Why You Feel Stuck and the Science of Human Motivation and What It Takes to Flourish
- Jun 27
- 11 min read
Vicky Russ is a leadership coach and former CEO with 20+ years’ experience across the public, health and education sectors. She specialises in leadership, transformation and helping leaders navigate complex change and life transitions.
You know you are capable of more. So why can’t you start? Why does the motivation vanish the moment you need it most? The answer is not willpower. It is something far more fundamental, and far more fixable.
Why do we get stuck? It is one of the most common and least understood experiences of professional life. You have the skills. You have the experience. You may even have a clear sense of what you want. Yet something holds you back. The energy is not there. The direction feels unclear. The gap between where you are and where you want to be feels paralysing rather than motivating.
For some, the “stuckness” arrives after a major career disruption, redundancy, restructure, burnout, or a long absence from work. For others, it creeps in gradually: a slow erosion of purpose, a growing sense that the career they built no longer fits the person they have become. Either way, the experience is remarkably similar. You are functioning. You are getting through the day. But you are not flourishing. Somewhere inside, you know the difference.
The instinct, when we feel stuck, is to try harder. Push through. Set goals. Make a plan. But decades of psychological research suggest that the problem is rarely a lack of effort. It is a lack of the right conditions, the internal conditions that make motivation sustainable, growth possible, and genuine flourishing achievable. Understanding what those conditions are changes everything.
The difference between functioning and flourishing
The psychologist Corey Keyes developed a model that fundamentally challenges how we think about mental health and wellbeing. His dual continua model demonstrates that the absence of mental illness is not the same as the presence of mental health. You can be free of clinical depression or anxiety and still be languishing, going through the motions, meeting your responsibilities, but not experiencing the vitality, connection, or sense of purpose that characterise a life well lived.
Flourishing, in Keyes’ framework, describes a state where individuals combine high levels of subjective wellbeing with optimal psychological and social functioning. It is not about being happy all the time. It is about experiencing meaning, engagement, and growth, about feeling that your life and work are genuinely aligned with who you are.
Martin Seligman’s PERMA model builds on this understanding by identifying the five measurable pillars of flourishing: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Seligman’s research, conducted at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, shows that wellbeing is not a single feeling but a composite, and that each pillar can be deliberately strengthened. When all five are present, people do not merely cope. They thrive. When one or more is missing, even outwardly successful people can feel hollow, disconnected, or stuck.
This distinction matters enormously for professionals navigating career transitions, returning to work after absence, or recovering from toxic workplace experiences. Many of these people are not unwell in any clinical sense. They are functioning. They are coping. But they are not thriving. The conventional support available to them, job search advice, CV workshops, interview preparation, addresses the functional level without ever touching the deeper question: what would it take for you to flourish?
What fuels motivation, and what kills it
Self-determination theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci over four decades of research, provides one of the most robust answers psychology has to offer about what drives human motivation. Their work, which has been validated across cultures, age groups, and professional contexts, identifies three basic psychological needs that must be met for a person to experience sustained, intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy is the need to feel that your actions are self-directed, that you are the author of your own choices, not merely responding to external pressure. Competence is the need to feel effective, that you are growing, learning, and making a meaningful contribution. Relatedness is the need for genuine connection, to feel that you belong, that you matter to others, and that your work exists within a web of meaningful relationships.
When these three needs are met, people are naturally motivated, engaged, and resilient. When they are thwarted, by controlling management, by work that feels meaningless, by isolation, or by the sudden loss of a professional role, motivation does not simply decrease. It collapses. No amount of goal setting or positive thinking can compensate for the absence of these fundamental psychological nutrients.
This is why so many professionals feel stuck after redundancy or a difficult career transition. It is not that they lack ambition or discipline. It is that the three conditions their motivation depends upon have been disrupted simultaneously. Their autonomy was taken away by a decision they did not make. Their sense of competence was undermined by the implicit message that they were no longer needed. Their relatedness, their professional community, their daily connections, their sense of belonging, disappeared overnight.
The engine room of growth
If self-determination theory explains what motivation needs, Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory explains how growth actually happens. Fredrickson’s research, developed at the University of North Carolina, demonstrates that positive emotions are not merely pleasant experiences. They are functional. They are the engine room of personal development.
The theory works in four stages. First, the experience of a positive emotion, interest, curiosity, hope, joy, gratitude, or pride in an achievement. Second, a broadening of thought and behaviour: the person becomes more creative, more open to new ideas, and more willing to explore and take risks. Third, the building of personal resources, new skills, new relationships, new ways of thinking, and greater resilience. Fourth, a transformation of the self: the person becomes more capable, more connected, and more confident than they were before.
