Business and Personal Secrets for Getting Unstuck

By Frank Zaccari

At times we all get stuck. Maybe you feel stuck in a dead-end job; your job was a victim of COVID; you live in an area that you do not enjoy; your personal relationship is floundering; the life that you want is moving further and further from reality; you can't catch a break, or maybe you never got the ri

• Language: English
• Publisher: WeBe Books
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781955668248

Book preview

Introduction

Business and Personal Secrets for

Getting Unstuck

We are all stuck in some area of our life pretending it’s not that bad so we can justify doing nothing. Ironically, the more trapped your feel by your life, the more you’ll convince yourself it’s okay.

Mel Robbins – Stop Saying You’re Fine

Remember this; I didn’t have an opportunity is not an excuse or a reason. It is a choice.

Frank Zaccari, CEO/ Author/Speaker

WHO NEEDS THIS BOOK?

We all get stuck, frustrated, depressed, anxious, frustrated, and disappointed. This book is for everyone who has ever felt stuck. If we are honest, that includes everyone over the age of thirteen. We are like the car stuck in the mud or a snowbank at times. We keep pushing on the gas, but the wheels just keep spinning. The rut we are in gets deeper until we feel we are running in quicksand. It seems the harder we try, the more stuck we become, and like quicksand, we sink until we simply give up.

Very often, being stuck in an internal issue. It is something we create and allow to occur. Wow! That’s a harsh statement. You should be saying, You are crazy, Frank. Why in God’s name would I ever create and allow a situation where I am stuck and unhappy to exist. Well, news flash, folks, it happens every day.

Maybe you feel stuck in a dead-end job; your job was a victim of COVID; you live in an area that you do not enjoy; your personal relationship is floundering; that life that you want is moving further and further from reality; you can’t catch a break, or maybe you never got the right opportunity. Does any of this sound familiar? Be honest! We have all been there. Now the question is, are you going to stay there?

Let’s look at another quote from Mel Robbins:

When you are stuck, the primary task is deciding if you’re going to change at all. The challenge is finding the ability to create a slight change in your life and build on it in the face of an overwhelming amount of resistance.

Mel Robbins – The Five-Second Rule

The magic words are IF you’re going to change. Getting unstuck, moving forward, and achieving a positive and productive life is in your hands. Greatness is not primarily a matter of circumstance; greatness is a matter of conscious choice and discipline. Staying stuck is a choice. Justifying that you never had the right opportunity is not a reason or an excuse. It is a choice. Where are you stuck in life, and what choices will you make? Are you going to fall apart? OR are you going to pick up the pieces and start moving forward?

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER:

The Harvard Business Review looked into why many people wind up in jobs they regret, even with suitable alternatives. A few factors lead to bad decisions. Many people choose jobs on salary alone, even if it’s not correlated to job satisfaction. I remember how I once fell victim to the But I am making a lot of money trap. Others are too good at tolerating bad jobs, lack self-awareness, or feel misled about the nature of the role.

Many of us remain stuck because it is simply too much effort to find another job. Updating resumes or filling out job applications, most of which are confusing, highly frustrating, and disappointing. It is just easier to stay put.

Another reason we stay stuck is fear—fear of the unknown. Fear to take a chance. Fear of stepping out of our comfort zone. Fear has prevented so many people from having the life they want. We will never rid ourselves of fear. It is a needed emotion to help protect us. Fear motivates some people to take action while paralyzing others.

Don Miguel Ruiz wrote in The Four Agreements:

Death is not our biggest fear; our biggest fear is taking the risk of being alive and expressing what we truly are.

Think about that statement. Many people are less afraid of death than taking the risk to be fully alive and happy. Wow! Fear is an emotion we all have, but we can learn how to prevent fear from dominating our life.

It is just too hard! is another choice that keeps us stuck.

Life is hard, and it certainly is not fair. It is full of challenges and obstacles that often appear overwhelming. Tom Hanks had a line in the movie A League of Their Own when Gina Davis’ character planned to leave the team. Ms. Davis’ character had just said, It just got too hard. Tom Hank’s character’s response was, It’s supposed to be hard. If it weren’t, everyone would do it. It is the hard that makes it great. Nothing worthwhile is going to be easy.

