Stuck Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Seven Steps to Getting Un-Stuck

STUCK

IS NOT A FOUR-

LETTER WORD

SEVEN STEPS TO

GETTING UN-STUCK

DEBORAH JOHNSON

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

STUCK IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD

SEVEN STEPS TO GETTING UN-STUCK

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Johnson.

All rights reserved. !No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9660-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9662-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9661-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911585

iUniverse rev. date: 7/3/2013

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR TRAP

1. Stuck In Fear And Rejection?

2. Stuck In A Rut?

3. Stuck In Circumstances And Problems?

4. Stuck In Criticism?

5. Stuck In Pain And Discouragement?

STEP 2: REASSESS YOUR ASSETS

6. Focus On Abilities And Opportunities

7. Focus On Truth And Freedom

8. Focus On Friends

9. Focus On Endurance

10. Focus On Taking A Chance

STEP 3: REINVENT YOURSELF

11. Define Your Core Strength

12. Define Your Wind-Speed Factor

13. Define Your Ideal Workload

14. Define Your Footprint

15. Define Your Passion And Dream

STEP 4: ELIMINATE DISTRACTIONS

17. Identify The Toxins

18. Identify Your Habits

19. Identify Your Time-Wasters

STEP 5: PLAY LIKE YOU’RE IN THE MAJOR LEAGUES

20. Major League Dugout

21. Major League Climb

22. Major League Game And Goals

23. Major League Swingers And Hitters

24. Major League Expectations And Winners

STEP 6: DO THE BUSINESS

25. Principle Of Compound Interest

26. Principle One: Find Your Uniqueness

27. Principle Two: Watch The Cash

28. Principle Three: Work Just A Little Harder Than Everyone Else

STEP 7: ASK WHAT YOU CAN GIVE

30. Giving Your Resources

31. Giving A Dream

32. Giving Meaning

33. Giving Hope

Bibliography

Suggested Reading

Permissions

Illustrations

Endnotes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend my thanks to those who have generously allowed me to interview them: Brian Chung, Vorin Dornan, Frank Fabela, Marcia Grondahl, Gordon Goodwin, Jim Heitbrink, Dennis Houlihan, Lee Jackman, Daniel Johnson, Greg Johnson, Lis Johnson, Paul McTier, Mark Malbon, Gary Miller, Lonnie Park, Wayland Pickard, Marge Rivingston, Arun Shenoy, Gail Theurer, Ruby Tuesday and Debbie O’Connell for the use of Donny’s story.

Many thanks to Paula Miller; a published author in her own right, who provided invaluable insight and guidance through the first drafts and also through the final editing. I feel like I have completed a post-graduate course in writing and she has been an exceptional instructor; Sandra Grajeda, with her unique clarity of concepts and lawyer’s attention to detail, asking questions that helped clarify important points. Finally, my dear husband Greg, my confidante and love, has listened and talked through many of these ideas with honesty and candor, pushing me to be my very best. His ability to find the nuggets of truth has been not only a valuable source to me, but in my journey to help others. The many sports references in Stuck come from experiences we shared during Greg’s years as a professional athlete.

Lastly, I’d like to thank my three sons Mike, Dan, and David for the joys and many endearing illustrations they have provided me and for my talented daughter-in-law Jessica, who took my cover photo. Watching them create and live their own history brings me joy. I am the luckiest woman alive with the gift of my family.

INTRODUCTION

You can feel it coming—the scratchy throat, the sneezing, and the desperate grab for tissues. As symptoms worsen, your head fogs and throbs, then exhaustion arrives. After consuming a concoction of drops, drinks, and doses to get through your day, you try to act as if nothing is wrong, but your coworkers keep their distance. At bedtime, you toss and turn, feeling chilled and feverish, with a mouth full of cotton. Rest is hard. So you wrap up in your blanket and enter survival mode. It doesn’t feel like this cold will ever end. You numbly face your work days, feeling discouraged and even hopeless as the cough deepens and the headache pounds on. This is what it feels like to be stuck. Anxiety, insomnia, and hopelessness make you want to retreat, wrapping yourself in a burrito blanket. There is a feeling that despair and discouragement have come to stay and the relentless fever will never end. Even your friends are keeping their distance, not knowing what to say or do for you any more.

However, just as medication, vitamins and liquids help heal a cold, so can positive actions mend life conditions when you’re stuck. Gradually the fog lifts, the pounding headache wanes; you regain energy, and your friends move closer, no longer afraid to speak with you. The numbness subsides, the shivering stops; you are no longer trapped in survival mode.

No amount of positive thinking, visualizing or clairvoyance can alter a situation, but you can change in the midst of it. STUCK Is Not a Four-Letter Word will help you break through the frustration of being caught in a never-ending maze. The seven positive steps discussed in this volume provide readers with new paths for growth. Included are inspirational stories of professionals who have survived periods of being stuck. Their experiences and life lessons will give you the tools to move your life forward again.

