Moving Toward the Life You Want (even when it’s hard).
You don’t have to feel ready to move forward. Learn how taking small, values-based steps—even with discomfort—can help you build a meaningful life.
By Maraya Pena, Marriage and Family Therapist, Intern
There might be a version of your life that you want to move toward.
Maybe in that version you speak more honestly, show up more fully, and feel more like yourself. Getting there doesn’t always feel easy and the path ahead might look distant because along the way there might be thoughts that show up: “what if i mess this up?” or “what if i’m not ready?”
The emotions that follow are generally fear, doubt, and uncertainty leading us to pause our steps ahead because it might feel hard.
The Waiting Game
It’s definitely natural to want to feel ready before taking a step forward. Maybe you are waiting to feel ready to speak your needs, try something new, or make a change in your life.
Our nervous system craves certainty, confidence, and less anxiety. But sometimes that feeling of “ready” doesn’t always come or pushes us in an anxiety loop.
It makes sense to want to feel prepared before doing something hard, but when your actions depend on how you feel it can keep your life on constant pause. Feelings change or come and go, and if you are waiting for fear, doubt, or discomfort to completely disappear before your move forward, you might be stuck playing the waiting game.
Moving Forward with Emotional Flexibility
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the focus isn’t on waiting for the “right” feeling. Instead, it’s learning how to move in the direction of what matters (even when uncomfortable thoughts and emotions are present).
In these moments, instead of trying to get rid of fear or doubt, you can learn how to use emotional flexibility to move with them and carry discomfort without letting it decide everything.
Maybe that looks like:
speaking up, even when your voice feels shaky
setting a boundary, even when it feels uncomfortable
showing up, even when part of you wants to avoid it.
Moving toward those things not because you feel ready, but because they matter to you.
Values Driven Direction
Values and feelings can have a similar role internally, but are also different in a sense of feelings are generally temporary and values are more directional. Values reflect the kind of person you want to be, how you want to show up, and what matters most to you.
When you act from your values, you aren’t necessarily waiting to feel a certain way first. You are choosing that matters to you.
You don’t need the perfect moment or plan, you just need to know where you want to move toward.
One Small Step Is Enough
Moving forward doesn’t have to be big. It can be one small shift toward something that matters like:
sending the message you’ve been thinking about
saying one honest sentence out loud instead of overexplaining yourself
showing up even if you feel nervous (not to get this confused with feeling unsafe. safety is number one priority).
choosing not to avoid something that matters to you (building self-trust).
A small shift can also look like:
Instead of asking: “Do i feel ready?”
Try asking: “What matters to me here?”
Try taking one small step in that direction even if part of you feels uncomfortable.
Final Thoughts
Moving toward the future you want doesn’t mean eliminating doubts, feelings, or fears. You don’t have to have everything figured out today, you just have to take one small step and then another. Begin as you are, just one percent at a time.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If this resonates with you, therapy can be a place to begin reconnecting with yourself in a deeper and more intentional way. Whether you are feeling stuck in old patterns, disconnected in your relationships, or unsure of who you are in this season of life, support is available.
Reach out through the contact page to schedule a consultation and take your next step toward healing.
About The Author
Maraya Pena is the founder of One Percent Counseling, LLC. She helps individuals and couples navigate anxiety, relationship challenges, emotional overwhelm, and life transitions with greater clarity, self-awareness, and connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and focused on helping clients create meaningful change one step at a time.
You Are Not Your Thoughts.
Your thoughts can feel convincing—but they’re not facts. Learn how to step back from overthinking and create space from your mind using simple ACT-based tools.
By Maraya Pena, Marriage and Family Therapist, Intern
There is something your mind can do really well: tell stories.
Stories about who you are, what you are doing wrong, and what might happen next. Sometimes, those stories feel so real that you don’t even question them.
When Thoughts Start to Feel Like Facts
A can show up telling the story of:
“I’m not doing enough.”
“I always mess things up.”
“Something bad is going to happen.”
Instead of noticing it as a thought, it starts to feel like the truth.
Some second nature responses to the thoughts are generally overthinking, second-guessing yourself, holding back from the present moment, or trying to fix it.
Getting Hooked by Your Thoughts
The reality is, this is not a unique experience and something many people encounter.
Your mind starts to say something, and you gethooked by it. Then, you are no longer just having the thought but you’re getting stuck inside of it. When this happens your thoughts can start to:
shape your mood
influence your decisions
limit how you show up in your life
You might not even realize it at first, but your mind and body are interconnected in most ways.
What If Your Thoughts Aren’t the Problem?
Naturally, thoughts will come and go throughout the day. The goal isn’t to get rid of your thoughts and that safety shield mindset usually makes them louder and doesn’t work in the long run.
