Stuck

by Kim Casey Cobb

Overview

In her first book, Kim offers tough yet encouraging advice to help break down mental barriers holding you back from achieving what is truly possible in your life.

Kim shares moments from her own dramatic story. She shows how she overcame parental abduction, was a missing child and was one of the first kids on a milk carton. But, she went on to achieve health, happiness, and success in her life.

This book offers a realistic, step-by-step process to overcome adversity, obstacles, challenges, and moves on to show you how to create a vision for yourself, set goals, and achieve your potential, no matter where you started or where you find yourself now. It will evoke a positive “can do” mentality and inspire people to continuously grow and improve their lives for the better so that they can ultimately be of help to others facing challenges in life.

Among the many benefits you’ll reap from reading this book you’ll learn:

• The things in your life that you are actually in control of and their benefit to you.
• How to stop believing lies about yourself
• How to stop making excuses
• How to stop allowing others to hold you back
• How to move forward towards your vision

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948484732
Publisher:	Clovercroft Publishing
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kim Casey Cobb has had a successful career in business serving as a CFO for several companies and currently serves as an advisor to business owners and works in the investment community. She is a self-proclaimed lifelong learner and believes in a world of future possibilities. Kim was abducted at the age of nine. She became an FBI missing person and her face was featured on a milk carton. She lived, at times homeless, on the run with her younger brother. Though she never stopped trying, Kim’s mother was never able to find her. At the age of sixteen, she ran away to seek help, healing, and to begin a healthy life. She achieved mental clarity over her circumstances, which cleared the path for her to achieve much more in her life than she ever dreamed. She lives near Dallas, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Have you ever noticed that when women succeed, they are more likely to attribute their success to luck and help from others, yet when they fail, they blame their own lack of ability? Why is that? More important, what can we do to change this?

Five years from now, you will be the same as you are today, except for the people you meet and the new things you expose yourself to. You Today + People You Meet + Things You Learn = Future You. You are also the average of five people you associate yourself with. Mediocrity breeds mediocrity.

I am a woman who has overcome adversity and chosen not to be a victim of my circumstances. I have taken responsibility for developing my abilities in order to keep moving forward in life. I am passionate about continuous learning, solving problems, believing I can make a difference, and seeing people I have mentored succeed. I am adamantly motivated to share my experiences and story with you. My sincere hope is that you will find some useful nuggets from my personal journey to apply to your own path forward.

I believe in a world of future possibilities. I believe that anything is possible with the right mentality and enough hard work, determination, willpower, and faith.

I have been extremely moved to write this book because I believe that no matter where a person starts out in life, there is NO excuse for not making something of yourself. I want to share my story and the things that I have learned over the last thirty years that have helped me overcome adversity and succeed. I want to share that with others who may be struggling to move mountains in their own lives. Seeing others strive for and meet their own personal potential makes me incredibly happy. As a result, my passion has become to provide motivation to people to help them not only see their own potential and future possibilities but achieve them.

For women who are "stuck," I want to help free their minds and thoughts from the bondage of self-pity and lack of confidence. I want them to open up and see that the limits to what they can achieve exist only in their own minds. I want women to realize that those who empower themselves and self-educate, who are willing to devote some of their personal time to that effort and not wait on someone to bring it to them, are more successful and happy than those that sit on the sidelines drowning in self-pity with victim-like mentalities and complacency, all the while waiting on things to magically change.

If you embrace the mentality to continuously expand your knowledge through learning new things, then you will literally change your life, because it will continue to improve as you continue to learn.

When you realize YOU are in charge of whether your life stays the same or not, you understand that it isn't even possible to "go back" to what life was like last week, last month, or last year.

This mentality will set you on a course that will bring so many opportunities your way, which means you will continue to have more and more options for yourself and never be trapped. This, the exact opposite of stagnation, is true freedom. Growth in all areas of life becomes possible once you start managing your life this way.

This book is different than others you may read. I am and always have been frank, blunt, and even somewhat "tough love" with my style and the advice that I have to offer. You will find no sugarcoating in what I have to say. I accept no excuses from myself or others. Be assured that I speak the truth out of love and a desire to see people overcome adversity in their lives.

I will encourage you to eliminate the mental barriers that are holding you back and be aggressive in believing in yourself and your God-given abilities. I will show you how you can get on the path to accomplishment quickly with a shift in the way you think about and view yourself and your future, and I will expose options in life that have been buried under the weight of your present circumstances. You will learn to eliminate any sense of victimization and set down any self-blame that you may currently be carrying and turn your life around.

If you are a female, a young woman from a poor background, a woman starting over after a relationship, or a woman at a crossroads in life, then this book is for you. If you feel "stuck" or as though you are not moving forward, then this book is for you. If you feel your life is out of control and you have no hope or options, then this book is for you.

