Episode #441: Life is not linear: If I had known then what I know now about the momentum cycle

This is episode 441 of the Brilliant Balance podcast.

Life is not linear: If I had known then what I know now about the momentum cycle…

Well, hey everyone. Welcome back to the Brilliant Balance Show. I’m so glad that you tuned in today. Before I get into today’s content, I just want to thank you for the comments about last week’s episode. It was really fun to hear from you that you were excited about Kate Northrup, who was my guest last week, and about the great things she had to share about money and our relationship with money.

It will never cease to amaze me how this is a topic that we just can’t get enough of. A long time ago, I did a four-part series on finances, and to this day, it’s one of the most popular series on this podcast, which is really not the subject we talk about most of the time. So I know whenever we talk about money, it can feel a little bit off-center for us, like it’s not always the topic that I’m here to share about.

Having Kate with me for that episode was so extraordinary because she really is an expert in this field and has poured her heart, soul, and capability into delivering something really exceptional for us. First, in the podcast episode, which I was grateful for, but also in this upcoming workshop that she’s hosting.

So I’m just going to take a second to reiterate: if you enjoyed last week’s episode, if it spoke to you on a level that really resonated, I want you to make sure you’re signed up for this workshop. Kate is teaching a three-day livestream, and really, this is a place for people who already carry a lot in their life—people like you—and want money to be an area where they feel supported, not one more thing that they have to carry all by themselves.

Inside this workshop, Kate is teaching about the hidden money ecosystem—where your ecosystem is leaking money and how you can strengthen it. She’s teaching how to put a really simple financial infrastructure in place, one that really supports expansion for you instead of increasing the pressure that you feel.

I think that’s probably the part that’s going to resonate the most: how do you have an infrastructure—it sounds just like Brilliant Balance—that helps you expand or live bigger instead of making you feel like it’s all on your shoulders? And then she really is giving a clear framework for how you can turn your income into a sense of stability and clarity and have that lead toward long-term wealth, which means you have to learn to make bigger financial decisions with a steady hand.

That can be hard, right? Because when we’re not thinking about the connection between our nervous system and our relationship with money—and P.S., there is one—it’s not always easy to see how to do that. So I want you to put yourself in Kate’s capable hands by signing up for that workshop. The link to register is in the show notes to this episode. You can just drop down there and get yourself signed up. If you aren’t there live, then she’ll send you the replay. I want to make sure that you give yourself the gift of participating in this.

Okay, so today’s topic. What I want to talk about today is a belief that I think a lot of us have, even if we’ve never really said it out loud, and that is that we think life is supposed to be linear. We are supposed to progress in a steady, straight line that is moving in a positive direction.

I certainly grew up thinking this. We think that if we’re just doing it right, then things are going to be steadily improving. We’ll make more progress, we’ll have more clarity, more success, more ease, more wealth—all the things, day by day.

And when that doesn’t happen, when things start to feel hard or messy, or we actually feel like we’re moving backward, then we think we’re doing it wrong. There’s something wrong with our strategy, or we think there’s something wrong with our timing, or we think there’s just, candidly, something wrong with us—like we’re broken and we’re doing it wrong.

But what I want to offer you today is a little bit of a flip or a shift. I want you to think about: what if life is not actually linear? What if it’s cyclical? And what if, even if you feel like you’re slowing down or moving backward, you can rest assured that it is, at worst, temporary?

Because once you really understand that, once you start to see the pattern of how all lives are operating, including yours, you can stop fighting with your life and start working with that pattern. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of ease. That sort of acceptance that this is, in fact, how life operates—we are not exempt, none of us are going to be exempt from that—starts to give us the ability to lean into it and to experience more ease day to day in our lives. And I think that’s so important.

I’ve noticed, for sure, over time—it took me a while to put my finger on this pattern—that things like my energy, my capacity, my ability to focus, my ability to be creative, those things are not always the same. They vacillate pretty dramatically, actually, from month to month, from week to week, from season to season.

My ability to acknowledge that… I was kind of a late bloomer, a late adopter of this idea. I fought it for a long time because I wanted to be at the apex of productivity all the time. I just thought that was my God-given right, and I wanted to be able to sustain it no matter what was happening in my life.

And the reality is, it’s just not possible. It’s not practical. It’s not possible. And it’s not reasonable. I think it causes a lot of suffering when we think we’re supposed to be able to do that.

So those resources just don’t stay constant. They sort of move in seasons, maybe. They move in a pattern. And I’ve been playing with this idea of what I’ve called the momentum cycle for years—kind of distinct seasons of productive energy that we all move through over and over and over again.

