You're Not Stuck: Find the Words That Move You

"I'm stuck" is one of the most common sentences in coaching, and one of the least useful. Not because the feeling is not real. Because the word is doing almost no work. It names an entire experience in two syllables and leaves you with nowhere to go.

In this episode of Candid Coach Conversations, Kimberly Boyd sits down with Amanda Kaufman, certified Live Life Fully coach and business builder, to take the word apart. What is underneath it, what to call it instead, and the three moves that turn a heavy feeling into something you can act on.

Stuck Deserves Some Language

Amanda's first move is to slow the word down. Stuck deserves some language, she says, and once you give it some, it usually turns out to be one of three different situations wearing the same label.

The first is a delay. Something outside your control is not happening on the timeline you would prefer. It is, as Amanda puts it, somebody else's department, and would they kindly hurry up please.

The second is effort. This is the one that shows up constantly in relationships. Someone says they feel stuck with their partner, and a layer down it turns out to be he never does this, or I have to ask again and again to get the smallest thing. Not a delay. A level of effort that does not match what you want.

The third is internal, and here the more accurate word is almost always frustrated. Frustrated, agitated, deflated, sometimes genuinely low. We roll all of it up into stuck because stuck is shorter.

And underneath all three sits the same thing: an expectation that reality is different than it is.

"I Am" Closes a Door. "I Feel" Opens One.

Kimberly catches something important in how Amanda phrases it. I feel frustrated. Not I am frustrated. That one word acknowledges the feeling without handing it your identity. You are not a ball of frustration. You are a person currently feeling some.

The distinction sounds small and is not. "I am" is a closed door. "I feel" leaves options on the table, and options are the whole game.

Amanda points out how quickly the closed door becomes permanent. People learn the language, learn about feelings, learn about limiting beliefs, and then convert the belief into a statement about who they are. I am bad with money. Once it is an identity, there is nothing left to work on.

The 2026 Problem: Tweet-Length Words for Whole Experiences

Part of this is cultural, and Amanda names it directly. Communication in 2026 is tweet-shaped. Short, fast, compressed. So instead of "I feel frustrated that this has not moved in three months and I am starting to think it never will," we type "I'm stuck." Or "I feel bad."

You win on character count and lose the entire description of your experience.

Most of us also never got trained in this. Emotional regulation is not standard curriculum. Unless you have done personal development work, or worked with a therapist or a coach, or happened to land in a community where people already have it handled, where exactly would you have picked it up?

The Gap Where the Story Starts

Amanda uses money to make the mechanism visible, because money is where almost everyone can see it.

Most of us are off by ten or twenty percent in both directions. We think we earn a little more than we do, and we think we spent a little less than we did. So every time you open the account, you meet a gap between what you expected and what is actually there.

That gap is where the emotional experience lives. And it is where the stories start. I'm stuck. There's nothing I can do. If I had just done that thing back then, this would be different.

Amanda's read on it is blunt and clarifying: you do not feel stuck. You feel like you are losing. And those stories, whatever else they do, conveniently prevent you from doing anything different. Kimberly's addition lands the point — all they are really adding is shame and blame.

Three Nudges

Asked what she would hand someone in the middle of it, Amanda gives three.

Say it out loud. Write it down if you can. Speak your truth exactly as it is, without judgment, without worrying how it will be perceived, without worrying whether you are using small words. Just let it out. The thing being avoided is the thing staying stuck.

Ask what you would like instead. You have identified the problem. Have you identified the solution? What does unstuck actually look like here? How will you know when you have arrived? Most people can describe the problem in detail and have never once described the alternative.

Collaborate. You are one of eight billion people. Amanda is certain that someone has already written the book that gives you the exact roadmap from precisely where you are standing. There are books, podcasts, coaches, programs, communities. But the collaboration only works after the first two steps, because you have to know what you feel and what you want before anyone can help you get there.

The Junk Food of Relationships

The last stretch of the conversation is about the people around you, and it is the part most of us would rather skip.

Kimberly has a test for her own circle. Are they quicksand, pulling you down into the mud pit? Or are they the thing that launches you back out into your own life? The people she keeps close push her, sometimes with permission and sometimes without.

Amanda takes it one step further. If the only thing you can really talk about with someone is complaining, that is the junk food of relationships. All of the bonding, none of the nutrition.

Then comes the turn. She is not telling you to put a red flag on that person. She is telling you to put it on yourself. If gossip and complaint are your main route to connection, that is something you are bringing to the table, which also means it is something you can stop bringing.

Her words: if the only way I am bonding with other people is to gossip and complain, I deserve more nutritious relationships. And I deserve to give myself that.

There is a social layer under this too. Comparison makes admitting you are stuck harder than it needs to be. Everyone else appears to be spending freely and living well, and Amanda's reminder is worth writing down: someone spending willy-nilly is not evidence that they have money. And either way, it has nothing to do with your situation.

Start With the Sentence

If you are sitting in something right now that you have been calling stuck, start where Amanda starts. Say the true version out loud. Name the feeling precisely enough that it points somewhere. Then say what you would like instead, and find the person who has already walked it.

The word you choose decides how many options you can see.

About Amanda Kaufman

Amanda Kaufman is a certified Live Life Fully coach and a business builder who works at the intersection of clear language and real change. Her particular gift is precision — taking the vague, heavy, hard-to-hold thing a client is carrying and helping them name it accurately enough to act on. She is blunt in the most useful way, allergic to performed positivity, and firmly of the view that someone out there has already written the roadmap for wherever you are standing.

A certified Live Life Fully coach can help you take the next step, together. Book your complimentary strategy session.