Ep. 163: Nothing Changed Until I Took Responsibilty

Have you ever felt stuck — not at rock bottom, not falling apart — just waiting?

In this episode, I talk about why so many of us stay stuck even when we want change. I share a personal story about a time in my life when I knew I wanted something different, but had no clarity, no direction, and no idea what my next step should be.

I waited for the right time.
 I waited for certainty.
 I waited for someone to tell me what to do.

What I eventually learned is this: clarity doesn’t come first — movement does.

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(Consider this your gentle nudge toward something new.)

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Listener Invite
• 0:36 What Being Stuck Feels Like
• 3:12 The Hidden Cost Of Waiting
• 4:32 A Personal Turning Point At Fifty
• 9:04 Investing In Mindset And Doubt
• 11:02 No One Has Your Exact Steps
• 12:22 Taking Action Without Clarity
• 14:56 Reframing Failure As Imperfect Action
• 16:36 Choose Movement Over Waiting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Maybe I Can podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Weiss. And thank you as always for joining me. If you're new to the show, welcome. I'm excited that you're here. Please feel free, reach out, message me on Instagram. It's Debbie.org.wiss. Send me an email, Debbie at DebbieRWiss.com. Let me know what you think of the show. Anything you like, you don't like, you want to hear. I am open to hearing it all because I do this for you. With that, let's get into today's topic. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt stuck? We've all felt stuck in one way or another at different times in our lives. Why do we get stuck? Whether it's starting at the beginning of something we're thinking about, or we're stuck in the middle where we're not sure where to go next. And we're waiting for crap clarity. We're waiting for the heavens to open up and get the answer. You ever feel tired of listening to the same thoughts repeating over and over again in your head? You're thinking about change, you're wondering what the right next step to do is, you're waiting for the energy, the clarity, the time, right? That's a big one for all of us. It looks different for each of us, but being stuck usually comes from the same place. And that is a place of uncertainty and fear. I'm not here to fix your light. It's really about understanding why and what we need to do to move ourselves past that. So why do we stay stuck? Well, don't we think it's easier to stay stuck? Aren't we afraid maybe of taking a risk? Maybe we make the wrong move and we're afraid that whatever happens is going to be wrong, that we make a mistake. Maybe we tell ourselves I don't know enough. I'll wait until I'm more confident, or I'll wait until things calm down in my life. This isn't a great time. For me, that was a big one. This isn't the right time. It was never the right time. Something is always going on in our lives. After my kids move out, after I'm done caring for my parent, or after I'm done with this work project, or once I retire, then I'll have more time. There's never going to be a good time. We can make every excuse under the sun. And the thing is, I don't think that we realize that besides not moving forward, there's another cost. Think of it as it's not something dramatic, like a landslide, but it's more that slow eroding, that small erosion by piece, starts to chip away. And what happens? We begin to lose trust in ourselves. We carry this low level of resentment that we don't even realize we're feeling. We feel like life is happening around us instead of living. Everybody else is living. They're seeming to progress and take risks, and we are not. Maybe you feel tired and you don't even know why. It's that small erosion in the background that's making us nothing terrible is happening, but yet nothing meaningful is changing either. I can think about so many different times that I've been stuck in my life. And I am gonna share with you a specific time where this was a slow erosion happening. I wasn't even aware of it. I hadn't hit rock bottom, I was still functioning, but I was waiting. I was waiting for my circumstances to change. I was at a point where I'd been done caring for my dad. He had passed away a couple of years earlier. Knew I'd already, if you if you've been listening to me, following me on social media, I'm sure you've heard that I had an aha moment when I turned 50. And that aha moment was that I did want my life to change. But it's not like anyone told me how to do that. I didn't know how to do that. The first thing I did is that I started by addressing my weight, which had been a lifelong issue. But while I was doing that, something else needed to happen, but I had no idea what it was. I knew that I wanted my life to change, but I was stuck because I didn't know how. She talked about a lot of the issues that I was dealing with, my weight, money issues, and her story was inspiring. She was offering a course on mindset, and I really didn't understand what mindset even meant back then. But I was very intrigued because I was looking for the answer. And so I decided maybe this is the answer. I clicked on the link to join the course, saw how much the course costs, which I think I want to say maybe around$1,500. At that time, I didn't have$1,500. One of the things that I was looking to change was my financial situation, and that in my mind wasn't going to be done by laying out more money that I didn't have. And so I remember forgetting about it and saying, okay, this is not the way to go. This is counterproductive. But something