Read This if Your Life is On Pause

Three mistakes that are keeping you stuck.

The email was a kick in my gut.

“Thank you for your interest in this position, but at this time we will be moving forward with another candidate.”

I can’t bring myself to finish reading it because it’s another in a long line of rejections while I try to get my life unstuck. For a few years, it felt like my life was on pause.

I’d lost a job I loved, and I’d taken another one I didn’t love to support my family. I had high hopes of going back into my industry so I put everything else was on pause. But something happened.

While I was on pause, life kept going on around me. Meanwhile, every rejection I received made it feel like my life was going to stay on pause forever.

Feeling stuck is one of the worst feelings ever. Your frustration builds while you try to find a way out. You search everywhere for a way to get things going again. But if you’re honest, you don’t even know what’s next or which way to even start moving.

There are many reasons your life may be on pause.

But in my experience, feeling stuck means you’re making at least one of a few mistakes. The good news is, once you understand your mistakes you can fix them and dramatically shorten the length of time you feel like you’re on pause. Sound helpful?

Let’s look at a few of the most common mistakes that can keep stuck and what you can do about them.

Something wants to die but you won’t let it

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said:

“Life is continually shedding something that wants to die.”

That is a true statement about society as a whole, but it’s especially true of your life. Life is change. And if you’re going to change, some parts of you will have to die.

Death is the engine of life.

If you feel like your life is on pause, it means something in your life is dying and you’re not yet willing to let it die.

It could be a relationship or a dream that has run its course. It may be some of your old beliefs or your story about yourself need to die. Perhaps the path you were on is at an end and on some level, you know it but you haven’t had the guts to let go yet.

Sometimes, when you’re at a crossroads in life, many pieces of you are dying at the same time. I won’t lie to you, that’s both painful and scary. But old pieces of you must die so something new can live.

When your life is on pause, your job is to figure out what needs to die and let it.

You haven’t paid the price

Everything in life comes with a price. You already know that, don’t you? The price you’re willing to pay will often determine your limitations.

As Ernest Hemingway said:

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”

Time is the only real currency you have because once you spend it you can’t get it back. How much time are you willing to spend to get your life off pause? Let me explain what I mean.

Often, when things in your life die, your next step requires learning new skills. The price of learning something new is time. You can get stuck on an eternally spinning hamster wheel if you’re impatient and unwilling to the price.

I don’t mean you should spend your time waiting around for someone to hand you an opportunity. Use the time you’re on pause to learn and grow so you can seize the opportunities your growth produces.

Maybe the reason you feel like your life is on pause right now is that you haven’t paid enough time to get things moving again.

You’re talking to yourself the wrong way

We all talk to ourselves. You tell yourself a story about yourself, your life, people around you, and everything that happens to you.

If your life is on pause, you need to start telling yourself a different story.

What does that mean?

If you tell yourself the story “Things will never get better, I’m going to be stuck here forever,” you’ll find endless reasons your story is true. That is a disempowering story that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what happens if you change your story?

Changing your story to “It might take me a while, but I’m going to find my way through this no matter what,” will produce a totally different outcome.

This isn’t about positive thinking. It’s about telling yourself a more empowering story. And since we all act out the stories we tell ourselves, telling yourself a different story about yourself will help you get unstuck.

Final thoughts

Feeling like your life is on pause is a frustrating experience. But it’s an experience every living person shares.

When most people start feeling stuck, they refuse to make changes, won’t pay the price, and tell themselves a disempowering story. Then they go into a spiral of anxiety and depression and their situation gets worse.

I know because I’ve been there too.

Like you, I’ve had to learn the hard way that these three mistakes will keep you stuck.

It’s hard to un-pause yourself because, truthfully, part of you wants to go back to the way things were. But deep down you know it’s impossible.

There’s a whole world out there and you only get one life to live. You owe it to yourself to make it count.