Life Situations

Some of you reading these chapters may be facing bankruptcy, a broken marriage, a dead-end career, unemployment or other personal or professional life changes. Others may be experiencing health crises that will alter your quality of life in an indeterminate way. Some are even stuck in a body they don’t like!

Maybe you’ve just made the house payment and feel like you won the lottery. You may feel that none of the breaks out there are going your way; the circumstances of life are against you; the other person is getting all the big accounts; you are not hired for the gig first; your spouse cheated on you while your quirky friend’s marriage remains intact; the bills keep coming and you can’t seem to get ahead; you are faced with life-changing choices about the care of a family member. Feeling stuck can be a time of feeling alone, isolated, abandoned and ultimately confused about the decision of the next life-move.

Getting Un-Stuck

In getting un-stuck, hope can fuel the energy to exert courage. You can walk and breathe again. When courage is exercised, it inspires the willingness to risk. You might even start jogging at this point. Taking a risk brings the prospect of change or advancement and now you are running. These actions are vital to getting further un-stuck.

Hope fuels courage for you to walk.

Courage inspires risk for you to jog.

Risk brings change so you can run.

I hope to encourage you to face your life with the courage that hope brings, and the bravery to take the necessary steps to move forward. The principles in this book are universal for people in different walks of life. I have gathered inspirational stories from my interviews with a variety of people, from company presidents to entrepreneurs. Through they have walked different life paths than you or I, their experiences reveal helpful principles that are far-reaching in their scope and application. No matter if you’re the president of your own company, between jobs, or a recent college graduate deciding what to do in life, if you are open to learning and growing, you can learn from others. They say experience is one of the best teachers, yet if we can learn from other’s mistakes as we gain wise advice and counsel from others, all the better.

Life Stories

In putting this book together, I have been inspired, encouraged, awed, and humbled during my interviews with ordinary, yet extraordinary people. Many of these stories would never have been told if I hadn’t taken time to share them, which made the interview and writing process all the more special to me.

There is so much to say on the topic of feeling stuck. I hope the following discussion will inspire, motivate, and maybe even stir creative thinking outside the box. In addition, each chapter includes positive steps of application and points to ponder in every section.

Throwing Water

I don’t want to merely throw water on the subject of feeling stuck. My sons will never let me forget one certain incident when they were growing up. I was raised with two sisters. Even though we had many girl fights, I was not used to the intensity that physical conflict with boys could bring. One time, I honestly thought our sons were going to kill each other. They were lunging and grabbing with great force and passion while I stood on the sidelines, not sure what to do. So I grabbed the first thing I could put my hands on, which was a full pitcher of water. I threw it on them, in our carpeted living room. They immediately stopped, looking up at me in disbelief, soaking wet. It worked—they stopped fighting because we all started laughing so hard at such a crazy solution!

Pouring water on my sons did not permanently stop the fights, but did help to ease their momentary conflict. We still laugh about it. I knew I needed to take action, and used the resource immediately available, which was water. Humor is a great resource and can ease the intensity of ongoing conflict, but there are more permanent solutions than water to move through feeling stuck.

When you’re in the throes of a crisis, you may not be thinking clearly. A douse of water, a good laugh, or an insightful confrontation might be just the action to disrupt your downward spiral and get you thinking in new ways about how to cope with life’s crises.

You Are Not Alone

I hope you will re-read many of the sections of Stuck Is Not a Four-Letter Word when you are feeling discouraged or even a little stuck, because you are not alone. There are many people just like you, maybe in totally different circumstances, but wondering if there really is a God, and if there is a God, is He a being who cares? You’re wondering if there is writing in the clouds or if there is a positive fork in the road, or if there are concrete answers when faced with roadblocks in life, love or in work. You will create your own answers, but I think you will gain insight and ideas to apply and use for your own journey of becoming un-stuck.

Recently, I have experienced tendonitis in my left elbow. I decided to ice my elbow for twenty minutes every morning. The pain in keeping an ice pack on my elbow has made my eyes cross until my arm goes numb. It works because warm blood rushes to the injury when the ice is removed, heating up the area with new blood cells, promoting healing. Baseball pitchers, as my husband was, dip and hold their arm in a bucket of ice water after pitching. It’s painful. But that is why they are able to keep using their muscles in a game with intense pressure and motion.

It may be a painful process to go through and apply some of the steps in this book, but they will only transform your life and outlook if you take time to evaluate how they apply to you personally. You can laugh, cry, and understand the principles, but actually applying the ice pack to bring the warm blood of change is necessary for real healing, no matter if you’re sinking in quicksand, trying to run in your dream, or just have gum on your shoe.

True transformation occurs with evaluation and application.