Most obstacles can be overcome, and 99% of things we worry about never happen, but you will need help. One of the secrets to becoming unstuck is learning to ask for and accept help and determine which people/organizations can help.

Many of us are stuck in destructive or unsatisfying personal relationships. These are more complicated than professional relationships. A very different set of highly charged emotions come into play. Years ago, someone told me, When emotions are high, intelligence is low. Many people become a spectator rather than a participant in their personal life.

WHY DID I WRITE THIS BOOK?

Life is meant to be lived, fully lived, and enjoyed. After spending over thirty years as a successful corporate executive and a business owner with a poor track record with personal relationships, I decided to share some of my successes and failures, being stuck and getting unstuck.

Business Secrets for Walking on Water, the first book in this three-book series, focused on issues we often don’t see coming in our professional and personal lives. Business and Personal Secrets for Avoiding Relationship Landmines, the second book in the series, focuses on identifying and avoiding landmines that derail our personal and professional relationships.

My first two books received comments like this:

I am now more aware of what I don’t know (book 1) and stepping on fewer relationship landmines (book 2). But as COVID lingers, I feel stuck or trapped in a life I don’t particularly enjoy.

I recently read a statement by David Whyte. He wrote, Always sweating the small stuff and playing life safe limits what you can achieve. Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you. I found myself stuck many times throughout my professional and personal life. It is terrible to feel you have no options and the life you are stuck in is as good as life is going to get.

Despite whatever disappointing experiences come our way, our challenge will be not to let bitterness take root. Although disappointment is inevitable, being discouraged is always a choice.

Manfred Kets de Vries

As a radio and TV host, I interviewed over 200 amazing people who found themselves stuck in the quick sand of life and found the courage and support to pull themselves out. My goal is to help others survive and thrive and enjoy the journey.

How do we get stuck, and what can we do to get unstuck? Keep reading.

CHAPTER 1

Create New Brain Pathways

Our choices have developed in the neural pathways in our brain over time. Think about it. How often do we see people continuously drawn to the same toxic situation or type of personality, and they have no idea why?

Frank Zaccari, CEO/ Author/Speaker

Have you ever felt stuck in some areas of your life? Of course, you have. It happens to everyone. You hit the brick wall or feel you are running in quicksand. Then it seems the harder you try, the more stuck you become. We have all been there and will probably be there again. The real question is, What are you going to do to change this dynamic?

Maybe you want to solve your financial problems but can’t make a breakthrough even though you work hard. Perhaps you want to lose weight and improve your health but can’t succeed even though you push yourself by eating healthy food and exercising regularly. Maybe it is a job or relationship you can’t seem to get out of that gives you no joy. Maybe you want to start your own business but can’t get out of your way to start. Perhaps a family or cultural or religious tradition no longer serves you, but you feel obligated to continue. Maybe it is an unconscious bias or belief that is holding you back.

When you want to solve a new problem or get yourself unstuck, you naturally go back to your memory bank to search for related information from your experience. But there is a problem with this approach. If the solution could be found in the old data stores of your mind, you would already know how to solve your problems. If you could readily access the key in your brain, you would not be stuck in the first place.

My colleague, Morry Zelcovitch, one of the few brain entrainment experts, writes:

You need something new to solve your problems. That something new is a creative idea. It is an idea you haven’t thought of yet. The real source of ideas is what is commonly known as the Universal or Higher Intelligence."

How do you tap into this power that may be the key to your success and prosperity? Most people don’t know. They only occasionally get a glimpse of this power. But what if there was a way to tap into this POWER at will? What if you could connect to this higher intelligence and find The Answer to get you unstuck whenever needed?

You may be thinking, OK, Frank; this is starting to sound like woo woo stuff. Well, trust me. You can retrain your brain and change the neural pathways that control your unconscious bias or beliefs.

BRAIN ENTRAINMENT

The vast majority of our decisions and thoughts are preprogrammed from what we have learned, been told, and our living environment. So, what is brain entrainment, and why should you care? It is vital because by influencing brainwave patterns, you also influence neural chemistry, and by controlling neural chemistry, you can help change how you perceive the world around us and how you act and react to it.