Instead, what if the shift is this: learning how to see your thoughts as thoughts and not as facts you have to obey.
Creating Space from Your Mind
When you become intertwined within your thoughts, you might start to believe they are urgent commands or absolute facts. In ACT, you learn to shift your perspective from looking from inside of the thought to looking at them from an external position. This is called defusion or in other words, detaching from distressing thoughts.
It’s the ability to step back, even just slightly, from what your mind is saying. Refraining from arguing with it or trying to prove it wrong, but just to notice it.
When you can notice a thought, you are no longer completely inside of it. The goal isn’t to force positivity or get rid of thoughts forever, but to instead make space for them that doesn’t dictate your behavior and steal your present self.
A Small Shift You Can Try
The next time your mind says something like:
“I’m going to mess this up”
Pause and gently say: “I’m noticing the thought that I’m going to mess this up.”
This might feel small, but the purpose is to create distance and soften the intensity of the thought and gives you more choice in how you respond. Just like daily habits like eating healthy or working out, your brain needs to be rewired and retrained to not be afraid of your thoughts.
Your Thoughts Are Like Clouds in the Sky
You don’t have to believe every thought you have. Your mind will continue to generate thoughts because that is essentially one of the many jobs it does. Some will be helpful, and some won’t be so helpful. But you don’t have to believe all of them and you don’t have to let them run your life.
A technique you might want to try is to visualize your thoughts written on clouds in the windy sky, then watch them drift away rather than holding on to them.
Final Thoughts
You can learn to notice your thoughts, create space for them, and still move toward what matters even when your mind is loud. You are not your thoughts, you are the one noticing them. Within that small space is where change can start to begin.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If this resonates with you, therapy can be a place to begin reconnecting with yourself in a deeper and more intentional way. Whether you are feeling stuck in old patterns, disconnected in your relationships, or unsure of who you are in this season of life, support is available.
Reach out through the contact page to schedule a consultation and take your next step toward healing.
About The Author
Maraya Pena is the founder of One Percent Counseling, LLC. She helps individuals and couples navigate anxiety, relationship challenges, emotional overwhelm, and life transitions with greater clarity, self-awareness, and connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and focused on helping clients create meaningful change one step at a time.
Make Space For Your Emotions (instead of fighting them)
What if your emotions aren’t the problem? Learn how fighting anxiety, sadness, or anger can make them stronger—and how to make space for what you feel without being overwhelmed.
By Maraya Pena, Marriage and Family Therapist, Intern
Most people actually know the moment emotions show up such as anxiety, sadness, and frustration. However, some might have been conditioned to respond to these emotions with avoidance or “i just need this to go away”.
So time after time, the emotion is constantly being pushed down and you are distracting yourself or talking yourself out of feeling it. For many, this is a protective factor in moments of unwanted stress or discomfort (and it can work for a while). Eventually, the emotions come back, get louder, and heavier until its not just a signal being noticed but more of a feeling you are trying to constantly fight.
The exhaustion of fighting your emotions
Just like most situations, we treat emotions like problems that need to be solved and the result can be a constant loop:
a feeling shows up
you try to control or avoid it
it sticks around (or comes back stronger)
then you try even harder to discredit or avoid it
Over time, this can create burnout not just from the emotion itself, but also from the overwhelming effort of trying not to feel it at all.
Your emotions aren’t the problem
Emotions (even the most uncomfortable ones) are just a part of being human.
Anxiety can show up in moments when something matters, sadness can show up when something hurts, and frustration can show up when something feels unfair. They aren’t necessarily convenient or timed well and they most definitely aren’t always easy.
But they’re also not something that needs to be completely eliminated.
What happens when you stop fighting
When you stop trying to push emotions away, something can shift inside your brain and nervous system and telling our internal selves we don’t have to be afraid to feel. The feeling may not completely disappear, but the struggle around it can soften up and the emotion wave eventually comes back down.
Instead of: “I can’t feel this”
It becomes: “this is here right now”
Just allowing a subtle shift in perspective and taking a split second breath to allow space instead of problem solving can reduce how overwhelming it feels, help you stay present instead of spiraling, and give you an actual choice of how to respond.
What “making space” actually looks like
Making space for your emotions doesn’t mean you like them or that you want them there. It can mean you are allowing them to exist without trying to immediately change them.
In real life, that might look like:
pausing instead of reacting right away
noticing where you feel the emotion in your body
letting the feeling rise and fall without forcing it out
continuing what matters, even while the feeling is there
It’s less about doing things perfectly and more about not fighting what’s already happening.
One of the biggest fears people might have is “if i let myself feel this, it will take over.”
But often, that resistance is what makes emotions feel bigger and when you allow space for them, they tend to move, shift, or change on their own.