They don’t necessarily always go in the same order. It’s not a predictable progression. Some of them are. There’s a couple of pairings in there where one follows the other, usually. And they don’t happen on a predictable timeline. You can stay in one state for a long while and sort of rapidly accelerate through another. In fact, I think that’s a skill that we’re all trying to build.

But there’s a rhythm to this, and there are actually a number of different phases of the momentum cycle that we could talk about. I picked out four today. I think there are more than four. I share more than four with my coaching clients when we’re really diagnosing their life at a more granular level. But I’m going to talk about four of the big ones that I think you’ll definitely be able to recognize if you look back on your life and identify periods of time when you were in one of these seasons.

Okay, so let’s do them one at a time.

The first one is the one we always want to be in, which is growth and expansion. Growth and expansion is when everything’s clicking. It is coming up roses. You feel like everything you do is turning to gold. Your energy is high. Your ideas are flowing. You feel confident and decisive and capable.

I love being in this piece of the momentum cycle whenever I can get there. It’s my favorite thing. We love to live in this phase, and I think we get a little addicted to it. We start believing our own press—that we can stay there. Because we’ve been there for a while, we’re like, “Oh, it’s all back. Look at this. I’ve got this now.”

And then, before we know it, something shifts, something changes, and we know in our bones, to our core, that we’re no longer in a season of growth or expansion.

Sometimes that happens on a dime, and sometimes it’s sort of a slow landing. But you can feel it in your body. You can feel it in your thinking when that shift happens.

So being at the top of the momentum cycle—think about it almost like a Ferris wheel—is about being in growth. Ideas are clicking. Everything’s coming together. People are on your side. The world is cooperating with you. It’s such a rush. It’s such a ride. We want to be there as often as possible.

And there are some tools that you can learn that help you get back into momentum if you’ve fallen out, to sort of get there more quickly. But it is unavoidable that you will not stay at the top of the momentum cycle all the time.

I think some of us apologize when we’re at the top. We sort of have this guilt that we shouldn’t be doing well if other people aren’t. And others of us don’t have guilt—we have a lot of pride in being at the top of the momentum cycle, and it can feel really destabilizing when we fall out of that phase. And we will, because it is cyclical.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be crisis. If you are in crisis, you sort of go into survival mode. Your energy is depleted. Your energy can feel low, but I actually think it’s more like your energy is really focused. You are hyper-focused on whatever is in crisis, and so it’s like you are laser-beam focused, pointing your energy at the element of your life that’s in crisis.

So it feels like it’s draining your reserves from everywhere else because it’s being harnessed in this one direction. Capacity feels really tight. You don’t have a lot of breathing room. There’s not a lot of extra happening. There’s not a lot of freedom of choice here. This is like, “I have one thing to do. I don’t have a choice. I don’t feel like I have a choice in it, at least.”

My back’s against the wall. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels reactive, maybe even overwhelming. And you’re not dreaming anymore here. You’re under no delusions that you’re in control. There’s a sense of needing to lay down control and go on the ride.

This is a place where, most often, I think in crisis… I’ve said to people for years, you’ve got to bring your line of sight way in. When we’re in growth and expansion, I’m telling people, “Pick your head up and look out there. Cast a vision. Where are you going? Don’t worry about the little stuff on the side of the road. Just eyes forward.”

But when you’re in crisis, I’m saying bring it in. Get your eyes focused on something that’s right in front of you. We are going to go one step at a time through crisis—one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time.

If you have ever sat bedside with someone in the ICU, it’s a great example of where it’s crisis personified. You are sitting in an intensive care unit. There are doctors and nurses everywhere, always at arm’s reach. There’s monitors going off, and all you are focused on is that next heartbeat, that next breath, the little biomarkers of stability.

I think that’s the penultimate example of crisis, but you can look in any area of your life and be experiencing a level of crisis. It’s clarifying.

If you’ve ever lived through a natural disaster in your city—a flood, a tornado, a hurricane, something that really did a lot of damage—the whole community comes into that hyper-focused zone. We are cleaning up, and we are taking care of each other, and that is all we are doing. We’re not focused on all the other elements in life that were important yesterday or a week ago, and we won’t be for a while. We’re going to be here managing and surviving this crisis.

So I think of those two as kind of the top of the ride. It’s so exciting at the top of the Ferris wheel. I think of the other one as the bottom.

And again, these don’t always… one doesn’t always follow the other. There are many ways that you can dip to the bottom of a momentum cycle that don’t involve being in crisis, but that’s the most dramatic way. So I’m going to use those two polar opposites to illustrate the point here.

