What’s Really Keeping You Stuck
I talk a lot on this show about ownership and purpose, and sometimes people hear that and think: okay, but how? Like, what does that actually look like when you feel completely stuck and can’t seem to move?
That’s the conversation I had with Gerren Power, and he answered it better than I have in years of trying.
It’s Not a Capability Problem
Gerren is a mental performance and leadership coach — the founder of Power Consulting — and his whole body of work sits on one premise: most of the time, the thing keeping you stuck isn’t lack of skill, lack of time, or lack of resources. It’s the belief system you’re operating inside of. The hypothetical scenarios you’ve constructed and decided to live as if they’re real.
He put it a way that stopped me cold: your mental barriers serve you at the level you’re at. Meaning — they’re not random. They’re doing a job. They’re keeping you exactly where part of you has decided it’s safe to be. And the only way through is to create a new vision that’s bigger than the comfort of the current level.
That hit for me. Because I’ve watched smart, capable, talented people stay stuck for years — not because they couldn’t do the thing, but because they’d built an entire inner story about why the thing wasn’t for them. And the story was doing its job perfectly.
The Belief System You Never Audited
We all have one. A collection of preconceived notions handed to us or built over time that we’ve never actually stopped to evaluate. Does this belief serve me? Is this actually true — or is it just what I’ve decided to live inside of?
Gerren’s framework is simple: vision simplifies everything. When you have a clear vision of where you’re going, it tells you what to do and what to ignore. Without it, you’re operating inside someone else’s framework, following a script you never consciously agreed to. The moment you create a new vision — something you actually want — your brain shifts from “I can’t” to “how can I?” That question change is everything.
Ask, Seek, Knock — and Then Invest
The practical formula Gerren uses is built around three moves: ask the right questions, seek out the people and information that can help, and then be willing to knock — which means invest in yourself. Not the new car. Not another streaming service. You.
Every successful person he’s talked to names mindset and self-investment as the foundation. And the ask, seek, knock framework matters because our brains create neural pathways — the new thing is always hard until the pathway forms, and then it becomes second nature. The beginning is always the hardest part. That’s just true. It’s also not the whole thing.
Hard Is Transferable
The part that resonated most for me was Gerren’s reframe on hard. We’re all wired toward different kinds of hard — I’ll go learn something new all day long, but ask me to do something physically terrifying and I’ll have a very different reaction. My husband is the exact opposite. But hard is hard. And the moment you recognize you’ve already been doing hard things in other areas of your life, you can start applying that same muscle somewhere new.
Gerren told a story about learning to play guitar — the calluses, the muscle memory, the months of awkward finger positioning before anything clicked — and how once it all came together, he could hear music differently. Layers and sounds he’d never noticed before. All because he made one decision and saw the process through. Your next hard thing works the same way.
If you’re sitting on something you want to do and you keep finding reasons not to — Gerren’s question is worth sitting with: what’s the worst that could actually happen? Not the catastrophized version. The real one. Because 99% of the time, it’s survivable. And the regret of not trying almost always outlasts any discomfort that came from trying.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Gerren Power on No More Mondays → careerbenders.com/episode-261
Find Gerren on LinkedIn and Instagram at @gerrenpower — and if you’re ready to get out of your own way, he’s the person to talk to.
