Imagine telling a story to someone you love and who loves you. Now imagine telling the same story to someone who makes you feel very uncomfortable.

The wonderful twists and turns of your story vanish into thin air. Instead of energy and warmth, you feel a desire to close down. Author Madisyn Taylor says that when we feel judged, disliked or misunderstood, our creative flow stops. In short, we feel stuck.

To really be in the flow, we need to feel safe and unrestricted. Achieving this is not as simple as avoiding people who make you feel uncomfortable.

See, you can be alone in a room and still feel totally blocked. Madisyn says when this happens you should know that you have come up against elements in your own psyche that are making you feel fearful. Perhaps you are afraid that in expressing yourself you will discover something you don’t want to know, or unleash emotions or ideas that you don’t want to be responsible for.

According to personal coach, Lola Fayemi, feeling stuck is not all bad. She says it’s a great motivator for change that you may not otherwise make. Berating yourself for feeling stuck won’t get you anywhere. Try not to look at stuck as a bad thing and forward movement as good. They are just opposites and it’s important for your growth to learn to dance in the light as well as the shadows.

Ask yourself what could be good about being stuck? What do you no longer get to do when you are unstuck? What are you kept safe from while stuck? Your answers will probably uncover conditioning or conflicting belief systems that are keeping you stuck.

Author Guy Finley says that the only thing keeping you stuck is what you do not know yet about yourself. Becoming more present and curious are key steps to uncovering the beliefs that are running the show. According to Brian Vaszily, founder of IntenseExperiences.com, we all have voices in our heads and hearts that are not our own. Some of them were implanted in previous relationships; others come from our youth; many are even thousands of years old and are drummed into our heads by the society we live in.

These other voices are often doing the reacting and believing for us. Brian says that voices from our past can have a mighty impact on how we approach love and relationships; how we perceive money, God, work, sex, death, politics; how we set goals for ourselves; how we react to challenges, anger, stress or compliments.

The key to living your own life is to untangle voices from the past from your own; to figure out where your thoughts and beliefs came from. And then to decide what you’re going to accept as your own.

The best recipe for fear, frustration and anger is to passively accept those other voices in your head and let yourself act according to them. The best recipe for joy, vibrancy and happiness is not to be so passively accepting; to realise that you have a choice. You are the one who gets to decide how you’re going to feel.

You don’t believe me? Well, let’s imagine telling a story again. This time you’re telling the story to yourself. Take five minutes to describe something you hate, whether it is being stuck in traffic, cleaning the toilet or filling out your tax forms.

Then take five minutes to describe something you love – an experience, a person or a movie.

Can you feel the difference? After the good story you will feel more positive, more vibrant and lighter. So why not deliberately try to take five minutes a day to focus on the good?

You choose where you focus your attention in life. You pick the story you tell yourself. You select the voices you permit in your head. Don’t like them? Then why do you allow them there?