In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.¹

—Dante

You know that feeling when everything is going exactly as you want it? You awake excited and passionate about your day. The sun is shining and the birds are singing. On your way to work you hit all the green lights while your favorite song plays on the radio. At lunch, your boss’s boss asks you to join her at your favorite restaurant because she wants to get to know you better and understand your career goals. Your afternoon is full of productive conversations with exactly whom you want to talk to at exactly the right time. Your day flows like that all the way back home, where you have a package from a loved one waiting at your doorstep and your spouse greeting you with an open bottle of your favorite wine. You sink into your bed staring into the night sky, grateful for the tranquility you feel before you close your eyes. There is nothing more you could ask for. Life is seamless. Life is good.

Now that you have that feeling of being in the flow of life, imagine the exact opposite. Imagine you are moving as fast as you can with all your energy and might in a large pool of quicksand, and you’re going nowhere. You are stuck. Living out the same old pattern over and over with little to no success, feeling incremental to no movement forward, just waiting for the next thing to reveal itself. Lethargic, exhausted, and lonely.

I know the feeling of “stuckness” very well. When I was 24 and a first-time entrepreneur, I started an online recruiting company for the hotel industry with several leaders of a hospitality marketing company. Building our company was thrilling. The first year was one home run after another. We had cash, little debt, and almost immediate industry credibility. In my personal life, I was young and adventurous, yet I had lived, worked, and gone to college all within the same 45-mile radius. I felt like I knew everyone and found the familiarity exhilarating. Then, something changed. The success of our business began to dry up. Instead of consistent big wins, we started suffering one loss after another until we were on life support and began our first round of capital calls. In my personal life, the once stimulating familiarity of my hometown began to feel confining. Everywhere I turned there was a guy I had dumped or who had dumped me. My friends were getting married and moving to the suburbs to start families, and the idea of doing the same felt like a prison sentence with no chance for parole.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Luckily, I had a psychologist for a neighbor. She was 30 years my senior and liked to drink martinis on her back porch at sunset. One Friday afternoon I took over a bottle of McCormick vodka (it was all I could afford at the time) and asked whether she was up for a chat. I shared with her the quizzical shift occurring in my life and asked her to help me sort it out.

“Seems clear to me,” she said, tipping back her martini glass and gulping the cheap vodka. “Your life is kicking you out of it. It’s time to move on.”

My life was kicking me out? Whatever did that mean? There was no amount of vodka that could help me figure that out. I had so much invested in the life choices I had made thus far. What did she mean “move on”? I brushed it off until several weeks later, when her words came back to me while I was reading a seemingly unrelated book.

I was standing in the middle of a Barnes & Noble, having plucked a book by Charlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom from the shelf, and was skimming through it with no real intention. I landed on a page that talked about a woman who had felt stuck in her life for many years, in both a bad marriage and limited career. She sold everything she had and moved to Denver. She described the beauty of the city and the way life unfolded for her when she arrived there. As I was reading through the pages, swaying in place, I accidently bumped into a man with beads in his long hair who wore old sandals.

“I love that book, man,” he said, leaning over me. “I read it on the plane ride back from Colorado.”

“You just got back from Colorado?” I asked, completely unsure why I cared other than the serendipity of the situation.

“Yeah, skied for seven days. It was awesome!” he said.

“I thought about moving there once. I have a good friend from college who went there, but I don’t know anyone else. I don’t even know how to ski,” I said. Why was I telling him this?

“Who cares, you’ll learn. You should move, man,” he said and then added, “Definitely buy the book.”

“Thank you,” I said and moved over to the next aisle to think about the eerie coincidence of reading a story about a woman who was stuck like me and changed her life by moving to Denver while bumping into a man who had not only read the book but also had done so on his way back from Colorado. Then there was the title of the book: The Power of Flow: Practical Ways to Transform Your Life with Meaningful Coincidence.² It was one of those times that make you stop and think.

