Why Are You Still Stuck When You Do Everything Right? with Cheryl Stelte

You have done everything right. The degrees. The certifications. The hours nobody asked you to work. Every box on the list, checked twice. And you are still stuck in your career, sitting more or less where you were two years ago, while a small question starts up in the back of your mind. What is wrong with me?

Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you.

But something may be running underneath all of it, and you cannot see it, because that is the entire definition of a blind spot.

My guest Cheryl Stelte has spent more than thirty years looking at what runs underneath. She is a spiritual coach and master healer, the CEO and founder of Star of Divine Light Institute, and the author of three books. She is also my coach, and I will say that plainly, because it should shape how you read the rest of this. I would not be where I am today without the work she and I did together.

And before you decide this one is not for you, sit with me a second. Cheryl has heard the objection more times than she can count.

I practice practical spirituality. I am not woo.

Cheryl Stelte

Corporate Rewards the Pattern That Keeps You Stuck in Your Career

Here is the observation of Cheryl's that stopped me cold. Corporate America is a magnet for perfectionists, and it is a magnet for a reason. The woman who intends to do everything correctly, be a great employee, and move up in an orderly way is a woman who fits the environment beautifully. She gets hired. She gets kept.

What almost nobody tells her is that the fitting is not free. In Cheryl's reading, a lot of that box-checking is an old pattern wearing a professional outfit, and every time it earns her a good review, the pattern gets reinforced. Some successes, she said, come from patterns that are not actually serving us.

The habit that made you a great employee can be the same one that keeps you in the same chair.

So you look, from the outside, like a woman who has it made. Look at her, everyone says. Great résumé. Steady hand. Nothing visibly wrong.

But on the inside, your soul is just crying out, please help me express my true self.

Cheryl Stelte

She calls the quieter version of this playing small, and she is careful to say she did it too. Two ways it shows up, both of them ordinary enough to miss: the moment you measure yourself against someone else in the room, and the moment you keep something true to yourself instead of saying it. Neither one feels like a decision. Both are.

The Four Core Wounds Underneath a Stalled Career

Cheryl works from four core wounds she says most of us carry some version of. I am not enough. I do not matter. I am unlovable. I am not worthy.

Read them in a corporate setting and they stop sounding abstract very quickly. I am not enough is the woman collecting one more certification before she will apply. I do not matter is the woman who decides not to put herself forward because it feels too exposed. I am not worthy is the woman who watches a promotion go by and privately agrees with the decision. I am unlovable is the woman standing outside the in crowd, doing excellent work nobody is talking about.

Cheryl gave one more place these wounds surface, and it is the sharpest thing she said all episode. When you find yourself out of alignment with your own values at work, one of the four is usually driving. Her check for it is three questions asked in the moment: what is my motivation here, am I going against my values, and what am I aligning to.

She has watched what happens when nobody asks them. She described a woman who did things she would not otherwise have done to get ahead, and the arithmetic of it was brutal.

And sure, she made a lot of money and she moved ahead, but she was miserable because she carried a lot of guilt.

Cheryl Stelte

Why You Went Quiet, and When It Actually Started

If you have ever sat on a comment in a meeting, thought better of it, and then heard someone else say your exact point ten minutes later, this section is for you.

Cheryl's first book is about the throat chakra, which in her work is the seat of feeling seen and heard and speaking your truth. Most of us, she says, did not get that as children. Not always because we were told to be quiet, though some of us were. More often because of something subtler and harder to name.

What we had to say was negated or wasn't valued.

Cheryl Stelte

And so, after a while, we stop.

I want you to notice what that reframe does. It moves your silence in that meeting out of the category of personal failing and into the category of a very old, very well-practiced habit. You are not a woman who cannot speak. You are a woman who learned, at seven, that speaking did not land, and who has not had a reason to update the file since.

Files can be updated.

The Practice for Work That Goes Unrecognized

I asked Cheryl the question I get from women every week. What do you say to someone who is working hard, doing excellent work, and watching nothing happen?

She gave a practice, and it is not the one I expected. It has nothing to do with your manager.

Step three is where Cheryl stopped and warned me, and I have thought about it every day since.

And then the trick is, and this is harder than you think, because you might not want to receive it.

Cheryl Stelte

You might slough it off. She used to. Somebody says the good thing and a voice in you goes, well, she does not really know what she is talking about. Which means you can spend a decade asking to be seen while quietly refusing delivery every time it arrives.

Asking to be seen is the easy half. Letting it in is the work.

How She Actually Clears a Block

Cheryl teaches a three-part method, and she uses the ace of spades to remember it. It is worth knowing even if you never work with her, because you can do the first part in a parked car before a hard meeting.

She is honest that the middle part is uncomfortable, and she does not pretend otherwise. What she promises is only that it moves.

Every block that we have is like a secret doorway that we can unlock to another aspect of our greatest self.

Cheryl Stelte

What I Want You to Take From This

Cheryl's own beginning was not a plan. She was raised Catholic in Canada, with no interest in any of this, lying on a beach when her deceased brother's spirit appeared to her as a ball of white light and told her, through a friend who had never channeled anyone in her life, to start meditating. She started. Her health changed, her relationships changed, her work changed. Thirty years later this is all she does.

You do not need a story like that. You need one thing to be true: that being stuck in your career is information, not a verdict.

One more thing, because it is the part I care about most. Clearing what is in your way gets you ready for the room. Being recognized once you are in it is a second skill, and it is the one I teach. That is the Articulation Gap, the distance between the impact you create and the impact leadership recognizes and rewards. Your results do not speak for themselves. They get interpreted.

So this week, do Cheryl's practice. Ask one person who sees you to say it out loud. And then, the hard part. Let it in.

About Cheryl Stelte

Cheryl Stelte is a spiritual coach, master healer, speaker, and bestselling author of three books. She is the CEO and founder of Star of Divine Light Institute and the creator of the Azarias Energy Healing Certification Program.

With more than thirty years of experience across energy healing, spiritual leadership, coaching, shamanism, yoga, and meditation, she works with women who have already spent years in meditation, therapy, and personal growth and still sense that something deeper has not shifted. Her books include Heal Your Neck Issues and Let Your Throat Chakra Shine, Client Magnet, and From Block to Powerful: The Spiritual Guide to Unlocking Inner Clarity and Authentic Power.

Canadian by birth and based in Colorado, Cheryl teaches her clients to become their own energy workers, so the practice continues long after the sessions end.

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