People who know me today see a put-together, polished, confident, and successful person. There have been times I've been told by some of those I am attempting to mentor that it is impossible for them to achieve more than what they currently have because they weren't "given the same opportunities in life that I was." I never accept this from anyone. Every day is an opportunity.

That you are alive is an opportunity. If you knew where I started, you might not think it would have been possible to pull out of the muck and to form the life I have today.

The starting line of the race wasn't even visible from where I stood as a child.

I was the product of an extremely dysfunctional family, where unhealthy circumstances had been rolling into a giant snowball for generations. The situation erupted when I was nine years old and my noncustodial father abducted my younger brother and me from our mother in the middle of the night on a routine weekend visitation during their bitter divorce. Around midnight of one cold night in May of 1979, he woke us up, piled us in his little blue Subaru with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and drove away through the snow-covered mountain passes near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As adults, we sometimes try to put our finger on the moment in time that set our destiny, plotted our course, or was the most significant over any other in our life. That day was a fork in the road of my family's life.

I became an official FBI missing person and one of the first kids on a milk carton. We lived in constant fear of being caught. We were not allowed to walk in front of cameras, and we made sure we turned and looked the other way when we saw a policeman. If we encountered one in the car on the road, Dad forced us to immediately hide on the floorboard, afraid we would be recognized. Posters were out all over the country with our pictures on them. Our photos and story were run in newspapers and on the radio, and our case was listed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Child Find. Although she never stopped trying, our mother was never able to find us.

In the beginning, we honestly did miss our mother, as children would. I wanted to talk to her. I remember that shortly after the abduction, we were hiding at my grandfather's house in Oklahoma, sitting at a table with my dad, looking at a map of the United States. He was trying to figure out where to take us next. I searched for and found the city and state where my mom was and kissed it, saying, "And a kiss for Mommy!" To which my dad replied, "Why do you want to kiss her?" During that time, I also walked in on him speaking to her on the phone, harassing her and telling her what he was going to do to her if she did not stop looking for us. I asked to talk to her, but he waved me away. I felt ashamed, as though I had done something wrong. My dad began sitting us down and talking to us about what a bad person our mother really was. He told us many things, such as she was going to take us from him by obtaining sole custody and not allowing him to see us at all. The perspective that we began to have was that in order for us to see our dad at all, we had no choice but to live in hiding with him. We began to defend him and quickly became angry with our mother for continuing to chase us. In our minds, it became her fault that we had to live on the run, as we were doing. It was an irrational mind-set that was perpetrated on my brother and me.

The situation became one of little hope to all of us. According to my dad and his radical paranoia, there were only two possible outcomes if my mom found us. Dad would either go to prison, where he would be subjected to the nightmarish treatment he envisioned in his mind, or he would be shot in cold blood in front of us by the "hit man" my mother had hired to kill him. He made it perfectly clear that he would rather be shot or take his own life than go to prison.

After living as homeless fugitives under assumed identities for years, I ran away at the age of sixteen . I did not finish high school. I obtained my high school diploma by taking my GED when I was eighteen. I escaped the oppression and control of my dad, thinking I was home free, and yet I allowed myself to backtrack into an unhealthy and abusive relationship with another man. I sank into a victim-like mentality and allowed myself to believe that I couldn't have what other "normal" people had because of what had happened to me. I mistakenly believed that the work necessary to produce the life I dreamed of and coveted was too hard. I eventually came out the other side and formed healthy relationships, met a wonderful man, gained a family, and have had a successful career.

This was a result of continuously seeking the truth, soul searching, breaking free from mental strongholds, surrounding myself with the right people, and constantly feeding myself with knowledge and learning skills necessary to move forward in life.

After reading this book, you will understand that it is possible to get "unstuck." You will realize, "Yes, I can!" You will learn valuable mental strategies to move forward and propel yourself up and away from your current situation that is holding you back and move towards the inspired life you were meant to lead. It really is possible to move forward, and I'll show you how this is true, through telling my own story and helping you understand just how much you are in control of. I will help you define success for yourself and actually envision it becoming a reality in your life.

Nothing is powerful enough to hold you back, unless you choose to allow it to do so.

Life has no remote; you have to get up and change it yourself. Life may not be fair, but this is true for everyone, so chasing "fairness" is never a reason to hold yourself back.

It's a fact that the same boiling water that softens a potato also hardens an egg. It's about what you are made of, not the circumstances you find yourself in. You are always stronger than you think you are, and in this book, we will work to destroy any dysfunctional belief systems that you may be clinging to. We will remove negative and harmful self-talk, lies you are telling yourself, or lies others have told you, and replace them with positive truths. Your new reality will emerge and, with it, a passion for what you can do in your life.

You will come to understand that you are confined only by the walls you build yourself. You will learn to think for yourself and not allow past or present sufferings to poison your view of the future. You will ask yourself these questions and answer them: What do I want? Why do I want it? How will I achieve it? You'll have all kinds of days on this journey, but every day you will show up, and you will see results.

