647 - Feel like you’re falling behind? - 5 Minutes of Momentum

Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation, and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday, I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest, and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Today I want to talk to you about how to deal with the feeling when you feel like you're falling behind. This sentiment comes up a lot with clients that I work with, and I'm sure that you felt it before. I know that I have felt it before, and I want to talk to you about how I would go about handling it and how I coach my clients through it. So when it comes to falling behind, the first thing you want to ask yourself is, behind what? What are you measuring your progress through? What is the lens that you're measuring it through? Now, this can be a lens in comparison. So if you're getting caught up in comparing yourself to other people and other people's journey, that can often keep us more stuck. And what we want to do is actually shift our focus back to our own goals. So we want to redefine progress. When you're measuring it against, like, this terminology around, like, I'm falling behind everybody else or I'm falling behind, are you falling behind your goals? Are you falling behind your timeline? Are you falling behind compared to other people? So you want to check in with that first. Now, sometimes I will have a set timeline in my head of what I wanted to achieve, and I get to a state where I'm like, oh, I feel like I'm falling behind based on the timeline that I'd set myself. And one of the things I always check in with myself with this is, why is that, like, what is causing the feeling of feeling left behind now? Is it because I hadn't achieved certain goals that I'd set out to? Is it because things got pushed back? Because that happens. Like, I had planned to have my book out already and it's just not happening, like, and it's taking longer than expected. And so I've got to allow myself a little bit of grace because I'm not the one that it's waiting on. So we've got to be conscious of the fact that sometimes our timeline gets changed and being okay with that and recognizing that sometimes there is a reason for that. Right. And it's the same thing with, you know, the event that I've been working on at the moment like I had ideally wanted to have it ready to sell already and selling tickets and been putting out there, but it's just not ready. And so I ended up pushing the date back into August. And that's given me much more time in order for it to be the best outcome and for it to be the best event for me to put the energy that I really want to put into it. And so sometimes we've got to recognize, like, why is this happening and is this something that was out of my control? And if it is, you've got to give yourself a little bit of grace. Now if you feel like you're falling behind with regards to your goals, the next thing that I would do is actually do a time audit. So I'd look at my business or my activities within my business over the last three months. Too short of a snapshot won't give us enough data. So three months, I find is usually pretty good. And I look over that three months and go, okay, what was taking my time? Was I spending my time on things that actually moved the needle? Was I spending time on things that were worthwhile within my business that got me closer to my goals? Because I know what it's like. You can get so caught up in all the different things and time flies like it flies so fast. And if we're not doing the needle moving activities, then we're most likely not making the progress we really would like to be making. And then that then brings me to really understanding different seasons of growth, because sometimes in different stages of growth within your business, the progress isn't seen yet, but it's still happening. And so again, we've got to give ourselves a little bit of grace and acknowledge that it's may, it may take a little bit longer, or you may just be in a season of not necessarily seeing the growth because you're planting the seeds and you're nurturing the seeds, but you're not at harvest stages yet, right? And so sometimes it's the same thing with, like when you start going to the gym, right, and you start working on yourself and, and you start strengthening your muscles and you start losing some weight. You notice it to begin with, but no one else notices, right? It takes quite a while for other people in your life to notice the progress that you're making. And so sometimes we have that view on our progress within our business because we're not necessarily seeing the results. But that also does not mean that we cannot make a change because one of the Things you really want to do is do a time audit on your. On yourself and you within your business to determine where are you spending your time and is it resulting in the outcomes that you really want? And then what I'd always coach my clients to do is actually stop focusing on the bigger goal as such and start focusing on the actions and start rewarding and celebrating your actions. The more you do this, the more excited you will be and the more awareness of your progress that you will notice. Because the thing is, we get so caught up in doing all the things that we just don't notice the progress that we're actually making because we keep moving the needle further, we keep moving the goalposts that we literally keep moving the goalpost further out. And then we feel like we're not really making the progress or feel like we're behind because we haven't hit our big goal yet. Whereas if you take a moment to take stock every single week to be like, okay, where am I at? What have I achieved this week? And maybe your KPIs need to change. And I did this recently, actually. I looked at certain things that I was measuring within my business on a monthly basis, and I went and actually changed all of them. I changed all of them. They weren't inspiring me anymore. They weren't motivating me anymore. And I was kind of just checking in with them on a Sunday at the end of my week to be like, yeah, I did pretty good there. Yeah, I did pretty good there. But now for me, I'm like, no, no, no, I need to actually change my KPIs now. I know that sometimes it feels when you've left a 9 to 5 to then start your own business, it feels like to go and set your own KPIs. But if you are feeling behind, if you feel like you're not hitting your goals, maybe that's what you need to do. So allowing yourself to measure the most important things and measure the action, not the outcome, I think this is one of the things that we always need to shift because we can often focus on, well, when I haven't achieved that goal, I haven't achieved that result yet. But there's 50 steps that actually have to get you to that result. And so we want to actually reward and celebrate those steps because they're absolutely going to inevitably create the result that you're looking for. So celebrate and acknowledge your progress by looking at the action steps that you're taking. Because by doing this, you may notice you may not be taking the action as consistently as you would like. You may, in order for you to hit the goal, you may not be taking the actions big enough. Right. This is another thing that often shows up in my masterminds, especially in the Next Level Mastermind. We think about setting massive goals, and we work towards these big, expansive expansion plans in our business. But we get caught up in stepping back into the business instead of actually doing the CEO activities. And sometimes those CEO activities aren't enough. So we're not doing enough. We're actually doing mediocre action instead of next level action. And so that's what we need to just really revisit. Like, where are we spending our time? Is it getting us the results that we want? And if not, it's time to step things up. I hope this benefited you today, and I hope that you enjoy the rest of your week.