Still Stuck After All The Mindset Work? How Mind-Body Coaching Helps Your Body Catch Up with Change

Amy Cotterill
Sep 17
3 min read

Updated: Oct 7

Why You Still Feel Stuck (Even When You’re Doing the Work): How Mind-Body Coaching Helps You Move Forward

Woman focused on laptop at outdoor café, surrounded by plants and umbrellas. A book and juice are on the table, creating a calm scene.

You’ve done the work.

You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, maybe worked with a coach or therapist. You know your patterns. You’re self-aware.

You want things to change - and maybe you’ve even made some big decisions already - but somehow, you still don’t feel like you’re moving forward.

And that’s the part that’s hard to explain.

You know what’s holding you back. So why can’t you shift it?

Maybe you hold back in conversations, even when you’ve promised yourself you wouldn’t.

Maybe your body tenses up every time you go to say what you really want.

Maybe you get hit with tiredness, fog, or overthinking just as you’re about to take action.

And then comes the self-doubt.

“Maybe I’m not ready.”

“Maybe I just need to try harder.”

“Why can’t I get this right when I’ve done so much work?”

But here’s what I want you to know:

This is not a mindset issue. It’s a body-based one.

Not because you’re not capable, but because your body is still operating from a different set of instructions.

When your mind is ready but your body isn’t

The kind of stuckness I’m talking about isn’t laziness or sabotage.

It’s your nervous system doing what it’s designed to do: protect you.

When certain experiences - speaking up, being seen, setting boundaries - have been linked to stress or shame in the past, your body learns to associate them with threat.

Even if you know you’re safe now, your system may still be running an outdated survival pattern.

This is why traditional coaching doesn’t always create lasting change.

You can shift beliefs and set goals, but if your nervous system still feels on edge, your body will find subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways to pull the brakes.

That’s not failure. That’s physiology.

This is where mind-body coaching changes the game

The mind-body for change coaching I offer blends nervous system regulation, subconscious re-patterning, and somatic release.

We’re not just talking things through, we’re working directly with your body’s stored patterns so the shift isn’t just intellectual, it’s felt.

Because real change doesn’t happen when you push harder.

It happens when your system feels safe enough to do something new.

When your body gets the message that it’s not under threat anymore - that it can breathe, soften, and move - things start to open:

→ You take action more easily

→ Boundaries don’t feel so high-stakes

→ Confidence becomes something you feel, not something you have to force

You begin to trust yourself - not just in theory, but in your actual lived experience.

What does this actually look like?

Every session is shaped around you — but here’s how we work with the nervous system in practice:

If you’re stuck in indecision, we’ll slow things right down. Often, indecision is a dorsal vagal response - your system has gone into shutdown because the options feel unsafe. We bring in regulation tools to shift you out of that freeze state, so choice becomes available again.
If you’re carrying old fear, we use gentle breathwork and body tracking to help complete the stress response. This helps calm the amygdala (your brain’s fear centre) and re-signal safety to your system, so you can act without that familiar spike of tension.
If you’re drowning in self-doubt, we work beneath the cognitive loop. Doubt is often a sympathetic charge - a fight-flight response. We use grounding, orienting, and somatic release to help your system process that charge and come back into connection. That’s what makes space for action.