Here’s something that still blows my mind.
In the same 90-day period, I worked with two clients who couldn’t be more different on paper. One was a hedge fund manager whose fund had been ranked in the top 10 globally during 2020-2021. The guy had predicted the rise and fall of the pandemic markets with scary precision. We’re talking about someone who moved millions of dollars based on gut instincts that turned out to be right over and over again.
The other was a grieving mother who hadn’t really left her house in six months. She’d lost her child and the world had just… stopped.
Both were stuck. Completely, utterly frozen.
And here’s the thing that surprised even me … the path out was nearly identical for both of them.
I get it if that sounds crazy. A Wall Street heavy hitter and a bereaved parent? What could they possibly have in common?
Everything, it turns out. At least when it comes to what actually keeps us trapped.
I understood both of them more than they probably realized during our first sessions. In 2023, I lost my daughter. Less than a year later, I lost my father. I know what “stuck” feels like from the inside. That suffocating weight where even getting out of bed feels like climbing Everest. Where people keep telling you it’ll get better and you want to scream because nothing is getting better and maybe nothing ever will.
But here’s what I’ve discovered after coaching hundreds of people through grief, loss, career implosions, and unexpected life detours: Whether you’ve lost someone you love, lost your edge after reaching the top, or just feel like you’re spinning your wheels with no traction… the exit door is the same.
It comes down to two mindset shifts. Just two.
1. It’s never the circumstances that define us or cause us to feel a certain way
2. The problem is not the problem—the problem is the way you’re thinking about it
Now I know those might sound like something you’d find on a motivational poster in a dentist’s office. Trust me, they’re not. These are operational frameworks that I spend entire coaching sessions installing in my clients’ minds. And when they finally click? Everything changes.
That world-ranked athlete I mentioned earlier? Within three weeks of consistent work on these concepts, he started qualifying for major tournaments again after months of not even making the cut. The hedge fund manager told me it was like someone finally turned the lights back on in a room he’d been stumbling around in for years.
Let me show you exactly how this works—and more importantly, how you can start applying it today.
Why Traditional Advice for Feeling Stuck Doesn’t Work
Can we just be honest for a second? Most advice for feeling stuck is garbage.
“Stay positive!” “Just push through!” “Everything happens for a reason!”
I wanted to throw things when people said this stuff to me after losing my daughter. And I’m a coach. I’m supposed to be the calm, centered one. But toxic positivity isn’t just annoying—it actually makes things worse.
Here’s why.
When someone tells you to “just stay positive” while you’re drowning, they’re essentially telling you that your feelings are wrong. That you’re doing grief wrong, or failure wrong, or being stuck wrong. So now you feel stuck AND you feel guilty about feeling stuck. Great. Super helpful.
The willpower approach doesn’t work either. I tried it. After my losses, I thought I could just muscle through. Wake up earlier. Work harder. Fake it till you make it. You know what happened? I burned out even faster. Willpower is like a phone battery—it drains throughout the day and needs recharging. You can’t run your whole life on willpower any more than you can run your phone on 3% battery.
Then there’s the “change your circumstances” advice. Get a new job. Move to a new city. Start a new relationship. End an old one.
Sometimes that works. But usually? You just bring all your same mental patterns to a new zip code. I’ve watched people change everything external about their lives and still feel exactly the same six months later. Because they never addressed what was actually keeping them stuck.
Here’s what nobody told me when I was in the thick of it: The problem isn’t usually the circumstance. The problem is the THINKING PATTERN around the circumstance.
I went to grief counseling after losing my daughter. And look, I’m not knocking therapy … it has its place. But something was missing. We spent a lot of time talking about what happened. Processing the loss. Which is important! But I noticed we rarely talked about the stories I was telling myself about what the loss MEANT.
“My life is over.” “I’ll never be happy again.” “Part of me died with her.”
Those weren’t facts. Those were interpretations. And nobody was helping me see the difference.
That’s the missing piece for most people who feel stuck. Everyone focuses on the event—the loss, the failure, the setback. Almost nobody focuses on the thinking pattern that’s keeping you chained to it.
Once I figured that out, everything started to shift. Not overnight. But noticeably. And that’s what I want to show you how to do.
