Episode 125: Breaking Through the Walls: How to Adapt, Pivot, and Push Past Your Limits

In today’s episode, we dive into the walls we all hit in life and business—and how to adapt, pivot, and break through them. We all face challenges, and whether they come from external sources or our own internal struggles, we need strategies to push through.

We talk about the natural fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses we all experience when under pressure, and how recognizing these patterns can help us respond consciously instead of reacting out of instinct. It’s all about identifying your go-to survival mechanism and setting yourself up with the tools and support to overcome the barriers before they even happen.

We share personal experiences of how these walls show up in our own lives and businesses, and why it’s important to notice when you’re starting to build them. Once you understand the root cause of the wall, you can break it down faster and smarter. The key? Change things up, take action, and know your “why”—it will help you power through and create new strategies for success.

If you find yourself hitting the same wall over and over, don’t ignore it. Acknowledge it early, test different approaches, and embrace the challenge of growth. It takes courage, tenacity, and action to break down those barriers and keep moving forward.

So, if this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who could benefit from hearing it. And don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you never miss out on new content! We also want to hear from you—let us know what topics you want us to cover next.

Until next time, get after it!

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Read the full transcript of this episode below:

 

Lynn Howard

Hi, I’m Lynn.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

I’m Amanda, welcome to the Pursuit of Badasserie, the podcast. Today we’re talking about hitting a wall, what to do, how to get out of it, where you go from here.

So whether it’s in business and creativity and your personal growth, we know it’s frustrating and there’s always an opportunity for growth. So let’s get after it.

Lynn Howard

Absolutely. So how many of you have hit a wall before, like, face planted, super hard, eyes, bloody nose, not a real wall, but I have run into it, my actual.

It’s a very clean water, but the figurative wall, it can feel like a real wall. The first thing when, and Amanda and had a nice conversation around this and actually we’ve really saw this in real-time play over the last few weeks with our six days, with our own selves, but more externally because we’re doing all of these events and different things and we’re watching individuals, how they engage, react, respond, participate or not when they’re hitting a wall.

The first thing that we would suggest for you to do is, is it really a wall? Is it wall or a problem?

Like you’re making much bigger than what it needs to be. it like justice? Like this not really a wall but it’s in your head type of thing?

Is it because you’re lacking something? really, what is the wall? Recognizing it for what it is and really being clear.

about like I’m just exhausted and I can’t go any further or this problem is just too big for me to understand or my emotions whatever whatever it is but really not taking it for for the superficial kind of initial like whatever but digging a little deeper and is it truly is it truly a wall?

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Yeah it’s about stepping back and sort of assessing situation so you need to pause analyze what this block is because ultimately when you’re feeling that resistance is this that you’re burned out is it that you’re missing resources is that you’re stuck in perfectionism is it that you just need clarity move forward is it that you’re sinking into kind of your go to emotion or you go to fall back feelings and actions because a lot of times it’s just habit that’s making you feel like you’re hitting a wall and it’s not actually you’re

but there is a wall there. It’s just that you’re so used to hitting walls that you think it’s there when really it’s just like a window.

You got to crack open a little bit. So I think it’s really important to reflect and analyze what’s causing this.

Why do you feel like it’s there? And then ultimately it’s a lot of it’s about shifting your perspective. I think there’s a million ways to look at everything.

There’s a million angles for every single problem. There’s a million solutions for every single problem. So can you approach things with fresh eyes?

it really like Liz said, is it really a wall? Or do you just need an alternative solution? I can brainstorm other ideas.

Are you not putting yourself in the other person’s shoes? There’s so many different angles to look at it, but ultimately if you’re not taking a moment to analyze, step back, look at it and see it from another perspective, you might be hitting that wall for the rest of your life.

Lynn Howard

Now, yeah, I chuckle because… you are totally in your emotions, it’s hard to not react. You need to be in a responding mindset.

You need to be in an action mindset of how to get around, get over, get through, get under, you know, whatever that is.

But essentially, and then figure out how to avoid it, but we’ll get to that in a second. But you cannot be in that emotional state.

So taking that setback, taking those deep breaths, getting it out of panic mode, or that emotions, stop spiraling, right?

So a lot of people spiral and then they make a amount of amount of the molecules. Yeah, they don’t even know, and this might be you.

And I’ve been here, I’m sure Amanda’s been here where you’re so down the damn rabbit hole that you forget what the actual problem is that you’re freaking out and about.

So that’s why it’s so important. to just like step back to really see what is in your way and and how the best move forward.

Yeah.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Yes. And I think along with that, along with that stepping back taking a break from it comes simplifying and prioritizing.