What makes this research so important for anyone feeling stuck is its central finding: while negative emotions narrow our thinking, fight, flight, freeze, positive emotions broaden it. They expand what we are able to see, imagine, and do. The resources built during these moments of broadened awareness outlast the emotions themselves. They accumulate over time, creating an upward spiral of capability and wellbeing.
This connects directly to Seligman’s PERMA framework. Positive emotion is the first pillar for good reason, it is the catalyst that unlocks the other four. When we experience positive emotions, we become more engaged, we deepen our relationships, we find greater meaning, and we achieve more. The pillars are not independent. They reinforce one another in exactly the kind of upward spiral that Fredrickson’s research describes.
This has profound implications for career transitions. A person who is stuck in fear, shame, or self-doubt after a career setback is operating with a narrowed cognitive repertoire. They cannot see possibilities. They cannot access their creativity. They are surviving, not building. The path to flourishing begins not with a five-year plan but with the deliberate cultivation of the positive emotional states that make growth possible.
Building your psychological capital
Fred Luthans and colleagues introduced the concept of psychological capital, PsyCap, to describe a set of four positive psychological resources that predict performance, wellbeing, and resilience. The four components form the acronym HERO: hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism.
Hope, in this framework, is not wishful thinking. It is the capacity to set meaningful goals and identify pathways to achieve them. Efficacy is the confidence to take on challenging tasks and persist through difficulty. Resilience is the ability to sustain effort after setbacks and bounce back, and even beyond, to achieve success. Optimism is the tendency to make positive attributions about the future, to believe that effort will lead to meaningful outcomes.
What makes PsyCap particularly relevant is that it is not a fixed trait. Twenty-five years of research across multiple countries has demonstrated that psychological capital is a state-like quality. It can be measured, developed, and strengthened through targeted intervention. It is not something you either have or you do not. It is something you can build. That building process is precisely what effective coaching facilitates.
The research consistently shows that higher PsyCap is associated with greater job satisfaction, stronger performance, better physical and mental health, and increased wellbeing. For professionals rebuilding after career disruption, developing these four resources is not an optional extra. It is the psychological infrastructure upon which everything else depends.
Why conventional career coaching is not enough
The data on workplace motivation in the United Kingdom tells a stark story. According to Gallup’s research, only 10 percent of UK workers are engaged in their jobs, placing the UK 33rd out of 38 European countries. Forty percent report feeling stressed, 27 percent feel sad, and 20 percent feel angry at work. Each disengaged employee costs their organisation roughly 20 percent of their annual salary in lost output.
These numbers reflect a crisis of motivation on a national scale. Yet the dominant approach to career support remains overwhelmingly practical: find the next role, update the CV, prepare for the interview. This addresses the surface. It does not address the person.
Gallup’s own research demonstrates why this matters. People who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work, three times more likely to report an excellent quality of life, and 15 percent less likely to leave their jobs. Building on strengths is a far more effective route to performance than trying to fix weaknesses. Yet, most career support barely acknowledges that strengths exist, let alone helps people identify, understand, and deploy them.
This is the gap that psychologically informed coaching fills. Not by replacing practical career support, but by going deeper, by working with the whole person, not just their CV. By helping them understand what drives their motivation, what values they want their career to express, what strengths they bring that are uniquely theirs, and what vision of the future would genuinely excite them rather than simply relieve their anxiety.
From surviving to thriving: What deeper coaching looks like
The coaching approach that integrates these evidence-based frameworks looks fundamentally different from conventional career coaching. It begins not with “What job do you want?” but with “Who are you, and what does flourishing look like for you?”
It uses self-determination theory to identify which of the three basic needs, autonomy, competence, or relatedness, has been most disrupted, and to design a path that restores all three. It draws on Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory to deliberately cultivate the positive emotional states that expand thinking and enable growth. It builds psychological capital, hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, so that the person has the internal resources to sustain momentum through the inevitable uncertainties of transition.
And it uses Seligman’s PERMA model as a practical compass for the whole journey, ensuring that the career being built is one that delivers not just an income but positive emotion, genuine engagement, meaningful relationships, a sense of purpose, and real accomplishment. A career scored against all five pillars is a career designed to sustain you, not deplete you.
It integrates strengths and values work at every stage. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but as the foundation of a career that fits. A career that aligns with who you actually are, not who you think you should be. A career that integrates with your life purpose, your goals, and the things that give you energy, so that work becomes a source of vitality rather than a source of depletion.
This is coaching that bridges the gap between functioning and flourishing. It does not just help people find the next job. It helps them find the version of themselves that has been waiting to emerge. It is not therapy, but it is psychologically informed. It is not mentoring, but it draws on lived experience. It addresses a need that very few practitioners are currently meeting: the need for career support that treats the human being, not just the career.
