#81. How to get unstuck

Or like, here's some stuff that worked for me

I’ve had a surprising amount of people ask me recently about my experience in career coaching.

I feel like the 30s are an especially interesting decade for career-related anxieties and questions to start popping up. Am I making enough money? Am I still in the right career? Do I want to go to grad school? Is my job the thing that’s stressing me out, or do I just have a lot going on right now? What about that other thing I’ve always loved, but haven’t ever really tried? How do I find more balance with my schedule? Why do I feel like I’m running in place?

Sometimes it feels like everyone I know is playing a game of whack-a-mole, real life edition. Which issue are we punching in the face today? Career? Relationships? Kids? Money? Dating? The minute you smack one thing down, another pops up in its place.

The good news is that I think all of this is very… normal. We’re all out here doing our best to do it all, manage it all, have it all. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we just want to be left alone to read faerie smut and forget about our problems!!

Someone DM’d me the other day to ask if I was ever going to write about my experience in career coaching. It’s funny – it didn’t occur to me that other people might find the details interesting, but recently, I’ve had several people lightly probe me about it.

I think it’s probably a symptom of the dreaded Millennial ennui. We’re feeling itchy, dissatisfied, and… tired. We spent a lot of time chasing things in our twenties (and maybe into our thirties), and then when we got them, we either started to wonder what’s next, or questioned if we even want those same things anymore.

I don’t think anyone has a magical cure to feeling stuck, weary, or dissatisfied. I certainly don’t, but career coaching pulled me off the ledge of existential dread and put me back in control. I feel good, friends. Really fucking good. I’m having fun at work again! I feel like I have an enormous amount of clarity about my career for at least the rest of my 30s, which is really saying something! Having a reasonably solid idea of what my work life will look like for the next five years or so makes me feel like this:

Here’s what people have asked me recently about coaching:

– How did you find a career coach?

I found my coach, Jenna, on a website called The Muse. If you have a friend who’s been through coaching, ask them for a referral!

– Was coaching worth the $?

Oh definitely. In 2023, I tried weekly therapy for roughly six months to specifically talk about big-picture career stuff. I loved having a space to talk through my feelings and process them, but I found that therapy wasn’t action-oriented enough for me.

Coaching was different, though. My program was 12 sessions, and we started out meeting weekly, then eventually finished monthly, spreading the sessions out over six months. Coaching involves a lot of homework, which I loved. Homework works for me. I liked doing the exercises with someone who debriefed them with me and held me accountable. Because of the set duration, coaching also ended up being cheaper.

– What was the most helpful?

There were a ton of exercises that helped me get unstuck, but two in particular stand out to me. These two exercises made coaching worth every fucking penny because they unlocked things for me in two sessions that six months of therapy didn’t:

“Your Captain” guided meditation –

Jenna led me through a guided meditation where I laid on the floor with my eyes closed listening to her voice for roughly 20 minutes. Initially this felt a little woo-woo for my taste, but I was totally down to try it, and of course this would be the one that worked, lol. I can’t tell you if it will work for you, but the idea here is that you’re meeting the “inner captain” of your life who is a confident, supportive bitch who already has all the answers, and she/he/they are giving them to you, guiding you in the right direction.

At the very end of the meditation, your captain hands you a gift. The image of my gift and what it meant was so unbelievably clear, it was literally the exact moment I had a big breakthrough. I kind of get chills just thinking about it again! Of course, this was just my brain giving me the information, even though it felt like it came from an external source. Totally wild. If you’re open-minded and down to get a little weird, this might work for you as well as it did for me.

If you want to try this on your own, here’s a video. Or, grab a friend and have them read you this script.

Six hats thought exercise –

The other breakthrough I made came from another weird visualization exercise (go figure). You pick a topic (in my case it was actually Substack), and then you mentally put on each hat, and start talking.

– White hat: The voice of reason
– Yellow hat: The optimist
– Black hat: The devil’s advocate
– Green hat: The creative thinker
– Red hat: The instincts
– Blue hat: The conductor

My breakthrough came when I put on the red hat, which is in charge of expressing what your heart/gut are trying to tell you. I think I was letting the white and black hats drive for a while, but like with most things, a balance is probably better. The conductor (the blue hat, which goes last) is in charge of translating all the thoughts that came out while wearing the other hats, and making a final decision on how to move forward. I was shocked at how confident I felt wearing the blue hat after talking through the topic for maybe… thirty minutes? Wildly effective, IMO.