The First Shift: It’s Never the Circumstances That Define You
This one’s going to feel uncomfortable at first. Stick with me.
Here’s the concept: Two people can experience the exact same event and have completely opposite outcomes. Same circumstance. Different results. Which means the circumstance itself isn’t what determines how your life goes.
Viktor Frankl wrote about this. He survived Nazi concentration camps—literally one of the worst circumstances any human has ever endured. And he noticed something strange. Some prisoners gave up and died quickly. Others found ways to maintain hope and meaning even in hell on earth. Same camps. Same conditions. Different internal responses.
His famous quote has stuck with me: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
That space? That’s where everything changes.
Let me tell you about my hedge fund client. For privacy I can’t share his name, but I can share what happened because it illustrates this perfectly.
This guy had dominated the markets. I mean dominated. His calls on the pandemic swings were so accurate that people in his industry were calling him a prophet. His fund performed in the top ten globally. He’d basically been to the moon.
And then? Three consecutive years of losses.
When we started working together, he was convinced his circumstances had ruined him. The market changed. The algorithms got smarter. The competition caught up. He had a whole list of external factors to blame.
But here’s what I noticed after a few sessions: His circumstances hadn’t actually changed that much. Markets are always volatile. Competition is always fierce. What changed was HIM.
I call it the “moon shot pattern.” When you’ve been to the moon, it’s really hard to get excited about a trip to the grocery store. He’d reached such heights that normal success felt like failure. And worse—the pressure of NOT wanting to lose what he’d built started affecting every decision he made.
He wasn’t trading to win anymore. He was trading not to lose. Huge difference.
His circumstances were challenging, sure. But circumstances didn’t make him gun-shy and second-guess himself. His STORY about those circumstances did.
So we did an exercise I use with all my clients. I call it separating FACT from STORY.
Fact: What actually happened, stated neutrally. Just the data. No interpretation.
Story: What you’re telling yourself about what it means.
For him it looked like this:
Fact: The fund lost money three years in a row.
Story: “I’ve lost my edge. I’ll never get it back. Everyone thinks I’m a fraud now. The best years are behind me.”
See the difference? The fact is just information. The story is what’s causing all the suffering.
We did the same thing with my athlete client. World-ranked in his sport. Then he sustained an injury a few years back. His body healed. By all medical accounts, he was fine. But he couldn’t find his groove. Kept missing cuts. Dropped out of the rankings entirely.
Fact: He had an injury. He recovered physically.
Story: “I’ll never be the same. My body betrayed me. I can’t trust myself anymore. The other guys can smell weakness.”
That story—not the injury from years ago—was what was actually keeping him stuck.
For grief, it works the same way.
Fact: My daughter died.
Story: “My life is over. Happiness is impossible now. I’m being punished. I failed as a parent.”
The fact is devastating enough. We don’t need to add a story that makes it worse.
Here’s a quick exercise you can try right now. Grab a piece of paper or open your notes app.
1. Write down the circumstance that has you feeling stuck. Just the facts. No adjectives. No drama. Just what happened.
2. Now write down all the stories you’re telling yourself about what it means.
3. Look at those stories. Ask yourself: Are these definitely true? Or are they interpretations?
4. What would be a different story you could tell? Not a fake positive one—a genuinely possible alternative?
This exercise alone won’t fix everything. But it starts to create that space Frankl talked about. The space where you get to choose.
The Second Shift: The Problem Is Not the Problem
Okay, this one’s even more counterintuitive. But once you get it, you can’t unsee it.
The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way you’re thinking about it.
Let me explain with a concept that comes from Buddhist teaching, though you don’t need to be Buddhist for it to make sense.
It’s called the “second arrow.”
The idea is this: When something painful happens, that’s the first arrow. You got hit. It hurts. That’s reality.
But then we shoot ourselves with a second arrow. That’s all our thinking ABOUT what happened. The rumination. The catastrophizing. The “why me” and the “this shouldn’t have happened” and the “I can’t handle this.”
The first arrow hurts. But the second arrow? That’s what actually takes us down.
Here’s the wild thing: Most of our suffering doesn’t come from the original problem. It comes from our resistance to the problem. Our arguing with reality. Our insistence that things should be different than they are.