The question worth asking
If you are feeling stuck, unmotivated, or disconnected from the work you are doing or the life you are living, the problem is almost certainly not a lack of effort. It is a lack of the conditions that make effort meaningful. Your autonomy, your competence, your sense of connection, your positive emotions, your psychological capital, one or more of these has been depleted, and no amount of pushing through will restore them.
The research is clear. Motivation is not a character trait. It is a product of conditions. Those conditions can be created, rebuilt, and sustained, with the right support.
The question is not “Why can’t I get motivated?” The question is “What would it take for me to flourish?” That question deserves a proper answer. The answer is worth investing in.
Ten ways to start building positive emotions today
Fredrickson’s research shows that positive emotions are not a reward for getting life right. They are the starting point. The following practices are small, evidence-based, and designed to be sustainable. Choose two or three to begin with. The goal is not to feel positive all the time, that is unrealistic, it is to create the conditions that broaden your thinking and build the personal resources you need to grow.
Three good things. Each evening, write down three things that went well and why. This is one of the most extensively researched positive psychology interventions, shown to increase wellbeing and reduce depressive symptoms within two weeks.
Strengths in action. Choose one of your signature strengths, VIA Character, each week and find a new way to use it every day. If your strength is curiosity, ask a question you have been avoiding. If it is kindness, do something deliberately generous. Notice how it feels.
Savour the small things. When something positive happens, however small, pause and fully experience it. We are wired to dwell on negatives; savouring deliberately strengthens the neural pathways for positive experience.
Get specific with gratitude. Go beyond generic thankfulness. Instead of “I’m grateful for my family,” try “I’m grateful my daughter made me laugh this morning.” Specificity deepens the emotional impact.
Protect your energy. Carry out an energy audit. Identify the activities that energise you most and schedule at least one into every day, even fifteen minutes. Treat it as non-negotiable.
Connect with one person daily. Reach out with a genuine message, not a networking message, but a human one. Relatedness is one of the three basic psychological needs, and even small moments of connection have measurable effects on wellbeing.
Learn something new. Novelty stimulates curiosity and interest, two of the most growth-promoting positive emotions. Read a book, listen to podcasts, learn a language, paint, draw, create. The broadening effect transfers across every area of your life.
Move your body with attention. Physical activity reliably generates positive emotion, but the key is noticing how your body feels during and after. Walking in nature, in particular, reduces rumination and increases creative thinking. See item 3.
Check your values compass. Once a week, review your core values and ask: did I live in alignment with these? Where did I drift? This keeps your decisions anchored in what matters most.
Visualise your future self. Spend five minutes imagining the version of you who is flourishing, professionally and personally. Research shows this increases optimism and goal-directed behavior, inspiring you to work through the less stimulating tasks. Be as vivid and specific as you can.
You were not built to function. You were built to flourish. The science says you can.
Read more from Victoria (Vicky) Russ
Victoria (Vicky) Russ, Managing Director and Leadership Coach
Vicky Russ is a leadership coach and former CEO with over 20 years’ experience across the public, health and education sectors. She specialises in leadership, transformation and helping leaders navigate complex change and life transitions. Her work focuses on supporting leaders to maintain performance while creating psychologically safe, high-performing cultures. Vicky is also a teacher of Positive Psychology Leadership and brings a practical, human approach to even the most challenging situations. She is passionate about “protecting the protectors” and helping leaders move from pressure to purpose.
References:
Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2017). Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. Guilford Press.
Fredrickson, B.L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.
Fredrickson, B.L. (2004). The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 359(1449), 1367-1377.
Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Free Press.
Seligman, M.E.P. (2018). PERMA and the Building Blocks of Well-Being. Journal of Positive Psychology, 13(4), 333-335.
Luthans, F., Youssef-Morgan, C.M., and Avolio, B.J. (2015). Psychological Capital and Beyond. Oxford University Press.
Luthans, F. and Youssef-Morgan, C.M. (2024). Psychological capital and mental health: Twenty-five years of progress. Organizational Dynamics, 53(4).
Keyes, C.L.M. (2002). The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 43(2), 207-222.
Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report. gallup.com
Gallup (2024). Employees Who Use Their Strengths Outperform Those Who Don’t. gallup.com/workplace
Health and Safety Executive (2025). Work-related stress, anxiety and depression statistics in Great Britain 2024/25. hse.gov.uk
CHEER At Work (2026). UK Employee Engagement Statistics 2025-2026. cheeratwork.com
Linley, P.A. and Harrington, S. (2006). Strengths Coaching: A Potential-Guided Approach to Coaching Psychology. International Coaching Psychology Review, 1(1), 37-46.
