What To Do When You Lose Momentum
Apr 25, 2023
When you lose momentum in business and in life, it seems like you are taking a step backward. It brings you a dreadful feeling that everything you have done in the past is now meaningless. Yanet Borrego is here to discuss how to get yourself back on track if you lose your way and find yourself stuck in a place where you cannot grow. She opens up on these last few months when she has lost her own momentum and how she gained it back by being consistent and accepting the present. Yanet also talks about building the courage to overcome temporary defeats and refusing to stay attached to outcomes alone.
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What To Do When You Lose Momentum
I am beyond grateful that you are here with me. Let me start by being completely honest with you. This episode was supposed to be around something else completely different, which is the second anniversary of my transition from my nine-year corporate career to full-time entrepreneurship. It was on April 21st. I cannot believe it has been two years already of being a business owner and doing this entrepreneurship journey that can be very fulfilling and also equally challenging.
I'm going to record another episode to give you all the juicy details. Having come from corporate to full-time entrepreneurship, I want you to know about the journey if this is something you want to aspire to do, or if you want to aspire to do something completely different. There are so many synergies and similarities in the journey from corporate to entrepreneurship.
There are so many lessons that can apply to any other context in your life, to be honest with you. We are going to leave that for the next episode. For now, I want to talk about a topic that is dear to my heart or a topic that through the clients I've been coaching and through my experience is very relevant to all of us who are pursuing to get better and grow, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically because this is part of the journey.
What we are going to talk about is what to do when you lose momentum, and what to do when you're on track with your goals and suddenly, you get off track. This feeling can be described as taking a step back. Many times when I experience this with my coaching clients and even for myself, it feels like whatever I have done in the past doesn't exist anymore.
It feels like you have gone backward, which honestly is not true at all because all the energy and effort you have put into following through with the goals that you're working on is a lot of credit on your behalf that you must account for to continue moving forward. When you hit a pause in your goals or when you hit a point where you feel you are stuck or stalled, it feels like you haven't done anything. It feels like there is no change happening. It feels like there is no progress happening.
Many times when we are in that moment, we also become paralyzed by indecision. We also become overwhelmed by negative thoughts and self-doubt because we think at the moment that temporary defeat means permanent failure, and that is not true at all, my friend. The journey of starting a new skill, creating a new habit, and achieving a goal is not about the destination. It was never about the destination. Once you get to the destination, you're going to set a new one because it's never the destination. What matters is the journey. What matters are those muscles of resilience that you build for you to get back on track whenever you get off track.
Once you get to a destination, set a new one. What matter more is the journey and the muscles of resilience you build along the way.
At the end of the day, that's what matters, and also the skills and the characteristic of being hopeful and keeping that vision or your why in mind because in the moments when it doesn't matter what you're pursuing and when it gets challenging, the thing that is going to pull you out of that challenge is having a vision, a dream, hope, and faith. At the end of the day, that's what life is about.
It's about having a bigger vision than the one you think you can accomplish because that's going to be your motivator as you move forward and having that resilience muscle to never give up, and keep trying because you know that it's a matter of timing until you get there. When you get there, there will be another goal. That's why I say it's about the journey, not the destination.
I was having a session with one of my amazing one-on-one coaching clients. We are working on a career. A book that I assigned to all of my coaching clients is The Slight Edge. It's all about taking small consistent actions that lead to long-term staggering results. I always ask my clients, "What was your key takeaway? How are you going to apply it?" Coaching is all about, "Let's take action." It's all about applying those concepts and the knowledge because that's where the power lies.
People say, "Knowledge is power." I don't agree with that. Knowledge is potential power. Action is real power. This is something I got from Tony Robbins and also one of my spiritual and NLP teachers. Knowledge is potential power but if you don't use that knowledge, that's not going to become a real power. We were having our session and talking about the concept of how there is no destination. There was never a destination. It's all about the journey.
