You Haven't Lost Your Momentum

There are certain periods in life when you can get to the end of the day absolutely shattered, knowing you've barely stopped since you got up, and still somehow find yourself wondering what on earth you've actually achieved.

You've been doing things all day.

You've sorted, organised, answered, remembered, travelled, fed people, dealt with whatever needed dealing with and probably completed seventeen tasks you didn't even know existed when you woke up that morning.

And yet somehow, because the things you wanted to get done haven't moved very far, there's this niggling feeling that you've lost your momentum.

I think this happens particularly when our usual routines disappear.

School holidays are an obvious example, but it can happen during Christmas, when we're travelling, caring for someone, moving house, going through a particularly busy period at work or simply navigating one of those seasons where life seems to require more of us than usual.

The structure we normally rely on changes and suddenly the things that usually make us feel productive aren't happening in quite the same way.

So we decide we've lost momentum.

Momentum Is Interesting

But momentum is interesting because, beyond the literal physics of it, so much of what we call momentum is actually a state of mind.

We feel like we have momentum when we're able to see evidence that we're moving forwards.

We're ticking things off, keeping up with routines, making progress on something that matters to us and generally feeling as though we're on top of life.

When those visible markers disappear, we assume the momentum has disappeared with them.

Except it hasn't necessarily gone anywhere.

You may simply be measuring yourself against a version of your life that doesn't currently exist.

If your circumstances have changed but your expectations haven't changed with them, you're almost guaranteed to feel behind.

You're Not Doing Nothing

I see versions of this in readings all the time.

People can be navigating enormous changes internally and externally, keeping families going, making difficult decisions, processing something painful or simply managing everything life is currently asking of them, and still tell me they feel as though they're "doing nothing".

They're not doing nothing.

They're just discounting everything that doesn't fit their definition of progress.

And I think we all do this to some extent.

We decide what a productive week should look like and then use that imaginary standard to judge the week we've actually had.

We decide we should be further along by now.

We look at something we were doing consistently a month ago and assume that because we've fallen out of the habit, we've somehow gone backwards.

But perhaps momentum doesn't need to mean constantly moving at the same speed.

Perhaps sometimes maintaining what you've already built is momentum.

Sometimes adapting to what's in front of you is momentum.

Sometimes dealing with life so that you have the capacity to return to something later is momentum too.

There will always be seasons when we have more time, energy and headspace than others, and expecting ourselves to operate exactly the same way through all of them makes very little sense.

What If There Was Nothing to Start Again?

The danger comes when "I've lost momentum" becomes something bigger than an observation.

Because very quickly it can become "I've fallen off", then "I've messed it up", then "I need to start again", and before we know it we've turned a temporary change of pace into evidence that we've somehow failed.

What if there was nothing to start again?

What if you could simply pick something back up?

No dramatic reset.

No waiting for Monday, next month or the perfect moment when life finally behaves itself.

Just recognising that the pace changed for a while and now you're ready for the next thing.

If you're in one of those seasons at the moment, perhaps give yourself a little more credit for everything you're carrying that doesn't appear on the imaginary scoreboard in your head.

You haven't necessarily lost your momentum.

You might just need to change what you're counting.

Be kind to yourself.

You got this.

Sarah xxx

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