Have you ever had a time when, for lack of a better description, you just feel stuck?  Unsure of how to go forward, but aware you can’t stand still?  Feeling stuck is actually a clear indication that something in our lives needs to change.

Whenever I find myself feeling stuck it’s because I have a decision I need to make and I can’t seem to get myself to make it.  I talk myself in circles in my head without ever coming to a conclusion on what choice to go with until I’m so tired of thinking about it that I tell myself I’ll table it for a while longer and come back to it when I have more clarity…which only seems to sink me further into that feeling of being stuck…

What I’ve found is that if I want to get unstuck I’ve got to be willing to make a decision – I’ve got to make a choice and begin moving forward with it.  I can’t keep waiting for every doubt I have to dissipate, or for every options positives and negatives to become perfectly clear, because chances are they’ll never be completely clear – and frankly I don’t think they are meant to be totally clear because if they were we’d lose the opportunity to exercise our agency and grow in our experience.

I find that right versus wrong decisions are the easiest to make, especially when you know what your values are. It’s those good, better, best decisions that I find to be tough, or choosing just one out of multiple good options which tends to be toughest of all – that’s where I most often find myself feeling stuck.  I sit and weigh all the good options and fret over how choosing one eliminates the opportunity of the other and so on and so on…

Committing to something when we haven’t figured out beyond a doubt which option we find best is scary. But perhaps we are overlooking the fact that staying stuck is probably the scariest option of all – there is no happiness in staying stuck, there can be no growth or progression while we are stuck, and while we stay stuck we are missing every opportunity. The thought of that should be much scarier than making a choice is.

We will remain stuck until we make decisions and start moving forward with them. The best we can do is to use our values and the knowledge we’ve gained to make the best decisions we know how. After that we can trust that God’s got guardrails in place to help protect us from falling off the road He wants us on.

~Amy Rees Anderson (author of the newly released book “What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel in Business & Life”