When we’re feeling stuck, it is hard to dust ourselves off and get our lives back on track. When things get really bad, we might feel unmotivated or depressed, as if what we’re doing really doesn’t matter.

If you’re feeling as stuck as I have been, here’s the 5 steps I use to get my life back in order whenever I see myself falling and need to reset.

We will call this break a Self-Care Day. We will use one full 24 hours to rest, reflect, and recalibrate. During this self-care day, we will spend time revising our plan and how to put it into action. This newly revised plan will be our blueprint for the remaining months of the year and propel us as we move forward in the years to come. 

Reiterating the goals we want to accomplish will give us the “fresh new start” that we so desperately need. By the end of Self Care Day, we should feel relief and a sense of accomplishment. We are back in control of our lives.

We get so caught up in our own little world and stressed out about all the things that are going wrong that we often forget how fortunate we actually are. There is no way we can’t find at least one thing we are grateful for. Even though we find ourselves in this rut we still need to show gratitude for the opportunity to wake up each day with a roof over our heads, a job to go to, clothes on our backs, food to eat, money in our pockets, and the power to make decisions that can change our lives for the better. 

By showing gratitude it allows us to free our mind from the depressive and lethargic mindstate that we are in currently and help us to realize things can always be worse. There is always someone out there in worse shape than we are who would love to play with the cards we’ve been dealt.

The actions we took in the past were based on the decisions we made and due to the habits we formed. That is why we find ourselves in this abyss at this particular point in our lives. We didn’t put our dreams first, we put them last. Let me say that again, we did not make our dreams our main priority. We made everyone and everything else the priority and our dreams a distant option. An afterthought. Now is the time we need to restructure our lives. 

If our dreams are truly our dreams we shouldn’t allow anything to deter us from putting our time, money, and resources towards accomplishing what we’ve set out to do. We need to take accountability for our actions and make a conscious effort to be disciplined and eliminate aspects of our lives that are not in sync with our goals. This means saying NO to things we previously said yes to. This may mean spending less time with family, friends, or coworkers and more time investing in ourselves. At the end of the day, they are not responsible for our dream, we are.

We are so comfortable with surrounding ourselves with people from our past that we don’t allow any room for those who will bring us closer to our future selves. For this we need to step outside of the box we have put ourselves in and reach out to mentors or sign up for groups where people who have similar goals and dreams congregate, share ideas, and network. This comfort zone we spend the majority of our lives living in is harming us and destroying our dreams at the same time. We are hanging on to partners, family members, friendships, neighborhoods, and jobs that we have outgrown many years ago and continue to shrink ourselves in order to still fit in and remain liked by those who don’t wish to see us grow.

This is because our growth threatens their comfort zone. The fear of being disloyal and/or the fear of change is one of the main things holding us back. In order for us to become the person we’ve always dreamed of becoming, we have to let go of everything and everyone who doesn’t match our future. Distancing ourselves from our past grants us the opportunity to forge our own identity and transform into the vision of ourselves we have in our heads. However, in order to do that we have to set ourselves free from the cage we’ve been put in.

If we don’t put in the necessary work in all areas of our lives we will not succeed. We will either remain in the same place we are at or our lives will fall into a downward spiral. The only way for us to move forward and dig ourselves out of the hole we are in is to apply all four steps mentioned above which, but it will require a lot of hard work. There are no shortcuts. In fact, attempting to find a shortcut and easy way out to escape the work is often what damages our lives the most. If our goal is to live an amazing life and escape the mundane and repetitive cycle called the rat race we are going to have to put our heads down and grind until we get to a place that resembles where we want to be.

However, once we reach this “destination” it will require even more work to maintain it and push towards even higher heights. Living a great life requires work. Mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual work. There is absolutely no way around it. We have to be willing to pick ourselves apart piece by piece and dig deep and see what areas need the most focus and begin chipping away. In essence, we are drilling away the old us in order to rebuild a new us. This isn’t the kind of work that can be completed in one day, it will require us to invest many hours into ourselves over a lifetime. But, once we commit ourselves just watch how quickly our lives change.

Studies say the average human makes up to 35,000 choices a day. This breaks down to roughly 2000 choices per hour. We are the sum of the decisions we make. I am stuck because of the decisions I made. You are stuck because of the decisions you made. And right at this very moment, we are left with two choices. We can continue to remain stuck and stay on the path of self-destruction, self-denial, and self-pity while sabotaging our lives and our dreams in the process or we can put in the work and discipline to gain the knowledge we need to pursue our goals and turn our dream life into reality and inspire others to the same.

The choice is ours.