Mary Schiller argues that feeling stuck is an illusion, since life is always moving at a cellular level. She recommends micro-disruptions like changing a morning habit or taking a different route to shift perspective. Small changes helped her advance a novel rewrite, improve her French, and spark a new business idea.
Hello, bonjour! It is day 27 of 30 Days of Following My Dreams, and I am in Luxembourg still for day 2. I'm not going to be able to film anything else today outside because I'm going to a family event, so I am doing this short record for today from the hotel room, and I wanted to share something that I have learned from this process that could be really helpful to you. If you feel like you're stuck in a rut, and I want to say first of all that I don't really like the term stuck in a rut because it's not true, it's never accurate, and it sounds very judgmental. We can't ever be stuck in a rut because life isn't like that. We are always in the flow of life because that's just how life is. It's constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly reinventing itself, literally from a cellular level. So the idea that we could ever really be stuck is simply false. It only looks that way to us in the moment. That's not true. So that in and of itself might be a relief to you. I know that when I first realized, realized that, it was a big relief to me because it was like, oh, I'm actually not stuck. It just looks that way. So what do I want to do now? You know, always comes back to that. Listening to what is calling to us to do. So if it looks to you like you are stuck or confused, as I was a few videos back when I made one in this series about confusion, I want you to look at what you could do to disrupt things a bit. I was thinking about disruption and how oftentimes when something happens in our lives, something big, it kind of pushes us in a new direction. If, for example, we lose our job like I did, or we lose a person who's dear to us, or we deal with an illness or something, suddenly everything looks different. We need to make different kinds of decisions. We do things differently oftentimes. But we don't want to wait for those huge life disruptions. Instead, it's better to take control now, to do something that is relatively small, even to break out of our routines. You don't have to do anything as major as I've been doing with these daily videos. That's a big undertaking. You certainly can, and I would watch them if you shared the links with me. I would definitely watch them. But it doesn't have to be anything that big. It could be something as simple as changing a small element of your morning routine, let's say. Or if you're like I am and you walk to the grocery store, you could change the way that you walk there, you know, go on a different path, see a different view, whatever it is that will help you to see your life in a different way, from a different angle. What I have found so interesting about this process of disrupting my routine is that it has not only helped me move forward in the things that I wanted to, especially the novel rewrite and working on my French, but it has brought breakthroughs in other things. I've mentioned that I had a new idea for something related to my business that I'm very excited to be working on now. I have no idea where that will lead, but I know that the direction feels wonderful and it certainly doesn't feel stuck at all. And so it's not just about breaking the routine and whatever that relates to, it's about what that disruption can do in other aspects of your life. So if you feel stuck in a rut, which you aren't, and— but I know it can feel that way— just do something simple to change something. And preferably make it something that is really exciting, something that you want to do, something that is really calling to you to do. Because the more you go in that direction, the easier life gets. It simply does. We don't have to keep doing things the same way. We don't have to keep doing things that we don't want to do because we feel some sort of obligation to do them. What if we just set all of that off to the side and said, what do I really want to be doing? And if the thing that I want to be doing is a big break from my routine, then let's just go for it. What might happen if you started to live more like that? I'd love to hear your comments. As always, thanks for watching. Bye for now.