Then, something even more outrageous happened. My phone rang, and while digging it out of my purse, I saw that the number was out of state and one I didn’t recognize. I answered it anyway. On the other end was my college girlfriend who had just moved to Denver.

“Ang, it’s me! I’m calling you right now from the Rocky Mountains. You have to move here. You would love it!” I dropped the phone.

I got the message. I understood that my life was kicking me out and something much better in Colorado was waiting for me. Six months later, I moved to Denver and took on a leadership role in human resources that allowed me to slow down and learn some of the tricks of the trade before trying to master a start-up company. I learned to ski, made new friends whose phase of life aligned with mine, and met my future husband. I was in the flow again.

When we stay too long in the wrong place, waiting, unwilling to budge, stuck in our old routines, life will make an effort to kick us out. We feel that first kick like a small twinge of pain, but after a while it grows and intensifies. This pain is often an indicator that it’s time to make a shift, a signal that it’s time to create change. The more we resist, the more stuck we become and the more pain we feel.

When Life Kicks You out of the Workplace

Lester was a company man, loyal to a fault. He started with his company as an intern and over a 20-year period led several corporate teams, moved to three new states, and took on growing responsibility with company acquisitions. He never complained. He loved his work and he loved his company. But after years of being the acquiring company, Lester’s company was now being acquired itself and experiencing layoffs. He worried he would be let go during the first round of restructuring, but instead was promoted to take on even more responsibility. He found himself working what felt like long, endless hours. He would often wake in the middle of the night thinking about work and unable to get back to sleep. In spite of his effort and achievements, he was feeling stuck. When he started out as an intern 20 years prior, his goal was to be the company CEO. His vision for this was closer than ever, but something just didn’t seem to fit anymore. He was happy, but he wasn’t passionate. He didn’t feel himself growing anymore. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stay in a leadership role, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to stay in the industry. However, Lester wasn’t one to shake things up. So he continued to plug along until the day his company did an exhaustive second round of layoffs that left Lester unemployed for the first time in his career. It was shocking, yet also a relief. Lester shared with me that he would likely never have made the change himself. He would have continued to work for his company and to ignore his feelings of frustration and growing discontentment. Now, he had options.

Several weeks after Lester was laid off, an old boss from a previous company found him and made him an offer to come to his company. It was an almost identical role at a competing company, working for a team he had already worked with and knew well. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. He knew it was the safe play because he had already done the job for many years. Instead of saying yes and falling back into the same pattern he was in before, Lester honored the courageous leader in him and turned the job down. He stayed in the job market for several more months, testing out other opportunities, and ended up partnering with an industry leader in a start-up entrepreneurial environment. For the first time in his career, he would be working for himself and growing a business.

When you stay stuck, sometimes life doesn’t kick you out but leaves you behind.

Sandra was different from Lester. She wasn’t looking to take on a leadership role or be the CEO; she liked her comfortable and steady role in quality control. Rather than climbing the corporate ladder, she preferred to stay under the radar and was unwilling to take on more responsibility. She was known for being exceptionally gifted in many areas of leadership, as well as her technical skills. Even though she was humble and avoided praise, she was flooded with it by her peers, her leadership, and her customers. Her boss had asked her many times to consider taking on a more formal leadership role, but she resisted. Deep down, Sandra knew she was not content and that she was not growing, but she feared that if she took on more responsibility, she would fail, and she didn’t want to let others down. It was easier if she just stayed in place.

Eventually her boss and others stopped asking her to step up, and she was left to do what she felt comfortable doing. No more, no less. Over the next couple of years, the company grew, but Sandra did not. Many around her were promoted to roles of increasing responsibility. Sandra found herself now working for others who were less competent and capable than she, and slowly she felt herself becoming resentful and restless. In addition, she was underperforming and she knew it. She just wasn’t motivated to bring her best self to work each day. It finally hit her hard one day when she had lunch with a colleague who had just recently been promoted to a senior leadership role. Sandra had started as a peer to this colleague 10 years previously, but now he was accelerating. She realized life had left her behind. Seeing herself in contrast with her colleague helped Sandra realize that her choice to stay on the safe path had created more pain than she would have felt if she had moved out of her comfort zone. Sandra told me it was then she decided to do the work necessary to take on more responsibility. Six years later, I met up with Sandra, who was flourishing in a regional leadership role. Her former peer had been promoted again, leaving a spot for her to be promoted into his role, as CEO for her company’s global supply division.