Many times when we stall in the progress of our goals and lose faith in the progress of our habits, it's because we are attached to the outcome. It's because the only thing that sometimes we're focusing on is the outcome. In the process of that attachment toward the outcome, we have forgotten to enjoy the process, have fun, and be there for the journey. I see this so many times with my coaching clients when they are installing new habits, working on their meditation practice, working on improving anxiety or reprogramming their minds and their bodies to be better communicators and leaders. I see it all the time. I also see it in myself. I'm a human being.
Two of my clients were telling me, "How are you so consistent? How do you not fall off track?" I was telling them, "That is not true. I do fall off track. I am not consistent 100% of the time but the only thing I focus on whenever I fall off track, which happens, is getting back on track." I'm telling you this because these last few months have been challenging for me, to be honest with you.
Even though I had the best three months of my business in terms of revenue and opportunities, and when I look at the big picture, everything is going great, it felt like at the beginning of 2023, I lost momentum. It’s not only the momentum of achieving because I'm still achieving but the momentum of the mental and emotional aspect of asking myself, "Where am I heading? Is this making a difference?"
I look at my long-term direction, which is part of my coaching program. I do it for myself because I have to practice all of the techniques and skills I coach my clients on. Integrity is important. I look at my avatar and my aim, which is a long-term direction, and realize I'm still aligned. I'm congruent with this purpose. I still feel that I lost momentum. I still feel the drive, the productivity, and the go-go-go that I had a few months ago. I don't know where it went. I started looking within myself.
Practicing Acceptance
One of the things I did was allow myself to process those emotions and welcome whatever I was experiencing instead of running away from it or thinking that it was bad. When we start judging the way we feel, our emotions, or our behaviors in a way, that's when we create aversion. Aversion is one of the causes of suffering because then you leave the present moment. You are in a state that you wish wasn't that state. You're in a state where you're resisting the present moment. You're in a state where you're not practicing acceptance.
One of the first things I did was start to practice that acceptance, which is challenging as you can imagine. I started listening more, started going with the flow in a way, and started to look at my vision and question. I continue to plan and prioritize. I realized I needed to work more on my mindset in terms of my faith that things are happening for me, and my faith that it is not about the destination even though I'll get there. It's about the journey. It's about the impact. It's about serving.
I left corporate to serve. I left corporate because early on in my corporate career, I realized that I wasn't happy. I realized that I needed clarity and an understanding of myself to figure out who I want to be for the first time. Before that, I was following a checklist, "What is success? It's a high salary. Let's go. Work on a huge corporation. Let's go. Support my family. Let's go."
When I got there, I had everything that a lot of people think success is about. I didn't have that fulfillment piece. I started getting obsessed. I started daydreaming about this intersection between achievement and fulfillment. I started gaining clarity, "Who do I want to be? What are the things I want to be doing? How do I want to serve the world? How do I want to help people?" I dreamed one day of that becoming my reality, and now it is two years into the journey full-time.
This started as a side hustle or a side coaching business while I was in corporate for around a year or a year and a half. Before that, I spent nine years of my whole corporate career getting certified as a coach and a million things. There was a lot of preparation in what people see as the two years of my transition from corporate to full-time entrepreneurship. This started honestly when I joined corporate nineteen years ago, and me getting ready because I knew one day, it was going to happen.
When that happened, there was a lot of momentum, faith, and focus. We run our lives in patterns. When I'm getting close to my anniversary of being a full-time entrepreneur and having this business full-time, I realized that I entered into an area of a little bit of self-doubt. I love it in the way that I'm learning it all myself. My husband asked me because he realized that I was doing well. When you look at the numbers, everything is great. He asked me, "Are you afraid of succeeding?" I'm like, "That's a deep question. That's a great question. Am I afraid of succeeding? Probably, to be honest with you."
