3 Steps To Fulfillment: Life Coaching For Women Who Feel Stuck

If you are an ambitious woman who feels unfulfilled in your personal or work life, you are not alone: as a life coach, I help many women who feel unfulfilled in all aspects of life, including personal relationships and careers.

Despite their ambitions, these women feel something’s holding them back – and what I’ve found is that very often, the driving cause is that women are not putting their own needs first – aka being selfish enough.

If this resonates with you, then here are three steps you can take to identify causes and start to resolve those challenges. Use them to chart your own course towards “selfishness” – in the most empowered sense of the word.

1. Identify the sources of your unfulfillment

Many women who feel unfulfilled are uncertain as to why or what they’re doing to contribute to that feeling – that’s why they seek life coaching!

Identifying your own source of your dissatisfaction can take time, and is a highly personal exploration of values, negative thoughts, and behavioral patterns.

That said, in my practice there are three common sources I’ve observed that may apply to you, too: perfectionism, guilt, and settling for less.

Here are ways in which these commonly play out – see if any apply to your life as causes of unfulfillment:

Perfectionism

Guilt

Settling for less

When these issues are the driving forces in a woman’s life, they create the perfect self-defeating storm. We’ll work together to replace them with healthier life approaches using the steps outlined below.

2. Develop skills to rewire thought & behavioral patterns

After you've spent some time thinking about what patterns and stressors are recurring in your life, it's time to develop skills that will help you healthily deal with them in the moment.

In my practice, I help clients work through these through with the following trifecta:

Learn to set boundaries

By setting strict boundaries in their personal and professional lives, my clients are able to foster healthier relationships – with others, and themselves.

Here's a few ways you can learn to set boundaries:

Defeat automatic negative thoughts (ANTS)

These “ANTS” are where your mind goes, automatically, when faced with a perceived challenge. Examples of ANTs include:

Work on self-compassion

We’ll work on self-compassion exercises, which include:

3. Embrace your new “selfish” mindset and exercise it

By this point, you've identified your sources of stress, and learned skills you can implement to respond more healthily to said stressors.

While those two steps require serious legwork, the final step is often the toughest: Activating those skills in the real world.

Be patient with yourself, and remember that not every situation is a battle – but rather, an opportunity to grow.

Journaling can be a helpful exercise in becoming more mindful of your automatic reactions and thought patterns. For example, when you feel stressed stressed, take a moment to ask yourself:

As your newfound skills become second nature, you'll notice yourself taking active steps to move towards achieving fulfillment and pride in yourself!

Patience is key for personal progress

It's important to remember that no one's process to empowerment is linear or clear-cut! Life is messy by nature, and no amount of life coaching can change that.

But what it can change is how we roll with the punches – and using that adaptability to get us from where we are today, to where we want to be tomorrow.