My athlete client is a perfect example. His injury happened years ago. YEARS. His body had completely healed. Every doctor cleared him. Physically, the problem was solved.
But mentally? He was still fighting that injury every single day. He’d replay it in his mind. He’d tense up in situations similar to when it happened. He’d hold back when he should have pushed forward because somewhere in his subconscious, he was still protecting that injury.
His actual problem wasn’t the injury anymore. His problem was his THINKING about the injury. The identity crisis it created. The story that he was now “damaged goods.”
When we started reframing, I asked him a question that stopped him cold: “What if you’re not the same athlete who got injured? What if you’re actually BETTER because of what you learned?”
He’d never considered that.
See, he’d been operating on the assumption that the injury was purely negative. That his only goal was to get back to where he was before. But what if that was the wrong goal?
What if the injury was there to teach him something? To develop a mental toughness he never would have built otherwise? To force him to refine his technique in ways that would actually make him more resilient?
This leads me to a mantra I teach all my clients: “All things are here to teach me and help me—it’s all working for my good.”
Now before you roll your eyes, hear me out. I’m not saying tragedy is secretly good. I’m not saying loss is a gift. That would be insulting to anyone who’s actually suffered.
What I’m saying is this: You get to choose what you do with what happens to you. And if you DECIDE that everything is here to teach you something, you start looking for lessons instead of just licking wounds.
The hedge fund manager started asking “what is this teaching me?” instead of “why is this happening to me?” Completely different energy. Completely different results.
He realized the market losses were teaching him that his identity had become too wrapped up in performance. That he needed to find joy in the process again, not just the outcomes. That the fear of losing had made him rigid and reactive instead of creative and bold.
Those are valuable lessons. Painful to learn? Absolutely. But valuable.
For grieving clients, this shift is delicate. I never tell someone their loss happened “for a reason” or that it’s secretly good. That’s cruel and dishonest.
But I do help them see that HOW they carry the grief is up to them. That the person they lost would want them to eventually live fully again. That honoring a legacy can mean building something beautiful from the ashes.
The loss is not the problem. The belief that life cannot be good again? That’s the problem we can actually work with.
One important warning here: This is NOT about bypassing grief or pretending pain doesn’t exist. That toxic positivity stuff we talked about earlier? That’s what happens when people use these concepts to avoid feeling their feelings.
Feel the feelings. Grieve the losses. Acknowledge the pain.
AND… don’t set up permanent residence there. The goal is to move THROUGH the hard stuff, not around it. These mindset shifts are the vehicle for that movement.
Why These Shifts Work for Grief, Failure, AND Success Hangovers
People always look surprised when I tell them I work with both grieving parents and high-performing executives. Like those are completely different worlds that require completely different tools.
They’re not.
Here’s what grief and failure and even success hangovers all have in common: They’re all forms of identity disruption.
When you lose someone you love, part of your identity goes with them. If you were a parent and your child dies, you’re left wondering: Am I still a parent? Who am I now? The role that defined so much of your daily life is suddenly… gone.
When you fail after a long streak of success, same thing. If your identity was “the person who always wins” and you stop winning, who are you? The hedge fund manager didn’t just lose money. He lost his sense of self.
And success hangovers? That’s when you achieve everything you set out to achieve… and feel empty. Because your identity was wrapped up in the PURSUIT. Now that you’ve arrived, you don’t know who you are without the chase.
The athlete struggled with this too. His injury didn’t just hurt his body. It attacked his identity as “the guy who could always perform.” Once that identity was shaken, he couldn’t access his abilities the same way. It’s like the password to his own talent got changed and nobody told him the new one.
So whether someone walks into my office grieving a death, mourning a career, or confused about why success feels so hollow… we’re usually dealing with the same core issue.
The old identity is gone. The new one hasn’t formed yet. And they’re stuck in the terrifying gap between who they were and who they’re becoming.
The two mindset shifts we’ve covered create a bridge across that gap.
When you understand that circumstances don’t define you, you stop clinging to your old identity. You start to see that who you ARE isn’t determined by what happened to you or what you achieved. You’re something more fundamental than your roles and your results.
When you understand that the problem is your thinking about the problem, you stop spinning in mental loops that keep you trapped in the gap. You start using your mind as a tool for building forward instead of a weapon for beating yourself up.
