How to Get Unstuck

is a place for business and let's dive in! Welcome back to business and I love this topic how to get unstuck in your life. Now, if I'm totally honest, I am the opposite of being stuck in my life right now. I've never felt more motivated. I've never felt more inspired. But I remember so vividly different points in my life where I was incredibly stuck, one of which was in college when I just felt like I didn't know what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go.

And I don't know that depression is a real thing. I don't know that I believe that depression is a

real thing. I don't know that there's any test for depression, but if there was, I would say that that was a time of deep sadness in my life, and there's been a handful of other periods of my life where I've felt that way, and I really want to help people who might be feeling that way right now, because you can get out of it and you can get out of it without taking drugs, without thinking that there's something wrong with you, simply through producing and creating the

life that you actually want. So if I was stuck in my life right now, in 2025 with social media and Netflix and all of these things that we have as distractions, this is exactly how I would get unstuck in my life. The first and most important step to getting unstuck is to understand that the old version of you doesn't exist anymore, unless you choose to stay stuck. You have to cut off the person that you are right now to become the person that you want to be.

So how do you actually do this? You see, I love to look up the derivation of words, and the derivation of the word decision is to cut off, which means you're no longer the person that you were yesterday if you have made a decision to change, that person doesn't exist. Imagine if your car got stolen the next day you couldn't wake up. Be able to use your old vehicle in order to get to where you're trying to go. You'd have to come up with some different solution.

You'd have to take a bike. You'd have to Uber. Maybe you're walking. You no longer have your car as your option to travel now. Think about this as a decision for you to change your life. If you are going to become a person who works out every single day, or a person who is a badass at sales, or somebody who reads books and is very well read and articulate, all of a sudden, if you decide to be that person, you are no longer the person that doesn't do those things.

That person doesn't exist any longer. So you have to start making decisions as if you are that new person. Because guess what? You are. All because you made the decision. Now, once you've made the decision, let's make your environment easier. So if you know that you doomscroll on TikTok, set a policy, make it so that moving forward you have

your screen time locked on your phone. You cannot scroll on TikTok for longer than five minutes when you make subtle changes like this to actually change your environment, you're doubling down on the decision for you not to be the old version of yourself. So your environment matters and the choices that you need to make in order to get there really matter. And guess what? They can be

small little tweaks. Being a whole different version of you doesn't mean that everything in your life changes, but the things that matter that you need to make progress on have to happen today. And that decision has to be now. My second step to getting unstuck is to ruin myself with disappointment in me. Disappointment is the wake up call that you have been avoiding. Do not listen to all of those nice memes and those fun TikToks that make you feel like you should accept yourself and be okay

with yourself the way that you are. If you're disappointed because you know that you have more in you, you know that you could impact more people. You know you have this great potential and instead you're wasting it. Be freaking disappointed. You shouldn't feel good about yourself. Why would you feel good about yourself? You're not living into what is possible for you. Once you know that you're unhappy with the way that your life looks, you can make

that change, but don't sugarcoat it. Don't tell yourself lies that you should just love yourself the way that you are and give yourself a big hug. Don't listen to that bullshit. Be disappointed, accept the disappointment and take action. My parents used to drag me to a dinner every single year with a family friend, and this family friend was very well educated, very well read, and incredibly successful. But I hated going to the dinner because he made

me feel bad about myself. The amount of news that he would read every single day would remind me that instead of reading the news, I was watching television. The way that he would articulate questions and his opinions would make me feel uncomfortable, because I realized I didn't have an opinion because I didn't even know what the frick he was talking about. He was so involved in politics

and what was happening in the world. And I realized, I don't know the things that I could know and that I really feel like I should know and should be part of those conversations. So after many years of dinners, I finally decided to stop lying to myself and take action. What did I do? I ordered the economist. I ordered the Wall Street Journal to show up to my house every single day, and I became interested in the news.

