Somewhere between early career pressure and the quiet panic of feeling behind, plenty of people in their 20s feel stuck. Not because they lack ambition or are confused about next steps. More often, Mike Foster said, they’re carrying grief, fear and a set of stories that keep them from facing what is true.
Foster, an executive coach and author, said one of the biggest obstacles to growth is denial — not the dramatic kind, but the softer, more socially acceptable version that disguises itself as patience, optimism or spiritual maturity.
“My mission in life is to blow up environments of denial,” Foster said. “Whether that’s institutional denial, workplace denial or personal denial. Whether it’s denial in a relationship, we, as human beings, we love it.”
He said denial is powerful because it offers temporary relief. It gives people a version of reality they can live with, at least for a while.
“I think it speaks to the power of a story in our lives,” he said. “A story can really help us get through difficult things. Stories can alleviate pain. So if I could tell myself a really great story about myself and live in a fantasy of what’s real, not facing the facts, then I’m going to be pretty happy for a while.”
Eventually, Foster said, reality interrupts.
“It works,” he said. “Denial works for a period of time. But then, unfortunately, true facts and reality will set in at some point.”
For people in their 20s, that interruption can feel especially sharp. This is the decade when expectations start to harden. Careers are supposed to be taking shape. Relationships are supposed to make sense. Faith is supposed to feel more settled than it often does. When life does not move on schedule, many people respond by either pretending everything is fine or blaming themselves for not being further along.
Foster argues for a different starting point: honesty.
“Part of welcoming grief is welcoming the different stages of grief,” he said. “It’s OK for me to feel sad. I don’t have to power through that emotion. I don’t have to pretend that I’m not depressed.”
He said many people have been trained to treat difficult emotions as something to suppress rather than something to acknowledge. Christian culture can make that impulse worse. In some spaces, sadness gets mistaken for weak faith. Anger gets treated like rebellion. Struggle gets edited out before anyone has had time to tell the truth about it.
“I think sometimes in religious circles, we feel this pressure to not feel certain emotions in our life,” Foster said. “But that’s all part of the beautiful process that we’re all in and part of becoming a human beings is to experience these ‘negative’ emotions. I don’t think any emotion is a negative emotion.”
His point is not that every feeling should run unchecked. His point is that refusing to name what is real will not make a person healthier. It will only make them less honest. Foster said growth requires the willingness to live in tension instead of trying to resolve every hard feeling as quickly as possible.
“Can you live in the tension of pain and joy?” he said. “It’s possible to have fulfillment and meaning and purpose in the middle of suffering and grief. Learning how is the work that we have to do as human beings.”
Many people want change, Foster said. Fewer people want the cost attached to it.
“The dirty little secret about growth and change is that ultimately we don’t want to,” he said. “The reason why we don’t want to grow or change is because it requires something. It requires a sacrifice, a cost. We love the idea of change. We love the idea of growth. We love the idea of personal growth, but we don’t love the idea that it’s going to cost us something.”
His diagnosis lands because it cuts through a common illusion. Growth is often marketed as an exciting new chapter. In reality, it usually asks for surrender before it offers momentum. Sometimes the cost is comfort. Sometimes it is pride. Sometimes it is the version of yourself you have worked hard to protect.
Foster is not interested in turning personal growth into another form of self-punishment. He said people can go too easy on themselves, but he is equally skeptical of the kind of ambition that leaves no room for grace.
“Simple answer: yes,” he said, when asked whether people can be too nice to themselves and stop pushing themselves to grow. “I describe myself as a combination of Mr. Rogers and a Navy Seal.”
He said both softness without accountability and pressure without compassion will eventually fail.
“Either extreme is not helpful,” Foster said. “Having no expectations and no challenge, that’s not necessarily helpful to our growth. Neither is just beating ourselves up, all performance, all maximization. We have got to love ourselves. We have to practice self-care. But part of practicing self-care is holding ourselves accountable to our values and our dreams and our passions.”
That balance matters because many young adults already know how to be hard on themselves. They do not need more shame disguised as motivation. They need a framework sturdy enough to hold both honesty and mercy. Foster’s language is blunt, but his approach is not cruel. He is pushing against avoidance, not vulnerability.
For people who feel depleted, his advice stays practical. He does not talk in grand reinvention language. He talks about movement.
“I have great compassion for those who struggle, who feel so overwhelmed and so burned out and so tired,” he said. “I have nothing but compassion for that. But I also say it’s like that doesn’t excuse us from making small steps, small movements.”
Small movement is less glamorous than the breakthrough people tend to imagine for themselves. It is also more realistic. Foster said many people wait for clarity before they act. His approach suggests the reverse. Action often comes first. Clarity follows.
“The hardest part of growth is getting that initial momentum going,” Foster said. “But one of the things I do is with my clients is bump people. I know that if I can just bump them and get them in motion towards healthy things, the momentum will keep them moving and they can take it from there. But getting started is tough.”
He speaks just as directly about personal responsibility.
“You are ridiculously in charge of your own life,” Foster said. “Because of my past, because of past trauma, because of my childhood, I lived my life from this powerless frame. It wasn’t until I said, hey, the clock is ticking. There is so much opportunity in front of me. There’s so many things in my hand. I have a duty and a responsibility to take ownership of my story and my life, because no one else is going to do that.”
His point is not that people control every circumstance. It is that agency still matters, even in small forms. A person can be tired and still take one honest step. A person can feel lost and still make one necessary decision. Foster’s view leaves room for struggle without allowing struggle to become a permanent excuse.
One more barrier shows up repeatedly in his work: self-talk.
“We have this inner troll living in our head rent-free,” Foster said. “The inner critic is always giving us one star reviews on everything that we do. It’s impossible to have a fulfilling, meaningful, purposeful life if we don’t do something about the inner troll.”
He encourages people to challenge those thoughts instead of surrendering to them. One of his questions is whether a thought is actually helping a person become who they want to become. Another is whether the thought is “accurate and complete.”
“So often we just assume because we’re thinking it, that it must be true, that it must be factual,” he said. “But we actually have a thin slice of the thought or the data set.”
Foster’s advice for twentysomethings is not flashy. It is more demanding than a motivational slogan and more useful than vague reassurance. Face reality. Tell the truth about grief. Stop confusing self-condemnation with wisdom. Accept that growth will cost something. Then move.
Feeling stuck, in his view, does not always mean a person is failing. Sometimes it means they have been avoiding the truth long enough for it to catch up. Sometimes it means they have been listening to the wrong voice. Either way, the way forward starts in the same place: honesty, responsibility and the willingness to take one small step.