I'm afraid at different times of different things but it's him asking that question and me realizing I need to strengthen the focus and the hope. I need to be careful also with the people I surround myself with. They are positive-minded. In this journey of entrepreneurship, your mindset has to be top-notch to continue going and believing even though most people are not doing what you're doing, at least the people that I spent most of my life with. This was such a great self-discovery moment for me.
Learning More About Yourself
When you lose momentum, that's one of the biggest opportunities to learn about yourself. Get that lesson of that temporary defeat and apply that lesson. After you apply that lesson, you start gaining even more momentum. I was going through a rough time, to be honest with you. It's not something I put in my stories, "I'm going through a rough time." I could do that. I prefer using this channel to be more vulnerable than the stories. It feels a little bit more impersonal. The show is you and me. We are having a connection and a conversation here intimately and vulnerably. I enjoy this method.
When you hit that moment and slow down, that's a great time for self-reflection. That's what happened to me. It was so interesting because I remember hitting a low moment. In that low moment, something happened to me. A person that is relatively close to me told me that I was not going to make my dream happy and that I was not going to make money doing what I love. He didn't know what I was doing. What I was doing didn't make any sense.
At the moment, that was hurtful to hear. Honestly, maybe I'll talk a little bit more about that situation later on when I process it even more, even though I completely forgive that person. I truly believe that the people that project their fears onto us because that's a fear or a limitation that he has, not me, love us. They are trying to do their best to protect us from their point of view.
At that moment when that person told me that, it was an out-of-body experience. I didn't meet the energy level of that person, and I decided to walk away at the end of it. I'm like, "This is not being productive. This is not adding value to anyone. I'm going to break the pattern and walk away from this." It wasn't leading anywhere, to be honest with you.
I remember I was brushing my teeth. I was sad. I cried. I'm a human being. I was sad because someone that close was telling me all those things, which was touching on a lot of self-doubt and insecurity from the previous months. Isn't that interesting when you're going through a low moment, and that happened? You go a little bit lower. You go to the bottom until you get back up.
I remember brushing my teeth and feeling this certainty within myself, and not only that but reminding myself of the many moments when I've gotten a no. Believe me, in my journey of immigrating to the US and doing many things that no one that I knew did, I've received many noes. I've received many people saying, "You cannot do this. You're not capable of doing this."
I can make a list of at least ten scenarios of people telling me, "You can't do that. You're not going to succeed at that." It's funny because, in this scenario, I'm talking about this other person. To be honest with you, we self-impose so many of those fears, limiting beliefs, and limitations. When I'm giving presentations about building a rejection-proof mindset or resilience, I always tell the audience, "No one can reject you if you don't reject yourself."
No one can reject you if you don't reject yourself.
I remember brushing my teeth, feeling that certainty, remembering those moments of the many times people have told me, "You cannot do that," and reminding me that my mom and I came here to the United States with zero dollars, just one connection, and zero resources, not knowing how to speak English or the language but with a vision. We were here in the United States to do it, which was building a life of more opportunities, more freedom, and more fulfillment, being able to be more financially successful too, and being free.
The feeling that you get when you have a lot of options, and you can decide to go in any direction is what I'm here for, to be honest with you, and knowing that from nothing, we created so many abundant things. The only thing that we had was a vision, that why, or that vision of freedom, "One day, this is going to happen." That pulls us forward in the right direction toward that North Star or that why even in the most challenging times.
I remember when my mom got fired from her job. She was earning $20,000 a year. When I hear that, I'm like, "That's crazy." She didn't have anywhere else to go. We had the rent of the apartment. Thankfully, I had made enough money from my internships in the oil and gas industry to be able to pay for that apartment and the food because we didn't have any source of income.
Seeing where we came from with no resources but lots of resourcefulness, knowing that we made a lot from it, and thinking of that experience gave me a lot of certainties, "Everything that I put my mind into is possible. It doesn't matter how many people say the opposite. I'm going to believe in myself. I'm going to set high standards for myself and follow through."