STEP ONE

DEFINE YOUR TRAP

I am fairly sure I read the eye chart backwards. While taking my first driver’s test at sixteen, I was told to get my eyes checked. The optometrist said one of my eyes was nearsighted and one, farsighted. However, there was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to distinguish letters on the familiar looking eye chart at the DMV. After all, I had it memorized. When you are feeling stuck, your vision may be off with a myopic view, not seeing the big picture and not realizing you may need additional help to see a clearer image.

A myopic view is not seeing the big picture and the need for help.

Disney Resorts focuses on the details, from fresh flowers without weeds or dead petals and walkways cleared of trash to uplifting music piped in at just the right volume. However, within all the details, Disney has not lost sight of the big picture. Their main slogan is Where Dreams Come True. They have created theme parks, movies and other forms of entertainment to help people imagine. Soon after the completion of Disney World someone said, "Isn’t it too bad Walt Disney didn’t live to see this?" Mike Vance, creative director of Disney Studios replied, He did see it. That’s why it’s here.¹

When feeling stuck, it’s hard to keep your clear focus on the most important details of life, business, or relationships. Fear, discouragement, depression and even despair cloud your view. It’s the emotion most experience when hearing the words, It’s cancer; or when you are closing the books on a month’s business knowing funds are short to pay next month’s bills; or when the present contract you’re working on is your last. It’s a feeling of being overwhelmed and wrapped in a burrito blanket that cripples you and keeps you from moving forward. It makes you afraid to risk. Fear, more than anything else, can paralyze you and kill your dreams.

CHAPTER 1

STUCK IN FEAR AND REJECTION?

Fear complicates the stress that life’s circumstances can bring. Whether founded on a fact or something imagined, fear creates an emotional and mental paralysis, amplifying the stuck situation. There are no simple answers to these challenges, but there are concrete, positive steps you can take to make progress. The first step is to learn not to fear the very pressures that are maturing you as a person. Author Dr. James Bilkey said, You will never be the person you can be if pressure, tension, and discipline are taken out of your life.² You may not recognize that you are dealing with fear. It can creep in to affect the way you feel, move and act.

Don’t fear the things that are making you grow.

Survival

My parents credit the survival of our family to me crying when I was a baby. When I was an infant, we were all in a small house in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was freezing outside, and the small home had an un-vented gas heater. At that time, there weren’t safety features on those heaters. My father turned up the gas, and we all went to sleep for the night, warm and toasty.

Sometime later, I started to cry. My parents woke up feeling quite groggy, hardly able to move. With his head pounding, my father soon realized what was happening. There was too much carbon-monoxide in the little home; it wouldn’t be long until we would all be fast asleep—for good—unless he acted fast. He turned off the heater, opened all the windows and doors and woke everyone up. Obviously, we all survived!

The Silent Killer

Just as carbon-monoxide is a silent killer, fear can also be a silent killer. Like toxic gas, it creeps in silently, unexpected and odorless. You may not recognize the symptoms at first, but you may feel strange, nauseous and unbalanced, moving in slow motion. In fact, you may be frozen, unable to move at all.

However, once you recognize the paralyzing toxin is fear, you can take action. You can change your surroundings, your approach, and your attitude towards people and projects. You can even change your circumstances, especially if you can ascertain the source of your fear, whether it comes from a person, an event, a transaction or other place. Recognizing fear is the hardest part. Fear steals one’s hope and the ability to endure, which are vital to survival.

To move forward takes courage, discipline, and a plan, along with a positive outlook and a willingness to advance. I have experienced the frozen feeling when faced with fear, similar to trying to run in a dream. I can’t move fast enough to escape the monster that’s chasing me; then I realize it’s because I’m lying flat on my back asleep. I need to wake up! Fear can be paralyzing: fear of the unknown, fear of getting hurt, fear of embarrassment, or fear of failure. However, courage is the willingness to advance in the face of fear.

Terror to face the unknown is uncomfortable and can impede the courage it takes to move ahead. However, confronting and conquering that discomfort encourages risk and future success.

Fear is a silent killer, taking away hope and endurance.

Courage is the willingness to advance in the face of fear.

Willing to be Terrified

In the much-chronicled story of Jeff Arch, book writer for the 1993 American romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, he put up his own money along with investors’ money on the biggest gamble of his life. He co-wrote the screenplay with Nora Ephron, who also directed it, and David Ward. It was an all-or-nothing situation where he had to put himself and all his resources on the line to succeed. He had to be willing to be terrified.

Jeff had a certain confidence that the endeavor wasn’t going to kill him. The film was a huge risk that might drain all his resources and leave him in debt, it might make him lose face among his colleagues and peers and it might take him a long time to regain lost ground if it failed, but he knew he wouldn’t die. Jeff said in an interview with Jack Canfield that he thinks one reason for his success was that he