As you read in my book Business and Personal Secrets for Avoiding Relationship Landmines, the human brain processes eleven million pieces of data a second from our five senses. Only fifty require us to make a conscious decision. It means the majority of your ideas and beliefs are on autopilot. Hmmm, maybe that is why you make the same decisions or mistakes over and over. Yet so many people fail to take action. It reminds me of the person who keeps beating his head against the wall because it feels good when he stops! Harvard Medical School’s Susan David wrote:

Figure 1 https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/brain-architecture/

Human beings become so stuck on the idea of being right that we forget to ask the question, ‘Is my response serving me?’

So how does brain entrainment work? The audio technology (sounds, vibrations, music, and words) provides a series of uniquely crafted pulsed tones that, simply by listening with headphones while relaxing, will stimulate and ‘entrain’ your mind to have a profound effect on your brain’s performance over time. (How it works | Best Brainwave Entrainment | Active Minds .... https://www.activemindsglobal.com/how-it-works/)

Entrainment is a term borrowed from physics which simply means the tendency for two vibrating bodies to lock into phase so that they vibrate in harmony. For example, when struck and placed next to another tuning fork, one tuning fork will cause the second one to vibrate at the same frequency. (How it works | Best Brainwave Entrainment | Active Minds https://www.activemindsglobal.com/how-it-works/)

For centuries people have been using outside rhythmic stimuli in drumbeats, chants, and singing to induce various feelings. This same phenomenon is repeated in training the brain to lock into the vibrations of an outside stimulus? Many scientific studies have shown that this is, in fact, possible. (Re Train Your Brain For A Better Life With QMP. https://trans4mind.com/download-pdfs/MindPower.pdf)

When the brain is stimulated with pulsed sounds (neuro-electrical activity via the nerves originating from the ears), the brain’s overall activity will respond to and align with these pulses. The brain, via the frequency following response (entrainment), can be naturally induced towards the selected brainwave state by selecting the desired rate. (Re Train Your Brain For A Better Life With QMP. https://trans4mind.com/download-pdfs/MindPower.pdf)

Ok, why should you try brain entrainment? Why not? Aren’t you tired of being stuck over and over? Ask yourself what challenges are you facing? Everyone is encountering one or more challenges. Most people have tried unsuccessfully to find ways to address their challenges. Ask yourself four questions:

What options have you tried?

How have those worked for you?

RWA - Are you Ready, Willing, and Able to take control of your situation?

Do you want to Be Your Best Self?

If you are Ready, Willing, and Able (RWA), here are some benefits people have experienced with regular/daily use.

Naturally reduce stress, anxiety, tension, and worry.

Help to improve sleep quality.

Quickly and automatically go into a deep meditative state.

Stop procrastination and boost motivation.

Improve self-confidence.

Develop laser-sharp focus and concentration.

Dissolve mental-emotional blocks and resistance.

Create new neural pathways in the brain, change patterns of perception, and information transfer in the brain, thereby creating new ways of experiencing the world.

Increasing mental power to grasp new concepts faster can significantly improve memory retention and boost creative and mental clarity.

You should be thinking, Sounds interesting, Frank, but I don’t have access to a sophisticated scientific laboratory. Well, do you have a comfortable couch or chair or bed; do you have a set of over-the-ear headphones? I’ll bet you do. That is all that is needed and your willingness to follow the program. Like everything other lifestyle change (diet, exercise, healthy habits), it doesn’t miraculously occur overnight. No one becomes an Olympic champion after two days of training. Commitment, persistence, and follow-through are needed. Why should you make the commitment? It’s like the L’Oréal commercials, Because You’re Worth It.

My business partner, Gaby Ory, and I are joining forces with Morry to form The Brain Train, Inc. Our goal is to help hundreds of thousands of people to become the best version of themselves. To learn more about brain entrainment, listen to my youtube interview with Morry https://youtu.be/hq8XmsvisAE

Stepping Stones to Avoid Landmines & Quicksand

What two patterns or choices do you keep making that are not serving you well?

What fear is keeping you from trying something new?

What is your best