Refusing Temporary Defeat
Temporary defeat doesn't mean permanent failure. When you go through life, most of the things that you're going to face are those temporary defeats because that's where we learn. Winning feels good for fifteen minutes or maybe a little bit more but at the end of the day, the secret sauce of life is learning through the challenges and anything that at the moment we feel that we cannot go through.
That was a defining moment for me. That moment was interesting. I'm not giving any details but it was heated as you can say, not on my part but on the other person's part. It's for me to be able to stand back up and say, "I'm going to do it." What I ended up doing, which is what I recommend to all my clients, is starting with one thing. When you lose momentum and you feel you have lost all the progress that you had, you have to start with one thing and commit to one thing. You're consistent with one thing. You show up for that one thing.
For me, it was working out or going out to the gym. Our physical body is the foundation. Working out doesn't come naturally to me, to be honest with you. It challenges me. It feels uncomfortable. It's something that I can be consistent with if I focus my efforts on it. I started with one thing, working out, and then added another thing. I'm recording this episode at 8:23 PM on April 17th, 2023 because to be completely honest with you, I've been a little bit delayed in my episodes even though you haven't realized it. I've been posting every week but next week, there will not be an episode because I was recovering. Let's say that.
I promised myself this morning that I was going to finish my list of things to do, that I was going to be productive, and that I was going to be focused. I needed to record this episode at least once. At 8:24 PM, I'm here showing up after my coaching sessions and making sure things happen because it is important to keep promises to yourself. That's where confidence and decisiveness get built. Not making a decision is indecision.
Whenever we're in those moments where we lose momentum, what I've realized through my coaching clients and myself is that we start becoming indecisive because we are not taking action. You have to choose one thing, take action, and then add to it. That's how you build momentum. Have faith that you will get back on track because many people get off track, and they're like, "I cannot do it." You have to believe that you can. It doesn't matter how many times you fall off track. You get back on. Resilience is the muscle to practice. It's not about the outcome. It's about the journey.
Here's the last reminder that I'm going to leave. I've said it already four times. Temporary defeat doesn't mean permanent failure. If you keep the faith and stay resilient, you're going to gain that momentum back in no time. I hope you had an amazing time with this episode. I had a lot of fun with it. In talking about fun, something that I realized is that I was taking things very seriously, "I have to do this and that." I decided to have more fun. I'm like, "I'm going to have fun. I'm going to do the things I get to do while enjoying it and purely being in it. There's no multitasking, only monotasking."
Life’s journey is not about perfection or linearity. It’s all about the tools and skills that get you back on track.
I feel my mood become more playful, having fun. I needed to share this with you because so many times, people see me on social media. They see how productive I'm being. They see all of the things in front of my business. They're like, "How can you do it all?" I don't do it all. I have my challenges too. I have times when I hit rock bottom. This transition from corporate to entrepreneurship is no joke. It's very different. Even though I've been in this for years, it's still different. It's still something I'm adapting to. It's challenging but I love the challenge. I have fun. I love serving my clients and all of you through this show, the weekly newsletters, and the many resources and tools I share.
I appreciate you. If this is something that you have struggled with, I have so many tools and skills that you can learn for you to get back on track because we are not going to be perfect. The journey is not about perfection. The journey is about you having the skills and tools to get back on track. It's not going to be a perfect and pretty linear line. What matters are the tools and skills to get you back on track. If you're ready to get those tools and skills and go to the next level, make sure to schedule a clarity call with me.
If you're curious about coaching, "What can she help me with?" I'll be happy to talk to you. It's 45 minutes. It's free. There are no costs. I've helped so many clients with the same challenges of feeling a lack of pleasure, feeling that they don't have a direction, feeling stuck, feeling that they lost momentum, and feeling that they are procrastinating all the time. If you're someone like that, reach out to me. I'm here to help. I hope this episode was super helpful. I'll see you next time. Take care, my friends.
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