This is why these concepts work for such different situations. Because underneath the surface details, the human experience of being stuck is remarkably universal.
We all face moments where life doesn’t match our expectations. Where the story we thought we were living gets a plot twist we didn’t see coming. Where we have to figure out who we are now that everything’s different.
The specifics vary. The path through? Same principles.
How to Actually Install These Mindset Shifts (Not Just Understand Them)
Alright. Here’s where most articles on mindset completely fall apart.
They explain a concept. You nod along. You think “that makes sense.” And then you go right back to your old patterns because nothing actually changed in your brain.
Understanding is not the same as installing.
Reading about these mindset shifts won’t transform you. PRACTICING them will. There’s a big difference between knowing the path and walking it.
So let me give you the actual practices I use with clients. These aren’t complicated. But they require consistency. Ten minutes a day beats a two-hour workshop once a month. Every time.
Daily Practice #1: The Morning Reframe (5 minutes)
Do this before you check your phone. Before email. Before the chaos starts.
Grab a journal or open a notes app. Write three things:
1. The circumstance you’re struggling with. Neutral facts only. “I lost my job.” “My spouse left.” “My mother died.” “I haven’t booked a client in three months.” Just the data.
2. The current story you’re telling yourself about it. Don’t filter. Write the ugly truth. “I’m a failure.” “I’ll never recover.” “Nobody wants what I offer.” Get it out of your head and onto the page.
3. An alternative story that could also be true. Not toxic positivity. Not “everything is awesome.” A genuinely plausible reframe. “This is making space for something better.” “I’ve survived hard things before and I’ll survive this.” “Maybe this is redirecting me somewhere I need to go.”
That’s it. Five minutes. But doing this DAILY starts to rewire how your brain processes difficulty. You’re literally building new neural pathways.
Daily Practice #2: The Evening Evidence Hunt (5 minutes)
Your brain believes what it has evidence for. So give it new evidence.
Every evening, write down three pieces of evidence—no matter how small—that support your new story.
If your new story is “I’m becoming more resilient,” your evidence might be: “I got out of bed even when I didn’t want to. I made one phone call I’d been avoiding. I didn’t snap at my partner when I was frustrated.”
Small wins count. Your brain doesn’t distinguish between big evidence and small evidence. It just looks for patterns. Feed it the pattern you want to reinforce.
Weekly Practice: The “What Did This Teach Me?” Journal
Once a week, look back at whatever challenges you faced and ask: “What did this teach me? How did this help me grow? What would I not have learned otherwise?”
This trains your brain to automatically look for lessons instead of just complaints. Over time, it becomes your default setting.
How Long Until This Becomes Automatic?
Real talk? It varies. Some clients feel shifts within the first week. For others, it takes months of consistent practice before the new patterns feel natural.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: Most people start feeling different within 2-3 weeks if they’re actually doing the daily practices. Not transformed. Not “cured.” But noticeably lighter. More agency. Less like a victim of circumstances.
The full installation—where these shifts become your default operating system instead of something you have to consciously work at—usually takes 3-6 months of consistent practice.
I know that sounds like a long time. But think about how long you’ve been running your old mental patterns. Probably decades. Rewiring that doesn’t happen overnight. But it DOES happen if you stick with it.
What Happens When You Finally Break Free
Here’s what nobody tells you about getting unstuck: Once you start moving, momentum builds fast.
It’s like pushing a car that’s stuck in mud. Those first few inches are brutal. You’re straining, sweating, wondering if it’s even possible. And then suddenly the wheels catch. The car starts rolling. And now instead of pushing, you’re just steering.
That’s what happens with these mindset shifts. The beginning is hard. You’re fighting years of mental conditioning. You’re building new neural pathways from scratch. It’s exhausting.
And then one day you notice you’re doing it automatically. You catch yourself reframing without having to think about it. You notice a limiting story and just… let it go. Like it’s not even a big deal anymore.
I’ve watched this happen with clients over and over. The grieving mother who couldn’t leave her house? She started a nonprofit in her son’s name. She told me the work gives her a reason to get up in the morning. That her grief hasn’t disappeared, but it’s transformed into something purposeful.
