading, studying, attending school/class, etc.
    • Professional skills, learned at school, work, internships, etc.; relevant to your career.
  • Internal abilities (emotional and spiritual/purpose) –
    • Emotional Quotient (EQ): meditation, maintaining strong friendships/relationships, etc.
    • Spirit/purpose: define vision, define values, religious practice, etc.
    • Includes intention, world view, purpose, vision, values, cultural norms, emotional stability, resilience, a sense of being grounded, overall personal well-being, intuition, balanced perspective, and attitude, and serves as the foundation for you to accomplish your deepest aspirations.

According to Ken Wilber, a leading philosopher, one can optimize improvement in one of these areas by “cross training”, or working on an external skill at the same time as an internal skill. For example, people who lift weights (external) and meditate (internal) tend to have more success in both areas than those who only do one or the other.

Planning Personal Development Goals

Choose amongst three developmental focuses: learning a brand new skill/behavior, building on a current strength, or minimizing a weakness. After you pick something to develop in one of those three focus areas, identify whether it is an internal or external ability, and then pick an activity that is the opposite ability for the sake of optimization by cross training. Click here to download the worksheet below (which doesn’t have my answers on it) and fill it out like I did. Feel free to view my answers to maybe better understand the question, or just to get more ideas.

behavior change priorities

Over the next few days, choose a skill and think about how great your life can be if you gain/improve it. In the next post, we’ll make a day-to-day plan for developing that skill to help you reach your next career milestone.

To become a more innovative leader, you can begin by taking our free leadership assessments and then enrolling in our online leadership development program.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future, via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible,  iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.  Stay up-to-date on new shows airing by following the Innovative Leadership Institute LinkedIn.

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