I know all of this sounds a little insane lol, but this is what coaching is like! If these exercises make you more curious than cringe, coaching might be something to look into if you’re considering it.

Good luck! :)

“A late blooming into misery: Why Millennials are unhappy” by Bride Jabour for The Sydney Morning Herald

This essay is a few years old, but I think it still hits:

“While Gen Xers and Baby Boomers before us had these realisations by 25, for Millennials the prolonged adolescence that was our 20s had delayed this type of self-reflection. And the hangover seemed more severe.

People who have spent years striving and hustling are suddenly questioning it all. If they are not happy being defined by their job, then what do they want to be defined by? Friends? Family? Apartment? Character? A job seems the easiest when you really start grappling with it. You don’t have to like the person you are if you are defined by your job. Of course, your job is also never going to love you back.”

“Mommy, Can We Go to Paris?” by Emily Gould for The Cut

I don’t have kids (obviously) but I gobbled up this piece about raising kids in New York among massive displays of wealth (like an elaborate Barbie-themed birthday party for a six year-old, complete with a live music performance) by people with money to burn:

“My husband and I will never, barring some kind of lottery-win-like windfall, have the money to own a second home or even a first one in New York. We are not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but we are stuck where we are — paying expensive rent that is still less than the cost of a mortgage on the inevitably smaller apartment we don’t have the down payment for anyway. (Apartments go for $914 per square foot in the neighborhood where our kids go to school.) Though I knew all this to a degree when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I also thought less about class disparities then, probably because they weren’t always in my face. Back then, it seemed like everyone I knew in New York rented the same medium-shitty apartments, decorated them with street finds, and brought over a bottle of wine from the store’s $8 table. Looking back, I wonder if some of our friends had generational wealth they hadn’t yet had cause to flaunt or even if they were pretending to be poor, experimenting with a bohemian lifestyle in Greenpoint before settling down properly in Park Slope.”

“A 481-Year Age Difference? For Some Readers, That’s Hot.” by Valeriya Safronova for The New York Times

I hate to admit it, but I do kind of love a shadow daddy…

“But what’s the appeal of a 500-year-old boyfriend, exactly?

Maybe real life. “It’s about the idea of someone who’d be mature and experienced enough to share the mental load with you,” said Elisabeth Wheatley, 29, a romance author and romantasy fan who lives in Austin. She said that many women who read these books are in their late 20s to their 40s, with jobs and families to juggle, and sometimes lack support from a male partner to such an extent that it feels as if they’re “raising children and their partners as well.”

“I suspect the appeal of someone who’s 100 or 600 years older is someone who wouldn’t have to be taught how to apply for health insurance or fill out a car registration,” Ms. Wheatley said.”

Now feels as good a time as any to confess that yes, I did just re-read Fifty Shades of Grey, which I spent $8 actual American dollars purchasing in paperback. And then I watched all three movies. The book is so bad it’s actually good, and I absolutely recommend it, as well as the second movie, Fifty Shades Darker (which I genuinely forgot is the origin of Taylor Swift’s collab with Zayn, “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.”) Apparently the book trilogy has sold over 165 million copies since it was published over 10 years ago, which is just completely insane. I can’t lie, I will probably read the second and third books at some point and I hope you didn’t just lose all respect for my taste.

P.S. The movies are free on Netflix right now, just saying. (But don’t watch the third one – it’s bad-bad rather than bad-good.)

A new study published this week suggests that the Dobbs decision in 2022 may not have just affected abortion access, but possibly the decision to use sterilization as a form of contraception, especially in states where abortion was effectively banned. Read more in The New York Times.

via @theeverygirl

The most-followed woman in the world just announced that she won’t ever give birth to a child, but she still plans to become a mother:

“It’s not necessarily the way I envisioned it,” she says of becoming a parent one day. “I thought it would happen the way it happens for everyone. [But] I’m in a much better place with that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me. It made me really thankful for the other outlets for people who are dying to be moms. I’m one of those people. I’m excited for what that journey will look like, but it’ll look a little different. At the end of the day, I don’t care. It’ll be mine. It’ll be my baby.” – Selena Gomez for Vanity Fair

That’s it! If there’s anything else you want to know about coaching, ask me in the comments!