By Nadine Araksi, Toronto-based Story Coach

If I’m honest, I’ve been feeling blah about work this year and it hasn’t felt like me. Know the feeling?  I’m the cheerleader, the hype girl! But I lost my mojo in 2020. For months it felt as though we were receiving bad news after bad news (while working in the news) and I couldn’t Pollyanna my way through it.

Working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic, as an extreme extrovert with ADD, has been challenging to say the least. As a leader it’s so hard to keep morale up when your own is suffering. Deadlines and deliverables suffer, too, as I found I’ve been putting things off due to decision paralysis and then white knuckling my way through tasks.

So, How Did I Stop Feeling Stuck at Work?

Mindset coaching works. I’ve been getting crystal clear in my quieter moments, using our Kickstartology Coaching Alignment Framework, and digging deep to understand what to focus on. For example, much of my procrastination was due to overwhelm from thinking, “I don’t know where to start.” By flipping the pancake, as Steph calls it, to “I have what I need to start,” and focusing on the “better feeling” that sentence gives me, I stopped trying to avoid the task at hand and was fueled into action.

We talk about gratitude a lot, because it works! When I reflect on my career, how it has opened so many paths to learning from smart, talented and interesting people, and how by working in journalism I am helping to inform and entertain people, I feel really lucky. But gratitude for your paycheck is often not enough to make you enjoy a job that no longer excites you. For me, checking that what I’m doing lines up with who I want to be and how I want to live is the biggest key to emotional transformation. How does how my day job align with my vision to write books and speak on stages around the world?

Luck: When Opportunity Meets Preparation

Through coaching, I knew my next step career-wise was to marry my love of storytelling to my desire to have real business impact, but I felt strongly that I needed to look outside my organization. So when the opportunity came up to lead the Marketing division of my workplace of the past 12 years, I cautiously but optimistically said yes. Could I love my job again if I just switched roles?

Once I got clear on ME, I could see that my vision for the team aligned with my overall vision for myself as a master storyteller, and BOOM, it just clicked. I could clearly draw a line between how to build my skills through my day job and also work towards what’s next. (Oprah, here I come!) Had I not been doing the work to understand what I want and where I’m headed, I would not have been able to adjust my attitude and framing of my situation EVEN WHEN my external circumstance changed.

I am loving being on the path I’m on and while I don’t quite know what I’m doing in my new role yet, I’m figuring it out and know I will work hard at mastering it. That last sentence is a critical reframing of what typically paralyzes me in the form of Imposter Syndrome. It’s not a silver bullet, but reminding myself daily of the direction I’m headed makes a big difference in whether I am kind or hard on myself, which impacts how I feel. In a year full of loss and grief, my current happiness seems absurd. (Have I mentioned that I also found love in 2020?) But this didn’t just happen to me, I worked at it. Hard.

If this resonates with you in some way, please reach out and book a consult with Steph or email me for a private chat. I am so grateful to Steph for coaching me through challenging times while we are also building a business. If you want to start feeling excited about a specific area of your life again, we can help with our group life coaching for women and mindset coaching!

P.S. Find out how to work with me if you're ready to break the patterns keeping you stuck and get out of your own way: Let's talk.

Book a free coaching exploration call and I will tell you everything you need to know and what results you can expect with my group coaching program for women or 1-on-1 coaching.

Free: Get unstuck with our mini starter course:

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