The hedge fund manager rediscovered his “why.” He realized he’d been trading for ego, for status, for the thrill of being right. When he reconnected with why he got into finance in the first place—he genuinely loved the puzzle of markets—his decision-making got clearer. His fear decreased.
The athlete? He started qualifying for tournaments again. Not because he found some new training technique. Because he stopped fighting a mental battle against an injury that had already healed. He gave himself permission to be a different athlete than he was before—and discovered that different could mean better.
Here’s what I want you to understand: Your stuck season is not wasted time.
I know it feels that way. I know it feels like life is passing you by while you’re frozen in place. But something is happening beneath the surface. You’re being prepared. You’re being refined. You’re developing depth and compassion and resilience that you can’t get any other way.
When I lost my daughter and then my father in such close succession, I thought my life was over. And in a way, it was. The life I knew before was over.
But a new life was beginning. One where I could sit with people in their darkest moments because I’d been there myself. One where I could speak with authority about loss because I wasn’t just teaching theory. One where my pain became the foundation for helping others find their path forward.
That’s legacy thinking. The idea that your suffering doesn’t have to be meaningless. That it can become the fuel for something bigger than yourself.
I’m not saying you should be grateful for tragedy. That’s not what this is. But I am saying you get to choose what you build from it.
And when you finally break free from stuck? You don’t just get your life back. You get a new one. Often better than what you had before, though different in ways you couldn’t have predicted.
When to Seek Additional Support
I want to be clear about something: These mindset shifts are powerful, but they’re not magic. And they’re not a replacement for professional help when professional help is needed.
Here are some signs you might need more support than a blog article and some journaling exercises can provide:
• You’re having thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life
• You can’t do basic daily functions (eating, sleeping, hygiene) for an extended period
• You’re using substances to cope
• You’ve experienced a trauma that comes with flashbacks, nightmares, or panic attacks
• You’ve been stuck for more than a year with no movement despite trying multiple approaches
If any of those apply, please reach out to a mental health professional. A therapist or counselor can provide clinical support that’s beyond the scope of coaching.
There’s also a difference between grief coaching and grief therapy that’s worth understanding. Therapy tends to focus on processing and healing from the past. Coaching tends to focus on building and moving toward the future. They complement each other beautifully, and many of my clients work with both a therapist and me simultaneously.
If what you’ve read here resonates—if you feel like you’re stuck and ready for transformation but just need some guidance—that’s where coaching comes in. It’s what I do at Living Legacy Path. I help people transform their pain into purpose, their grief into growth, their setbacks into setups for something greater.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. I didn’t. And I wouldn’t expect you to either.
Your Next Chapter Is Waiting
Let me bring this home.
I know what it feels like to be stuck. To wake up and wonder if this is just how life is now. To have people tell you it’ll get better while everything inside you screams that it won’t.
I’ve been there. In the depths of grief. In the darkness of wondering what the point of anything is anymore.
And I found a way through. Not around. Through.
The two mindset shifts we covered today aren’t complicated. But they’re counterintuitive, which is why most people miss them:
Your circumstances don’t define you or cause your feelings. Your STORY about those circumstances does. Change the story, change the experience.
The problem isn’t the problem. Your thinking about the problem is what’s keeping you trapped. Shift the thinking, and the problem stops having power over you.
Whether you’re grieving someone you loved, mourning a career or identity that used to define you, or just feeling inexplicably stuck even though everything looks fine from the outside—these shifts work.
I’ve seen them work for a hedge fund manager who lost his edge. For a world-ranked athlete who thought his best days were over. For parents who were certain they’d never feel joy again.
They worked for me. They can work for you.
So here’s my challenge: Pick ONE of the daily practices from this article. Just one. The Morning Reframe or the Evening Evidence Hunt. Commit to it for seven days. Not seven weeks. Seven days.
Watch what happens.
And if you’re ready to accelerate the process … if you’re tired of feeling stuck and want real transformation with someone who’s walked this road and now helps others walk it … reach out. This is exactly what I do at Living Legacy Path.
Your next chapter is waiting. The door isn’t locked.
You just need to see it differently.
Justin Fox is the founder of Living Legacy Path, where he helps people transform grief into growth and pain into purpose. After losing his daughter in 2023 and his father less than a year later, he dedicated his life to helping others find their path forward after devastating loss.