And I know it’s no shock that Lynn and I talk about prioritization. We talk about it all the time.

But all that overwhelm that you’re feeling leads to stagnation. you it’s that analysis paralysis where you can’t go any further.

So if you can break the problem down into smaller manageable steps and then tackle them one by one, you’re going to get much further and really focus on those impactful actions than if you just sort of spiral out of control and like everything’s this huge problem and everything has to be done immediately and oh my god this this this this and it’s and I’m kind of chuckling to myself because I have a couple of clients who fall into that category of every time they talk to me, it’s like the has happened.

It’s the fan every week, like every week there’s drama in their business and so and so from HR and then this came down and I have this meeting that came up and I don’t have time for this and I’m so busy for that.

I’m just like take a breath, not not everything is an emergency and you’re so stuck in all the emergency mode the panic mode that you’re not actually getting anything done and then a week has passed and then you are in panic mode because you didn’t do anything for a full week.

Because you were too busy panicking about everything that wasn’t a big deal begin with and I know that seems a little bit callous on my part to say it, but there are a lot of things that we as a society as people romanticize it and like overdrammed radifies when it’s really not the big deal if there’s if it doesn’t matter in five years, then does it really matter like that’s that shares words words of wisdom not mine, but if it’s not important in five years, it’s probably not important now.

So like you don’t need to freak out every time the power goes out or you know, so-and-so shows up late for work or, you know, your car got towed, like, the things happen and they suck, yeah.

And, and now what? Because if you sit in that , everything’s going to smell like and you’re going to stop noticing that that’s what the smell is.

Lynn Howard

So you’re just going to like, this is the way everything smells.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

And that’s not how it’s going to be. That’s not how it’s going to be productive for you.

Lynn Howard

Not, not at all. Not at all. You need to step out and step into strategy as well, like having a strategy of how you’re going to do it those daily, those action steps.

You know, I was thinking when you were, when you were talking about a lot of this comes from lack of emotional intelligence, unhealed trauma, like, because it’s, it is a response, a reactive kind of mode.

It’s the way we deal with things. I know we want to talk a little bit about freeze, fight, fight and fawn.

And so how we respond, but it could be unhealed trauma, it could be lack of emotional intelligence, could be instability in our minds, in our circumstances, in our situation.

It could be lack of grounding of ourselves. Like there’s a lot of reasons why we tend to react and not be adaptive and not go with the flow and not like be able to step out, step back and said we’re in that like super scarcity, super defensive, super reactive kind of mode and complaining about everything.

That’s kind of a whole other layer of it. But yeah, and again, if you continue to keep living in that, just like the elephant, like that’s going to be the wall.

And eventually that wall, all fortifies itself. becomes harder and harder to get through it because you ingrained that so much in your brain and in your mechanisms.

let’s talk a little bit about freeze, fight, flight, fawn because we see a lot of people when they’re dealing with, you know, hitting that wall, how they initially react.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

You know, we’ve seen this a lot in group trings that we’ve done in one-on-ones that we’ve done. But ultimately, there’s well, not ultimately, but generally speaking, this is a generalization.

People tend to gravitate towards one or towards one. Like, if you’re faced with a saber tooth tiger, like, are you going to try to fight the tiger?

You can try to run away from the tiger. You’re just going to, like, lay back. These are internalized things that are just naturally part of us.

If you want to call it nature versus nurture, there’s all sorts of, you know, go ahead and go to a psychology class.

Go. read the psychology behind this. But ultimately, you will tend to fall towards one or the other. And this can be, it’s basically just a panic response, your automatic response of freezing up when something, when you get that anxiety, or when you’re feeling like you’re hitting a wall, you just freeze and do nothing, or you’re running away from the problems, or you’re fighting the problems and constantly pushing back, pushing back, pushing back, there’s, there’s, there’s something that you’re going to naturally fall into, curious if you know what you’re, what you naturally fall into, but we noticed it a lot with our clients.

And even when they say they don’t do it, and they’re like, no, I never, I never run from a fight.

I never run from a fight. And then like, the first time something gets hard, they’re like, be lying it to the parking lot.

So there’s, and it’s not, it’s not a wrong or right response who pulling you for, for running away if you need to.

And you’re, there is,

Lynn Howard

adapt quicker when you’re hitting the wall, the wall, the walls are going to come. Like either other people are going to put them in front of us, we naturally put them in front of ourselves, even if we’re the most grounded, healed, emotionally intelligent, thought leader, blah, blah, blah, we’re still human.