Let’s talk about another one, though. Another phase of the momentum cycle that we go in and out of is transition and change. Transition and change is a phase where you are having to move from what was to what will be.

And there’s always kind of that trapeze moment in the middle. I think of them like a literal trapeze, where you have to let go of one bar to grab the other one. So transition and change: we know that something is ending, but we have the reassurance that something new is beginning.

When we’re in that state, it’s different than crisis. Crisis is like, we don’t even know what’s next. But in transition and change, there’s often a sense of, “Oh, this is how it used to be, and now it’s going to be like this.”

You can pick something universal, like moving to a new home. If you ever sold a home and moved to a new home, you’ve had this experience of, “Oh, we used to live here. All of our stuff was there. This is where the kids went to school. This is what our commute looked like.” And now we’ve packed everything up, and now it’s in a different place in this home, and we have to find our way around a new neighborhood.

Depending on how big the move was, we might have to reestablish all of our caregivers and providers—doctors, hairstylists, and all the things. So something even as universally experienced as moving your residence is an example of transition and change.

It might be moving from one job to another. That’s a transition and change. It might be welcoming a new family member. You have a baby or you adopt a child. It might be merging a family through marriage. All of those are transition-and-change seasons.

And if you think about how they affect momentum, again, they take up a lot of space. The thing that is in transition will grab a disproportionate amount of energy or attention. We know that something has to shift. There’s often a level of uncertainty or discomfort or restlessness that says, “I don’t know how to do this the new way yet. I’m not fully settled into the new job,” or “I’m not fully settled into how to take care of this next child, and I’m relearning some things.”

You might be trying some things on for size and then discarding them, going, “I thought that’s how I was going to do it, but it’s not going to work.”

So those periods of rapid change or transition can be voluntary. We can go looking for them and call them into our life, or they can be thrust upon us. You can get thrust into a season unexpectedly. You could lose a job, for example, and you’re in transition and change whether you like it or not, because this was the past and that is the future. Your job is to figure out how to get from here to there.

And all of the energy and all of the time and all of the headspace that is going into making that transition is not going anywhere else. So it will decrease momentum temporarily as you get your bearings. But often, a good transition will increase momentum over time.

So if you’re at the early stages of it, you’re going to feel like, “Oh, I’m slowing down.” And we don’t like that. The kind of women who listen to this podcast do not like that state of slowing down. I know it because it’s me too.

However, if we can get through that dip, man, there is a surge. There is just a surge forward that can follow it when we do it well. So giving transition and change the attention that they need, when they need it, can actually be an accelerator to momentum and get you back to growth and expansion faster than you would have gotten there otherwise.

Okay, here’s another one: recovery and healing.

We do not think about this one very often. But after something like crisis, or after a big period of growth and expansion, we sometimes need recovery. We always need it after crisis, I can tell you that. We often need it after a big period of growth and expansion.

And I think we dishonor this one a lot. Again, I’m stereotyping to make a point here, but I think women who have a long history of success and accomplishment do not allow themselves to recover or heal very well. We’re kind of cracking the whip on ourselves: “What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?” Like other people can rest. Other people can take time to recover. Not me.

And if you look back on your life and you see this pattern of achievement, achievement, achievement, achievement, crisis, achievement, achievement—just never taking a breath, never giving yourself a chance to kind of batten down the hatches for a little while, maybe get under a blanket, maybe take a little time away from just the pace that you normally run at…

Recovery and healing is a really powerful season because this is where you rebuild.

So it will feel slower. Momentum will be slow if you take a season of recovery or healing. But you need that space to restore, because that’s where your energy starts to come back online. Your thinking starts to re-clarify because it gets muddled. You’re not ready to sprint yet. I promise you, if you try to sprint in this state, you’re going to fall down.

But you are able to move. You’re able to think. And you need so much more rest than you want to need. It’s infuriating. It’s absolutely infuriating for people like us to need this.

But I promise you, you do. Whether you are a very high-energy person at baseline or not, if you have gone through a significant period of crisis—whether it’s brief or sustained—or a significant period of growth and expansion, especially if it’s sustained, like you’ve been on a long run, then you are going to need some time to regroup from that.

And that season of recovery, if you lean into it, is sort of like healing from an injury. I was a runner for a long time. I wish I were still a runner. I do a lot more walking now than running. But for years and years, I was a really avid runner. And, as runners do, I would get injuries, often in my knees—something connected to my knees, IT band, my actual knee.