Stuck in a Paradigm

Pari and I began working together on a coaching basis because she was seeking assistance in defining her next goal. She was having difficulty getting clear about where she should take her career, and she was feeling rather stifled. Similar to me, Pari was very happy with her family, her community, and her work but was feeling the jabbing pains of being stuck. After interviewing Pari’s teammates and leadership, it was clear that she was viewed as a strong leader with incredible potential to do just about anything she wanted. The problem was that Pari wasn’t sure what that was.

To help Pari gain more clarity, I had her create a “life line.” I asked Pari to recall all the important times in her life, from the time she was born to the present. I told her to consider the people and situations that were significant to her and to explain how they shaped her life today.

Pari’s story starts in a small town in India. Her father had been stationed there for work. It was a town too small to provide a good education, so she went to live with her grandparents at the age of five. Although you might presume this was a sad time in Pari’s life, it was quite the opposite. She says she felt nothing but love from her grandparents and the extended family who lived nearby. She grew up very happy and content. It wasn’t until her beautiful cousin joined their family in town that things changed. As she recounts, her cousin wasn’t just beautiful; she was exceptional. Her blue eyes and fair skin were not only rare but also adored. Pari’s brown eyes would never be blue, and her dark skin would never be light. For the first time in her life, she felt stuck. She felt motivated to do something exceptional. So she went on a mission to find whatever exceptional was for her.

Pari joined a dance team and learned to dance. She auditioned for a part in a big show but got the understudy position. She stuck with it, and when a spot on the team opened up, she was selected to perform. That’s when she realized she could dance. Really dance. She was exceptional. She remembers that, during the performance, her cousin left the room with a look of envy on her face. Pari was pleased. Now, it wasn’t just Pari who was jealous of her cousin, but her cousin was jealous of her, too. She felt validated.

Many years later, Pari’s cousin went on to win a beauty pageant hosted by the town. It just so happened that Pari’s college was also hosting a beauty pageant, so she entered. Although she had no real desire to perform in a beauty pageant, she was once again motivated by the desire not to be less than someone else, especially her cousin. The pageant had three parts. The first was an introduction, the second a catwalk, and the third a question presented by the judge. She knew she would not perform well on the catwalk. She just wasn’t the kind to dress provocatively and saunter down a runway. The question, of course, was random and not something she could prepare for in advance. She figured her only real shot at winning was to have a stunning introduction. Pari prepared and practiced, and on the night of the performance, instead of wearing the customary evening gown, she wore a traditional Indian dress to signify her independence and express her cultural heritage. As she had hoped, her introduction and the answer to their question blew the judges away, and she won. Once again she felt validated.

Since that time, Pari has moved to the United States and established a career as a high-performing professional at a Fortune 500 company, and she is married with children. Everything is great, except that it isn’t because she just doesn’t know what that next big thing is for her. That’s partly because Pari’s not just stuck in her life; she’s also stuck in her paradigm.

In the past, Pari’s primary source of motivation came from comparing herself to others and seeing where she came up short, then competing with all her might to prevail. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, describes what Pari was feeling as “creative tension.” When where we want to be is different from where we are, creative tension is the force that brings the two together.³ For Pari, proving herself to others was the source of her creative tension. Now that she was at a place in life where she had all the right things and no one obvious to prove herself to, she didn’t know where to go next. This is not an unusual place for leaders to find themselves. When the world around us changes and we don’t change our paradigm, we often find ourselves stuck and lacking creative tension.