I became interested in politics so that when I showed up to dinner the next year, I would actually have opinions. You see, I didn't lie to myself saying that those things aren't important. They were important. That brings us to step three, which is to decide what you want your life to look like. You cannot create the life that you want without knowing what you want. If I'm totally honest, I entirely gave up on my goals. For about three years, I became introverted. I just decided to be stuck in

life because I felt really insecure, to be honest. And I was not confident. And I was so terrified of what people thought of me that I just didn't want to try. And I'll never forget flying to this conference. And I had said no to speaking at this conference because I was scared and I didn't feel confident. But then I was sitting there in the audience realizing, I'm here.

I could be participating, I could be contributing. But instead, my fear of public speaking, my fear of being seen, my fear of maybe people judging me or criticizing me is going to keep me on the sidelines. And from that moment forward, I was like, I'm not going to be this person. I refuse to be the person that doesn't have the life that they want. And so from there, I took accountability and said, what do I want my life to look like? And I wrote down all of

my goals. What do I want personally? What do I want my fitness goals to be? What do I want my family goals to be? What kind of friends do I want to have professionally? What type of mentors do I want to bring in? What are the opportunities that I'd like to create and financially, how much money do I want to make? What do I want to contribute to? How could I make a financial impact on a charity

that really matters to me? Because if I'm not confident in myself today and I don't feel like I can create the life that I want, I'm never going to create the impact that I could potentially make. And I am put on this planet in order to live into

my potential. And I think that you are too. So if you haven't done this already, I would pause this video and I would take out a piece of paper, or maybe open up your notes app, and I would write down your personal, professional and financial five year goals. This will give you a picture of who you want to be in the future, so that you can decide to be that person today. Step four is the most important thing you can do, because you have to know

for sure that you are moving forward. Are you making progress daily? That is how you get out of the rut of having this dream life, but actually feeling like you're making incremental progress. You're seeing wins. You're making a change. One of my successful habits around this is to plan my day the night before. I do not leave my office. I do not leave my place of work or go to bed without having a full breakdown of my calendar and where I'm spending my time the next day. Make

the plan the night before. So when I'm going through my calendar, I'm looking at what appointments do I have, what books am I reading? What podcasts do I need to listen to? How do I sprinkle in little pieces of future Natalie and make those deposits today so that I can actually get to those opportunities in the future? Because I'm well-read on these things, because I'm in the know, on what's happening in the spaces that I'm interested in going into. The progress you choose to make every single

day is what changes things. It is not these big steps. It is the tiny, incremental steps that you make every single day that change the trajectory of your life to create the life that you've always wanted. And my hack for this is to actually graph the things that are

the most important to me. Because if I can see on a graph that I'm getting more hours of sleep every single night, that I am working out consistently, and that my muscle mass is increasing, or if I can see that I'm actually making more money month over month. All of a sudden I feel better about the growth

because I can see it moving up. But if you aren't graphing and you aren't paying attention to those movements every day, you're going to feel like you're not getting any closer and you're going to go back into your rut. So measuring the handful of things that matter to you changes everything. Step five is one of my favorites, and I don't hear people talking about this. Wherever you're currently

spending your time, stop spending your time there. If you're in a rut, the easiest way to get unstuck in your life is to get out of your house. Your environment dictates the way that you feel. So you're watching a video right now about how to get unstuck. If you're feeling stuck, that means that you shouldn't stay in the environment where you are stuck. Your environment can be

the type of social media that you interact with. Your environment can be the friends that you hang out with, the information that you're reading, get out of your house. Get out of those places where you feel stuck and do that immediately. If you're watching this in a place where you don't feel great, leave the place that you're currently in. And getting out of your house is one of the most effective things. When you get out of your house, it means that you have to be around

other people. Back when I was in college and I would really feel caved in, I would do my homework in my bed. I felt like I was just grinding and that there was no end in sight. My life was always going to suck. I would go and study at a Starbucks, and later on I learned that the best place to study was actually a hotel lobby. Because you were just in a different environment. It was a

different groove. I just felt better about myself. I put on a different outfit, I made my makeup a little bit nicer, and I felt like I was in a place, like the places that I wanted to be in the future, instead of physically being in the place where I currently feel stuck. So think of ways that you could change your environment. If you currently study at your house, could you study in a library? If you currently work in a space with a coworker that you can't stand. Could