When you have an injury and you’re a runner and you’re training for a race, the last thing you want to do is take days off. It’s going to throw off your training schedule. You’re like, “I just want to keep going.” So I was the person getting cortisone shots to say, “I need to keep running. I can’t take a day off. I’m going to do that marathon anyhow.”

And you know what? It never went so well. The results were never that good because I was skipping this really important season of recovery and allowing that injury to heal so that I could come back stronger.

So there’s a little bit of “slow down to speed up.” That philosophy kind of governs a season of recovery and healing. You may need to slow down for a hot second—or longer—so that you actually are at full strength when you come back and try to, metaphorically, run again.

I love that analogy as a runner because it is so typical in the running community: when you are trying to run through an injury, you are not going to run your best races. And we just don’t want to take the time because we think it’s going to slow us down. But ultimately, it’s what gives us back the full strength that we need to be able to move forward.

So for me, the key insight was that not every season has the same amount of energy. We don’t have the same amount of capacity. We don’t have the same output in all of these phases of the momentum cycle, but we expect ourselves to.

That mismatch is the source of suffering. That mismatch between our expectations of ourselves and the reality of how the momentum cycle works—when our expectations of ourselves exceed our capacity—that is a one-way path to overwhelm.

We will be overwhelmed faster than we know what hit us. And how many of us are walking around feeling overwhelmed all the time? We’re trying to operate at peak performance all the time, even when we’re exhausted, even when life is throwing curveballs, even when our capacity has clearly been diminished by something that’s happening in our life. We still expect ourselves to keep going.

Just like running that marathon with an injury, or running it when you had the flu, you wouldn’t do that to yourself physically. That’s the easiest example to get of where you might actually honor it. Let’s make it bigger: a broken leg. You would not try to run a marathon on a broken leg.

All I can think about now is Lindsey Vonn, because what a quintessential example of this. God love her. I mean, it’s just so astonishing what she has attempted to do with the first serious injury, and then, of course, now there’s the second, even more catastrophic injury following that.

But that’s all I could think about as those words were coming out of my mouth. And I think we do this all the time in our own small ways. We expect ourselves to perform even when what we really need is a different gear. We need to operate in a different gear.

Some of my very hardest seasons in life, when I look back at where I was suffering the most internally, were not as much about the situation I was in—whether it was a crisis or otherwise—as they were about my refusal to accept that. My refusal to acknowledge that. My refusal to align to the season that I was in.

And so until I did that, there was friction. There was tension because I was fighting. I still wanted to perform the way I’d always performed, even though something in me was aware that something had shifted. I was ignoring, ignoring, ignoring it.

And when we align with the season we’re in—the phase of the momentum cycle that we’re in—we can create relief. We can create relief.

So I want to give you a couple of ideas on how you do that. How can you align to the phase of the momentum cycle that you’re in so that it feels better?

The first thing you can do is match your actions to your energy level. This sounds obvious. It does when I say it. It’s like, duh. But that’s not how most of us live. Most of us are not aligning to our energy; we’re aligning to our expectations.

We have expectations of ourselves, or other people have them. They’re on our calendar. It’s what other people are demanding of us. But if you start with, “What do I actually have in the tank right now?” and I’m going to expend everything that I have…

In a season of expansion, you go big. You launch the thing. You have the conversation. You take the risk because you have what you need to meet the moment. But in a season of survival, that’s not when you’re going to be a visionary. You need to be focused on what’s right under your feet, what is essential right now, what actually matters in this moment. And that’s where you are really going to be at your best, and it’s going to feel the most aligned.

So that first step is just about matching your actions to your available energy.

Second is honoring your human limits. You are actually a human. This one is very hard sometimes for very successful women. We think we’ve transcended humanity because we’ve built our identity around being really capable, almost superhuman. We’re reliable all the time. We’re productive all the time. We’re the one who gets it done all the time.

And I think when we have developed a reputation for being someone people can count on, it’s hard to let go of that, even for a minute. But the truth is that your capacity to perform is not constant, and pretending that it is will break you, ultimately.

There are times when doing less is not a failure. It’s actually wisdom personified. It’s wisdom personified to know your limits, to say, “I am a human being with human needs, and I require sleep, and I require good food, and I require a quiet night to do what I want instead of grinding and performing all the time.”

So it really is true in your life that figuring out how to honor your human limits—and just sort of trust that they will come back—if you meet them in a particular season, they will come back even stronger in the next.

And the third thing I would say is that you can use the pause to pivot.

In between every one of these phases, there’s kind of—I picture it like a gear shift. You’re moving through the momentum cycle and something is shifting gears. And when the gear shifts, there’s this little bit of a pause. You can feel it.