A small shift you can try
The next time a difficult emotion shows up try:
Instead of asking: “how do i get rid of this”
Ask (gently): “can i make a little space for this, just for a moment?”
You don’t have to commit to the feeling forever, just for the short moment.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to be a master or expert of your emotions and you don’t need to get rid of them. You also don’t have to fight your emotions to be okay or emotionally safe. You can learn to hold them without letting them hold you.
Learning to feel them, make space for them, and still move forward are the small steps that can create meaningful change one percent at a time.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If this resonates with you, therapy can be a place to begin reconnecting with yourself in a deeper and more intentional way. Whether you are feeling stuck in old patterns, disconnected in your relationships, or unsure of who you are in this season of life, support is available.
Reach out through the contact page to schedule a consultation and take your next step toward healing.
About The Author
Maraya Pena is the founder of One Percent Counseling, LLC. She helps individuals and couples navigate anxiety, relationship challenges, emotional overwhelm, and life transitions with greater clarity, self-awareness, and connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and focused on helping clients create meaningful change one step at a time.
You’re Not Broken: Why trying to “fix” yourself is keeping you stuck.
Trying to fix every thought or emotion can leave you feeling more stuck, not less. Learn how emotional flexibility can help you move forward—without needing to “fix” yourself first.
By Maraya Pena, Marriage and Family Therapist, Intern
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned a subliminal message: if I could just fix myself and my feelings, I will finally feel okay.
We might believe that “fixing” the emotions, the anxiety and the overthinking will surely change our reactions or the way we show up. To some extent that might feel like it will work, especially if we have conditioned ourselves to push down uncomfortable feelings and put a band-aid of “think more positive” over them. You might even tell yourself “just get it together” and yet, the feeling of stuck is still hiding in the background of your body or subconscious.
The lack of control can lead to frustration and even more overwhelm than the initial emotions even presented in the first place.
You’re not broken, but it can feel that way.
When your thoughts feel loud, your emotions feel overwhelming, or your relationships feel harder, it is easy to assume “something must be wrong with me”.
And the initial instinct is to probably turn inward and start trying to fix everything you experience. However, emotions a problem to fix or an equation to solve. In the contrary, the constant effort to fix yourself can actually create more of the struggle you’re trying to escape.
It’s not necessarily wrong to want to problem solve, but the approach in itself is exhausting.
The trap of “fixing yourself”.
When thoughts and emotions are treated like problems to solve, you might get stuck in a cycle that looks like:
You notice a thought or feeling you don’t like
You try to get rid of it, change it, or control it
It comes back (often a lot stronger)
You try even harder
Over time, your energy goes into managing your inner world instead of actually living your life and you might find yourself overthinking everything, avoiding situations, waiting to “feel better” before taking action, and feeling like you are constantly working on yourself but never actually moving forward.
What if nothing is wrong with you?
What if your anxiety, your self-doubt, and your emotional reactions aren’t signs that you are broken…what if they are simply just part of being human?
That doesn’t mean that you have to like how you feel or that things don’t need to change. There are absolutely tools that can be learned to open up a different possibility.
Maybe the goal isn’t to fix yourself, but instead to change how you relate to what you experience.
A different approach: Emotional Flexibility.
Emotional flexibility is the ability to:
Notice your thoughts and feelings
make space for them (without judgement or overwhelm)
still move toward the life you want.
You can’t get rid of discomfort completely, but you can not let discomfort run your life. For example, one small shift can look like:
Instead of asking: “how do i stop feeling this way?”
You begin to ask: “how do i live my life, even when i feel this way?”
You don’t have to fix yourself to move forward.
You don’t have to wait until your thoughts are silent or your anxiety is gone or you feel completely confident. You can take a small, meaningful step forward with those things still present. That might look like setting a boundary, saying what you feel, taking a walk outside, or letting a feeling exist and showing up even when it is uncomfortable.
Not in a perfect way or even all at once, but just one percent at a time.
Final Thoughts
At One Percent Counseling, I believe that change doesn’t come from “fixing” who you are but with small steps in learning how to be with yourself differently, responding instead of reacting, and moving one percent forward (even when its hard).
If you have been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like you are constantly trying to “work on yourself” let this be a reminder that you don’t have to fix yourself to start moving forward.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If this resonates with you, therapy can be a place to begin reconnecting with yourself in a deeper and more intentional way. Whether you are feeling stuck in old patterns, disconnected in your relationships, or unsure of who you are in this season of life, support is available.
Reach out through the contact page to schedule a consultation and take your next step toward healing.
About The Author
Maraya Pena is the founder of One Percent Counseling, LLC. She helps individuals and couples navigate anxiety, relationship challenges, emotional overwhelm, and life transitions with greater clarity, self-awareness, and connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and focused on helping clients create meaningful change one step at a time.