you ask your manager to move? There are creative ways to change your environment, and your environment is everything. Step six is to realize that entertainment disguised as education is why you're not making progress. If you watch a bunch of these videos and you never do anything after them, you have just substituted traditional entertainment via TikTok or Netflix with education that you're using as entertainment. And I am

a huge culprit of this. I will never forget when I needed some motivation, it was back when I was in high school. I had to study for this big AP exam. I was going to watch this movie about this inspirational story of this woman who had this incredible gymnastics career. In my mind, I was thinking I was being productive or I was learning something, learning how to overcome and how to have grit. Really, I was just

being educated. Back in the day, I didn't have YouTube, but today I see people doing this constantly where they will just binge watch all of these videos on how to launch an effective marketing campaign, how to grow on social media, how to make more money and they feel better because instead of just watching mindless reality television. At least they're learning something. But they're not paring the learning

of something with the doing of something. This can lead to you feeling like you're making progress when really you're not. So here's my rule of thumb whenever I'm watching, reading, or listening to something, I have to actually do something immediately afterwards. I can't just go to the next video, to the next podcast, find the next guru. You will not have a better life. You will not get unstuck from your rut if you just go to Natalie's next video.

Although you should go to my next video, but that's not going to really help you and I'm here to actually help you. So what can you do right now that would make a change? If I was you, I would take my laptop or I would take my phone and I would get out of my house and I would go set up shop in a coffee shop or in some awesome swanky hotel lobby. That is how you implement. And you make a change so that you're actually making

progress instead of just being educated. Next up is number seven, which is to separate yourself from people who don't support you. You can take a break from people holding you back, and it doesn't have to be a breakup. This is a lesson that my mom taught me. She would tell me about the boyfriends that she would break up with, but they didn't know that she broke up with them. And I was like, mom, how did you do this? She said I would just create slow and subtle distance.

Instead of having this big fight that created all this emotion, I would subtly become more and more busy to the point where it just didn't make sense for us to be together any longer. Because I already had this new life with things that I was passionate about, and they were still doing what they were doing before. We didn't have some massive breakup, but it was obvious to both parties that there was no longer alignment. This is the best way to create separation from your friends. Now here's

the deal with this don't make other people wrong. Don't have some big emotional blow up. Just separate yourself and start being so busy working on yourself, doing things that are creating the life that you want, that you no longer have the time that you used to have. If you have friends who you like to party with and go out with on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights just have other things to do that you can't move. Whatever it is that you're trying to create, make time to

do those things. In the time that you used to spend with people who aren't helping you get closer to your goals. This is where I go back to looking at my calendar, and I cancel anything that is not helping me get out of the rut that I'm in. There is no party that you can go to. There is no lunch that you can go to. There is no coffee that you can go to with your friend that is going to make you feel better about yourself again. It's not to make them bad and it's not to

make them wrong. It's just to say, I no longer have time to talk about my current life because I have to go do things and spend time building a new version of my life. And I can't live my old life while building the new version of my life. That brings us to our final step in getting unstuck, which is step number eight. Just say no. You have to say no to anything that doesn't align with your goals.

I used to make up errands that I had to run instead of spending Saturday actually learning a new skill and investing in myself to make progress, I would come up with this list of all of these things that I had to do. I have to go get my nails done. I have to go to target, I have to eat lunch. I just created all of these things that I had to do when really I didn't have to do any of them. So sometimes saying no isn't

saying no to somebody else. It's actually saying no to the habits and the routines and the things that you tell yourself you have to do, but they're really distractions, just taking you away from the things that you actually have to do. If you're not making progress on the real things that you need to do, you have to reevaluate the things that you have to do and start saying no to yourself. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely not want to miss out on

my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating this content and I am obsessed. Every single week in your inbox, I'm going to send you business. And which is exactly what it sounds like. How do you fit business and all of the other things in your life so that you are up to speed on fashion, beauty, wellness, all things that really matter. If you want to subscribe and get this special gift and weekly treat in your inbox, go to Cartoon ventures.com/news.