And so they’re there for a reason. And so if we can think of, first of all, understand what our natural ones are, what our go-to walls are, learn what they look like before they happen, so that way we can put strategy in place to of help us.

And that might be, you know, I know that I hit a wall and I check out doing my social media because I hate her, my email sequences because I hate them.

And so maybe I’m doing a work group with a bunch of my buddies, right, to get this done so that way I’m in a safe space.

I’m also with other people, whatever that is for you, but setting up Setting up things to help you succeed, to succeed, before you need them, because you understand what your walls are, because these walls tend to be the same walls over and over again.

once you recognize them, once you start to learn how to get around over them, through them even, then how do you prevent them?

How do you mitigate them? And I think that that also, again, is where that strategy comes into play. Like, really kind of looking at big picture and say, I know I tend to act this way.

My stress response is this. And so I need X to be able to make sure that I’m not sitting in the and smelling like it like Amanda.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Oh, I love that phrase. Well, I mean, and we mentioned this that the fight, light frees are fun. That’s like a tongue twister.

These are natural reactions. is just rooted in your nervous system. We’re not saying that you can complete we avoid these things or that they’re inherently bad because these are the things that kept you alive when you were fighting stay with the two tigers back in the olden days.

So these aren’t bad. This is just how your body navigates and handles conflict, it handles stress, handles challenges, difficult situations, and these are kind of your go-tos.

And you know, we talked about what ours are sort of, we talked, we loosely talked about ours. However, it’s different in different situations.

So certain things, I’m going to have a different response and depending on who’s around me. my response to conflict or to a challenge, but I’m by myself is different than if I’m in a group of people who are less or more capable than me.

So if I’m with my son, my fight, flight, freezer, farm response is going to be different in a dangerous situation than if I’m by myself.

And that’s pretty much obvious based on how I’ve traveled over as a 20 year old versus how I travel with my son now.

they’re like 20 year old Amanda was much less careful than already something you’re old Amanda, but just to kind of give a breakdown of what this looks like, so your fight facts, your fight response, this is like you’re you’re facing things head on, this can look like confrontation or aggression, anger, defensiveness.

Like an aggression doesn’t necessarily mean like you’re going to throw punches, like you’re not throw punching people left and right every day.

It could also just be verbal, like verbal diarrhea, like needing to win an argument just for the sake of winning the argument, like pushing back constantly.

Why are you chuckling over there? Why are chuckling? But this is like if you’re feeling like you’re on the work and you feel they need to like argue with a car or the coworker just for the sake of arguing, like you’re needing to take control of a project, that sort of your fight response.

So if you’re looking at like that’s an example of your fight response. your flight is escaping threats, like you’re running away from the saber tooth tiger, this is avoidance, this is excessive dizziness, anxiety,

Overworking, physically leaving a situation, getting up and leaving because you’re too overwhelmed, you’re uncomfortable. This is also procrastination, distraction.

this is definitely this is the the busyness. So instead of dealing with a difficult conversation, like you’re suddenly too busy to build that conversation or you suddenly need to leave the room to deal with that conversation, like I just, I can’t handle this right now.

And so you walk away from the conversation. That’s avoiding that confrontation. That’s an example of light. Freeze is shutting down and paralysis.

this is like zoning out, feeling stuck disassociation. Yeah, making, you’re having a difficulty making decisions, or you’re shutting down emotionally, you’re feeling numb.

That’s what the freeze feels like. And this is like, overwhelmed. think there’s a lot of feeling of overwhelmed in freeze as well.

For sure, for sure. Like when you have to make a tough decision at work or personal life and you’re feeling

like paralyzed. you just do nothing. This is a lot of analysis paralysis for sure. Like, you kind of hope the problem will just kind of fix itself like, Oh, if I ignore it, it’ll just, it’ll just kind of fix itself.

I don’t have to do anything. And then the last one is fawn, which is your people pleasing. So your people pleasing to survive, which sometimes it is a survival mechanism, like you people please for survival.

That is an absolute thing. all of these are real things in real danger situations. We’re not just talking on a superficial level.

Lynn Howard

These are real things.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Fawn is apologizing, like over apologizing, prioritizing everybody else over yourself, being overly accommodated. Yeah, pleasing instead of solvering, like no boundary setting at all, you’re always seeking approval, you’re seeking outside approval.

So instead of like standing on your own ground and demanding like putting down a policy and adhering to a policy in your business, like, for example, they want a cheaper rate or they want to discount or they want to refund that’s against your policy.

is then you do the extra, you go the extra mile to make them happy, even if it’s policy and it’s against what financially you can afford that you go bend over backwards to you know make them happy.