kept bringing me back and bringing me back again to the link to her course until I finally said, you know what? Something's gotta give. I've got to give this a try. And so I joined. And I remember I had in my head that I had made a mistake, that I was spending this money, that this woman was just trying to get money from her, you know, listeners without really giving anything of substance back in return. And so the course was kind of like each week the next module was released, and I think it was every week that she also had a live session where you could go on and ask her questions. The first few weeks, every module, I'm like, okay, I get it, but you're still not telling me what to do. Each week I was poking holes in the course, trying to prove to myself that this was just a scam to get money from people. I don't know how many weeks in when I finally realized, oh, she's not gonna give me the answer. I was always looking to pay people to give me the answer. Show me exactly the steps that I need to take. But no one's gonna do that. And actually, if they show you the steps that you need to take, they're wrong because those might be steps that worked for them, but they're not what would work for you because the only person who can answer that is you. The only way that you can determine that is by self-reflection and making choices by choosing to stay stuck, you are making that choice, and that choice is not going to move you forward. But through this course, I came to that realization. I started to understand how my mindset was affecting my life. I started to learn that I needed to take responsibility for my life and for my actions. From that course, I decided that I would take some kind of action. The next action that I took was on this woman's recommendation, which was to join a mastermind. This is a business thing, and at the time, one of my goals was around money. At the time I was looking to launch a side business selling supplements that I found useful. This mastermind was gonna show me. And so I again invested more money and joined this mastermind. Long story short, I wound up not selling the supplements. Those actions didn't lead me where I thought they would. But that doesn't matter because that's not the point. I thought I had it figured out. I'm gonna join this mastermind, they're gonna show me how to sell these supplements, and then I'm going to launch that business and I make X amount of dollars, and then I'm gonna do this and this and this with the money, and my problems will be solved. Well, that's not at all what happened, but you know what? Looking back, if I hadn't pressed join for that first course, and then I had done the same with joining the mastermind, I wouldn't be talking to you today. I had no idea of any of the things I would be doing now. I never had a desire to write a book, I didn't think that I could forget a podcast. I barely knew how to listen to a podcast, let alone start a podcast, create products, none of them, zero zippo were in my mind at that time. I had no clarity on that. But I just made the choice to do something, even though I had no idea where it would lead me. And you know what? I failed along the way. Some of the choices that I've made, they haven't been successful. But that's okay because each of those choices, successful or not, I've learned something from it. And that helped me make my next choice and my next choice and my next choice. And here's the thing. It's so interesting because I just knew that doing nothing wasn't working. It wasn't about the course or the money or the books or the podcast. It was that I stopped waiting. I accepted responsibility that I was the one who had to do something, make some type of movement. And that has changed everything. Let me bring that back to you. Do you have thoughts of, well, that's great, but what if I choose the wrong thing? What if I waste time or I waste money? Or what if this turns out to be just another failure? All of those things were things that I have asked myself. Even now, it's not like those questions have gone away. Duck can happen at the beginning, or it can happen anywhere along that journey. And so many times over the last however many years, I've stopped myself and said, Oh, what if I waste more money by creating this card deck, this journal, whatever I'm going to do next. Not about that. Yes, we make mistakes and it's okay. Nobody's perfect. We have to learn from them and think of them not as mistakes, but imperfect action. None of us is perfect. If you're wondering what comes next, remember it's not a big plan or a perfect answer. It's deciding whether you're going to keep waiting as you're doing now, or you're going to choose some type of movement, even without clarity, or choosing to stop outsourcing your life by you staying stuck and not making the decision of how you want your life to move forward. You're allowing others and your current circumstances to determine the path of your life. You're listening because you want to be in control of your life. You want to decide how the rest of your life is gonna look. But when you stay in the gunk, you're choosing to stay stuck. You don't need to know exactly what to do next. You just need to decide whether you're done waiting. It's not about the action. It's really more about the decision to move forward imperfectly. Being stuck didn't end when I felt ready. It ended when I stopped waiting. If this episode gave you anything, let it be this. Waiting is a choice. And so is movement. Which are you gonna choose? Can't wait to hear how you take imperfect action this week. Message me, get in touch with me somehow because I'd love to hear. Until next week.