And you can use that pause to pivot or to change direction. Those in-between seasons, especially ones like transition and change, recovery and healing, and some of the others that I didn’t get into today, give you this little moment where it’s easier to change direction.

Things are moving more slowly, and we don’t like it. So we want to rush through it and speed up and get things back on the road. But if we just honor, “Hey, you know what the benefit is of going slowly? I can turn.”

If I’m not full speed ahead and I’m actually going slowly—or heaven forbid, at a full stop for a moment—that’s where I can change direction without crashing. So those seasons sometimes are really where the magic happens.

They’re where you can reassess. You can redirect yourself, your energy, your team, your family. You can shift where people are moving. You might see things more clearly because you’re not moving so fast.

I have made some of the most powerful decisions in my family and in my professional life during a pause, often an unplanned pause. Something would happen—not that I controlled it, it just happened around me. And because things had to slow down, almost like moving in slow motion for a while, I was able to see things more clearly and then make a powerful decision about how we were going to navigate out of that season into the next one.

And when I look back at the decisions that got made—those really powerful decisions that moved things, where there is a clear before and after—they’re almost always tied to a pause that I did not create, one that I did not go looking for and did not want to be in. But because things were moving more slowly, I saw things more clearly.

And I think that’s the hidden blessing of those particular phases of the cycle. That pause is not always just a delay. It’s like a doorway you can walk through into whatever is next.

So let’s bring this home. I want you to ask yourself: where am I in this momentum cycle? Am I on top of the world in growth and expansion? Am I in crisis? Am I in some kind of transition, or am I approaching a transition? Do things feel expansive and energized in my life? Do they feel maybe more tight or constrained, or do I feel trapped?

Are you building something and you can feel momentum building, or are you barely holding it together right now?

Because once you figure out where you are on this cycle, then you can ask yourself, “Am I aligning my actions with this? Am I taking steps that are actually serving this particular phase of the cycle that I’m finding myself in, or am I expecting top-of-the-momentum-cycle output in a season where I’m just not there?”

And aligning those expectations with your actions is such a game changer. Even small adjustments here can be such a big relief.

And when you start honoring this, when you really kind of wrap your head around this and start looking for it in your everyday life, I think what starts to happen is that you stop judging yourself so harshly. It’s like there’s a good explanation for why you might be feeling the way you feel, why things might feel like there’s a lot of friction, like you’re trying to push water uphill, or why you feel like maybe you’re in free fall and you just can’t figure out how to catch yourself.

Those often are signals that you haven’t yet figured out where you are in the cycle. Every hard season does not mean that something has gone wrong. There are times when you had nothing to do with it. You just have to figure out where you are in the cycle, and you can start to trust the cycle and trust that expansion will come again.

When I’m coaching a group of women, or a circle group of women who know each other well, we are always reminding each other that when you’re at the top of the momentum cycle, shout it loud. Tell us what’s going well. You will inspire and provide hope to every single other person in the circle when we hear about your wins that you’re having at the top of the cycle.

And when you are at the bottom of the cycle, reach up and get some support, because there’s hope in looking at the women at the top and saying, “I’m going to be there again.” And there’s compassion extended to you when you honor where you are and you don’t go into hiding and you let other people sort of pull you up, because people can help pull you back into momentum.

I see it all the time in BOLD in particular, which is my mastermind. The women in BOLD know each other so well because they’re there together for a long time. And they do this for each other so readily. You watch them turn and pull and pick somebody up and kind of help them get back into momentum. And you watch them celebrate and high-five and toast those women at the top, even when they’re not there.

And that is extraordinary, right? Because so often, if we’re not there and we see somebody at the top, what do we feel? Jealousy? Envy? Culturally, those are the women who are getting torn down. They’re not allowed to be at the top of the cycle for very long if you’re not there, because we want a reason to get them off that pedestal.

And women at the bottom often are in hiding because they don’t want anyone to know that they’re not growing right now. They’re not expanding. They’re feeling really stuck. So we want to honor and acknowledge the full spectrum of this cycle because every single one of these phases matters.

Every single one of them brings a piece of the puzzle, and life is not linear. It’s cyclical. Your energy will rise and fall. Your capacity will expand and contract. And that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. This is how life works.

Your job is not to force it. Your job is to align to it. To align to it. That’s all you have to do.

And that is all I have for you today on this topic. So thank you for tuning in to the Brilliant Balance Show today. If you are new to this show, I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you’ll share this episode with somebody that you think would benefit, and I would love to have you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode.

That’s all for today, my friends. Till next time, let’s be brilliant.