After sorting through this further, Pari concluded that she wanted to know more about what she was good at rather than seeking to compete and prevail. So she began using some of the tools for getting unstuck.

Instead of asking, “What is someone else doing that I’m not, and how can I compete to prove my worth?” she asked herself the question “What is it I can do to contribute in a meaningful way and give my best to others?” Her entire focus became about doing something that would add value for others, not doing something that would make her look better than someone else. She described her new vision for herself as wanting to start her day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, feeling a great sense of satisfaction for having contributed her strengths in a positive way that helped others.

We started down the path of becoming clearer about what it is that she does so well that brings value to others. Pari began to see that the things she does naturally are considerable strengths, and instead of talking about whether she should move on from her role or her company, the conversation began to shift toward discovering how to leverage her strengths more consistently in the work she does today. When we wrapped up our work together, Pari found herself in a place where she was far more confident in herself, and she was exploring opportunities on the job and in her company to expand her contribution. She was able to get unstuck and go deeper.

Pain During the Transition

Although discomfort and pain are early warning signs that we are stuck, we often stay there, enduring the pain because we anticipate that the discomfort or pain of making the transition to something new will be even greater. So we stay in a bad place, telling ourselves that the alternative is worse, when in reality the alternative is what holds more pleasure and more possibility—we just have to make the transition from one to the other. Getting unstuck requires the courage to experience discomfort and pain during the transition. This phenomenon of human behavior hit me during a seemingly normal everyday occurrence with my then three-year-old.

During a winter business trip, on which I had brought my kids, Cate found warmth and comfort in the hotel bathtub. She heard the doorbell ring and the hotel attendant bring in room service. She told me she wanted to eat. I explained to her that dinner was ready but that she needed to hop out of the tub and get dressed. She began to sob uncontrollably and said, “Mom, that will never work. I’m too cold and the water is what is keeping me warm.”

I reiterated that, as soon as she got out of the tub, I would dry her off and put her in warm clothes, and she would be warm and able to eat. She sobbed some more and said, “But Mom, I’m so hungry!” Once again, I pointed out how easy it would be to get out and get her food. She said, “Yeah, but if I get out of the tub, I’ll be really, really cold.”

Cate’s current state was warm and hungry. Cate’s desired state was warm and full. The only way she could get from her current state to her desired state was to temporarily be cold and hungry, a seemingly worse off scenario. And this is how we get and stay stuck. We sit in the comfort of our situation and hunger for something more.

Suspended between our current situation and the situation we desire, we experience the pain of the transition like a trapeze artist swinging from one bar to the next. William Bridges, a best-selling author and expert in the field of change management, refers to this transition as the move from the ending of one thing through the neutral zone to the beginning of something new. He describes change as fast and the transition through the neutral zone as something that takes time.

He defines transitions as the dynamic interludes between stages of development that function to close out one phase, reorient, and renew people for the next phase. He also defines four Laws of Organization Development that apply during these transitions from one phase to another. Bridges’ Laws were designed to describe expected behavior of organizations during transition. Here are the four laws from Bridges’s work (amended slightly) to reflect the more personal experience of change:

• First Law of Organization Development. Those who were most at home with the necessary activities and arrangements of one phase are the ones who are the most likely to experience the subsequent phase as a severe personal setback.
• Second Law of Organization Development. The successful outcome of any phase of personal development triggers personal demise by creating challenges that you are not yet equipped to handle.
• Third Law of Organization Development. In any significant transition, the thing the individual needs to let go of is the very thing that has got him or her this far.
• Fourth Law of Organization Development. Whenever there is a painful, troubled time for an individual, a developmental transition is probably going on.⁴

How incredibly powerful these laws are for describing the reality of getting unstuck. I don’t know about you, but I feel as if William Bridges has followed me and half of the world’s population around for decades and documented the realities of our lives in his research. His words are accurate and insightful, and more important, they present an opportunity.