So that’s like a breakdown of what each of those are and these show up differently in different situations.

Lynn Howard

They do and I’m glad that you said that because not only do they show up differently but they are natural in us like we we all have them and there’s almost like a light side if you would and a dark side.

So it can be in spite of also in favor of because it is our natural pattern. It’s the way we handle challenges, conflicts, know high level or high stakes decisions like this is this these four are in bought they’re ingrained in us.

And I think as I this earlier is most of these are our go to or go to. because sometimes we embody multiple.

They are formed typically from early, early childhood, early survival kind of mechanisms, right? That’s where we kind of learn our boundaries and our go to.

It’s a, but when we can recognize them, when we understand what our go to behavior is in these conflicts or hitting a wall or whatever, it will help us be more empowered to respond versus react and we shift our ourselves into more of a conscious state versus a reactive state.

So why it’s important and why we brought this up of how to adapt when you’re hitting a wall is you have to understand your natural go to mechanisms, right?

Otherwise, you’re always going to be held in that pattern?

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Absolutely. mean, it’s how you develop coping mechanisms like healthy coping mechanisms. If you can identify what it is and your triggers and when you’re sort of getting stuck and you’re hitting a wall and why you’re hitting that wall, then it’s much easier to come out of it if you can recognize it.

you’re just like throwing spaghetti in the wall hoping that something hits like some some coping mechanism hits, it’s going to take a lot longer and then just knowing the answer and doing that one thing.

Again, we’re just trying to simplify and make it easier for you to take care of yourself because mental and physical burnout, which is basically what hitting a wall is, it can be that big culprit and it’s you’ve got to prioritize the other things in your life and sometimes that means the healthy coping mechanisms that you have to use in order to get over that thing whatever it is.

again, this is like, this is life. There’s nobody’s perfect, nobody avoids these things. And you want to have these.

So we don’t want to make it sound like these are bad things, because again, this is what kept you alive when you were being like, when you’re walking down a creepy alley and you sent something, this is that part of your nervous system kicking in to keep you alive.

This is the fight of the saber tooth tiger. This has kept us alive for thousands of years. So we’re not fighting it or denying that exists or denying its usefulness.

However, when we’re in a wall, there’s often a reason behind it, and these are kind of the culprits.

Lynn Howard

Yeah, so now you know what your wall is. Now you understand kind of your patterns, you know, to it how you respond or react.

The strategy behind getting around with it. Two other things to add is in order to get a different result, you have to do things differently.

So change it up, like figure out how to change things up, test a different approach, and start with small .

action is important. You get clarity in the action. Don’t overthink it. Just do. And also having some kind of root to the why.

So, and we’ve talked a lot about this. I remember coming back to this several times over the past few weeks is the is the that you’re sitting in more important than the the freedom of not being in that, right?

So, on this side of the wall or this side of the wall, which one drives you more and understanding the why or the root behind that will help you help be a driving force or could be it could help be a driving force for you to get over get around get under get through it and create new patterns and new strategies to either avoid or minimize mitigate them as you approach them because they’re going to happen.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

They’re going to happen and You know, you’re talking about the hitting that same wall over and over again earlier and I kept thinking, like, if you keep hitting these same walls, you’re actually really building another brick.

So every time you hit that wall at the same time, you’re just putting another brick down another brick and other brick until you have to literally go through multiple walls that are the same wall, because you’ve built so much of that up in your psyche and your habits and your processes.

So, if you notice that wall forming like nip it in the butt early because the last thing you want is to have to take four times as long to break through that wall so embrace the challenge of it.

You know, we want to experiment with things we want to I mean it’s like the golden world of 2020 to 2025 pivot.

We want to pivot we want to embrace the challenges because that’s part of the journey that’s part of what makes us stronger and smarter and more resilient and more interesting and have better senses of humor.

So, we want to have a little bit of that tenacity and you’ve got to go for it and you’ve got to actually put in the work to break down the walls because it’s really easy to keep putting the bricks down, building, building, building, building, building, but it actually sometimes takes more work to bring them down.

Lynn Howard

Yeah. All right. We’re at time. If this podcast resonates with you, go ahead and share it with somebody who you know that needs to hear about adapting and getting over or under or through those walls and setting themselves up for more success.

But also hit subscribe, listen, subscribe, subscribe to our newsletter, hear all the cool things that are coming out. Let us know what other topics that you want to hear about so that way we can add them because all these topics came, these were recording several today.

And all these topics came from some of you, our listeners. And we’re really excited to be able to give you the content that you want.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

That’s right. So until next time, get after it.