I've been feeling stuck for about 18 months now. It's not a vague, philosophical stuck – it's proper, multi-front stuck.

My ankle is in a moonboot while I wait to see a foot surgeon about a torn ligament, and it's been keeping company with a rib injury that hasn't fully settled since around the same time. Between the two, I've been living with some level of chronic pain for a year and a half, and it has bled into everything else.

Work feels harder than it should. Money feels tight in that low-grade, gnawing way. I have a brain full of projects – actual bazillions of them – and precisely zero motivation to start a single one.

Mostly, I am just tired. Tired of the pain, tired of the waiting, and tired, especially, of being tired.

Of course, it's deeply ironic that I'm a coach who helps people get unstuck, while feeling so thoroughly stuck myself. I've spent the last few weeks trying to think my way out of it, the way I usually would, and getting nowhere.

So this month, instead of writing to you from the other side of an insight you can use, I'm writing from inside it. Because I suspect I'm not alone. And I want you to know that I get it.

Years ago, I came across an idea from Martha Beck that has stayed with me ever since: the Transformational Cycle of Change. I first read about it in one of her books, and then we revisited it in depth when I trained.

It borrows its logic from something rthat happens inside a chrysalis. I'd never really thought about what happens as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, but it turns out the first thing it does is dissolve. Completely.

If you opened the chrysalis early on, you wouldn't find a caterpillar-ish butterfly, or a butterfly-ish caterpillar. You'd find a puddle of gloop. Somewhere in that gloop are cells carrying the instructions for what comes next, but for a good while, there is no visible progress at all. Just gloop.

Martha maps four phases of human change onto this: the dissolving (death and rebirth), the dreaming and scheming that follows, the messy trial-and-error of actually building the new thing, and finally, flight. Most of us badly want to skip straight to flight, or at least to the scheming bit, where there's something to plan and do. What nobody warns you about is that the first phase – the gloop – while uncomfortable, is essential. And it can take a long time.

But here's the part I need to remind myself of: dissolving isn't something you do. It's something that happens to you. You can't think, plan or hustle your way out of the gloop stage any more than a caterpillar can.

The only real job in that phase is to stop fighting it – to stop treating the falling-apart as a personal failure, or a sign that something's gone badly wrong – and instead to just tend to yourself while it does its slow, invisible work. And in case you were wondering, yes – this is true self-care.

For me, right now, that's meant lowering the bar considerably. I'm not ticking off the bazillion projects. I'm putting my foot up when it needs putting up, cancelling things I don't have the energy for, and letting “I did the essential work today and then I rested” count as a good day.

It has felt, frankly, a bit indulgent, and a bit like giving up. And I can't say I get it right every day. But I am trying to remind myself that dissolving isn't giving up – it's the part of the process that makes the rebuilding possible.

So, if you're in your own puddle of gloop at the moment – stuck at work, stuck in a relationship, stuck in your health, stuck in motivation – or all of the above – I'd love you to sit with a couple of questions.

Where have you been treating your stuckness as a failure, rather than as a phase you're allowed to be in? And what would it look like, just for this week, to cocoon a little instead of forcing yourself forward?

This is, in the end, exactly the kind of thing coaching is good for – not necessarily pulling you out of the gloop before you're ready, but helping you sit in it with a bit more compassion and a bit less panic, so that when the pull towards rebuilding does arrive, you're ready for it, and have the energy to take the next step.

If that would be useful to you right now, you know where to find me.

Until next month,

Mandy