You will come to understand that you will never find a better sparring partner than adversity. It is a tool you can use to become better and to grow into the person you were intended to be. As my mother likes to say,

"It's not about what happened to us; it is about what we do with it."

This came from a woman who had her children ripped from her and who was not reunited with them until they were adults. I am going to show you how to do something amazing with the life circumstances you have either inherited or taken on yourself.

We will utilize techniques from the business world to help you get in tune with your true self, to establish conviction by identifying your values, to create a personal mission, and to establish a solid vision for your life.

This book will inspire people to believe in themselves and to understand that they can effect change in their life to the point where it will be impossible to return to the place where they once were. It offers methods and encouragement to empower yourself and to self-educate yourself towards new things. It turns people who are stuck in circumstances seemingly beyond their control into empowered, motivated "doers" who take charge of their lives and overcome adversity.

This book will open your eyes to the things that are within your control in your life, such as your effort, how you personally take things, what you believe, your priorities, what you think about, how open-minded you are, your happiness, and whom you surround yourself with.

Throughout this book, not only will I offer the mental strategies that have worked for me; I will also share my story with you: my hurts, happiness, successes, and failures — all as real-life examples.

I will offer encouragement and tools to create a "can do" mentality and inspire you to get out of the rut you are in, move yourself forward, and become an inspiration to those around you, someone who has something to say and give back to others.

You will learn how to stand on your own two feet. You've heard the saying, "God helps those that help themselves." Another way to say it is, "The wind can't move a boat that doesn't have its sails up." Let's get those sails out, and let destiny take its course; let's help you help yourself.

After extracting myself from the dire situation with my father, I wound up in a serious relationship for several years. It proved to be very unhealthy, mainly because I did not know any differently yet. I had not yet developed my own sense of self-worth; therefore, I was ill-equipped to properly protect myself from someone who did not want me to succeed. I fell into the trap of allowing a victim-like mentality to settle in on me, and for years I maintained a "poor pitiful me" attitude and even self-described a life that had bombed out on me. After five or six years of this defeat syndrome, I decided to permanently take responsibility for my own life — not only where it was but where it would go in the future. I left my abusive live-in boyfriend and sought out influences that would uplift and reinforce healthy behaviors, habits, and lifestyle. I sought counseling, read self-help books, joined church support groups, and surrounded myself with people who would be honest with me if I began to backslide. Today I am mentally healthy, happy, and successful — none of which would have been possible if I was not willing to be accountable for my own life and take things into my own hands. I had to want things to change and possess a desire to change myself and my mentality before it could happen. Then I had to fight for the life I wanted and deserved. I would like to ask you for three things as you begin this process with me. First, have an open mind. I promise you that you will not regret walking this path with me. We are going to walk through the forest into a beautiful clearing before long. Second, please make a commitment to yourself that you will do the hard work to improve your life. Third, use a journal while reading this book. In every chapter, I ask you to make specific journal entries that answer valuable questions. This will be used in several ways. It will be used for accountability and motivation, as well as later showing you how far you have come mentally and emotionally. It will ultimately serve as your roadmap for the future.

I have kept a journal for almost twenty years. I have used it to be openly honest with myself about what my thoughts and feelings are. I've also used it to chronicle what is going on in my life emotionally and spiritually, as well as to record my goals, successes and failures, and things I am learning. It's incredibly inspiring and motivating to read back on what was written and realize all that has happened and been accomplished over time. Anytime I feel like I'm failing and nothing has changed, I get out the books of my own words in ink, and I am completely overwhelmed at what has actually transpired in my life. My journals help me remember the things that have worked out, how my efforts have paid off, and all the blessings that have come to pass. They also help me realize that most of the things I have feared and worried about have never happened and that when I did stand still, it was as a result of being paralyzed by fear itself. My journals hold me accountable and have served as a tremendous motivator and tool for me in my self-help walk with continuous personal improvement. Journaling reinforces that while I have grown as a person, I am constantly evolving and I still have a long way to go. The journey will not end.

I look forward to trusting the journey ahead and sharing life's possibilities with you! With all that life has to offer, who knows WHAT'S POSSIBLE? Let's find out!

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but building the new.

— Socrates

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Stuck"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kim Casey Cobb.
Excerpted by permission of Clovercroft Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Stop Saying, "I Can't!"… Change Impossible to I'm Possible! 13

Chapter 3 Goals and Determination-Where Do You Want to Go? 25

Chapter 4 Act As If 59

Chapter 5 Pick a Mentor 71

Chapter 6 Baby-Step Your Way 83

Chapter 7 Lifelong Learner 95

Chapter 8 It's Worth It 111

Chapter 9 Pay It Forward 123

Chapter 10 Conclusion 137