If we can anticipate that these four laws will surface in our courageous development as they do in organization development, then when they do come up, instead of resisting them, we can view them as signposts, alerting us to alternative paths forward.

If we can anticipate pain and discomfort as part of the transitional process, then when it develops, we can embrace it rather than fight it and make it worse.

Making Sense of Our Pain

Sometimes we stay stuck because we can’t find meaning or because of the meaning we provide our circumstances. If we are unaware of this, over time, our feelings of pain can translate to feelings of despair. Chip Conley, a former CEO and now best-selling author, wrote a book called Emotional Equations.⁵ He identified an equation for describing what it feels like to be in our stuckness:

Despair = Suffering − Meaning

Conley attributes this equation to Viktor Frankl, a man who survived concentration camps, tested the theory that meaning can keep people alive, and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning. In an interview with Ken Page from Psychology Today, Conley describes how he uses Frankl’s equation.

Let me explain the “sacred algebra.” If you’re going through a period of suffering, like Victor Frankl in a concentration camp, or me in my own mental prison, it’s as though everything is going wrong, as though you’re in a downward spiral. When you’re in that place in life, suffering does feel like a constant.

If you believe in Buddhist philosophy and thinking, the first noble truth of Buddhism is that suffering is ever present. So think of suffering as the constant. Think of meaning as the variable. If you remember back to algebra, there is often a constant and a variable in an equation. If suffering remains the constant, then when you increase meaning (the variable) despair goes down.

Despair equals suffering minus meaning.

Let me do the simple math so that it makes sense…. 8 = 10−2. Despair (8) equals suffering (10) minus meaning (2).

8=10−2.

So if meaning goes up from 2 to 3, the despair goes down from 8 to 7.

When meaning goes up, despair goes down. This equation helped me to see that meaning and despair are somewhat inversely proportional, so the more I could find meaning in my life, the more I would reduce my despair.⁶

Using The Courageous Leader language, I’m going to change this equation slightly and substitute suffering with the word we’ve been using to describe suffering:

Despair = Pain − Meaning

If pain is the constant, then to live a life avoiding pain is futile. It is a natural part of the human condition. But to live with it, we have to make sense of it. If we can make sense of it, then we get unstuck, and we move into the flow of life. If we can make sense of it, we will grow and change the equation to be:

Pain + Meaning = Growth

One American hero and iconic leader brings this equation to life for us in how he lives his meaning. In 1967, John McCain was a U.S. Navy pilot flying over North Vietnam when his aircraft was shot down, and he was taken captive by the Vietnamese. He was held captive for five and a half years. He was badly beaten and was not provided much in the way of medical care in the early stages of his captivity. On several occasions, he was offered release from captivity, but he refused to leave if others were not also released with him. Although his circumstances improved over time, he continued to suffer beatings and inadequate care during that time. In an article published by the U.S. News & World Report in May of 1973, he described the meaning he gave his experience in his own words. He said, “I had a lot of time to think over there and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life—along with a man’s family—is to make some contribution to his country.”⁷

It was clear that McCain experienced a great amount of pain, yet at every opportunity to eliminate the pain and leave the camp, he refused. He viewed his pain as an opportunity to demonstrate his allegiance to his fellow prisoners and to his country.

McCain has gone on to lead a successful life outside those prison walls as an influential leader in Congress known for his integrity and patriotism, and as an advocate for ending waterboarding as an interrogation technique. The meaning he found during his time of pain transformed his experience into something he could learn from and share with others. If he had given in to despair, it’s likely he would have come home sooner but not with the honor and integrity that he believed in. The meaning he attached to his experience transformed the way he approached his captivity and the life he chose to live as a prisoner and after.

Growth takes courage. If you want to stay stuck, then stay put and wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting. If you want transformational change in your life that brings about temporary pain and lasting growth, determine what has you stuck, determine what meaning you want to give it, and then make a choice to move on or go deeper.