Do you perceive that you are stagnating or not making progress in one or more areas of your life? Perhaps you are holding yourself back in some way or that you spend substantial time comparing yourself to what others have achieved and are wondering why they are building momentum, while you’re treading water. Stagnation, if wisely interpreted, can provide you valuable feedback to help guide you towards what is truly most important.
I like to use the analogy of a train when talking about momentum. Most people will have seen a train pulling heavy cargo. It starts slowly as it pulls the massive weight behind it, before picking up speed or velocity as it goes. You may remember from your school days that momentum = mass x velocity: the mass of the train multiplied by its speed velocity results in its momentum.
It may be helpful to think of that train track as a metaphor for your unique, primary purpose, mission, or objective that you have in life. Whatever is most important, most meaningful, most inspiring, most intrinsically calling you, the objective that you love doing that you can’t wait to get up in the morning and do. That’s your train track path.
It may surprise you to know that you tend to be most efficient, effective, and inspired when doing what is highest on your values. It’s also when you tend to have the least resistance, the most intrinsic drive, and when your engine becomes unstoppable.
If you’d love to build momentum, it is wise to align your life so that you are living congruently with your highest values and keep prioritizing your life accordingly.
When you live congruently with your highest values, you also increase the probability of being clear about what your track is – your mission – and be spontaneously inspired to act on it without inner resistance. As such, you tend to have the fastest speed and accomplish more in less time. In other words, you build momentum.
If you’re not consistently moving towards something that’s deeply meaningful and inspiring, and you’re not building up an accelerated pace or faster velocity towards it, you’re unlikely to get to a point where your momentum is unstoppable.
That is the life-transforming power of discovering what your truly most inspiring mission is. Your unique mission is an expression of your highest value. Mine, as an example, is teaching self-mastery principles and methodologies in the field of human behavior.
Every decision you make is based on what you believe will give you the greatest advantage over disadvantage at any moment in time in relation to fulfilling your set of and highest values.
It’s for this reason that it is wise to prioritize your life by asking yourself: What is the highest priority action I can do today that can help me fulfill what’s most meaningful to me, my purpose in life, and that serves the greatest number of people?
If you’re not delegating lower-priority tasks, you won’t be able to spend time on the highest-priority tasks that help you become masterful, build momentum, and be unstoppable.
Give yourself permission to do what’s most important.
If you make a list of everything that you do in a day, all day, every day for weeks, and look at what you’re doing and then take a look at where it is on the meaning list: How meaningful is it? How productive is it? You may just realize that you are majoring in minors and minoring in majors, instead of doing what’s most important and high priority to you. In doing so, you tend to hold back momentum and lower your velocity.
- When you do something HIGH on your values, your energy goes UP.
- When you do something LOW on your values, your energy goes DOWN.
Your energy is what drives your momentum. So, if you raise your energy, you’re likely to speed up the process, be more effective, efficient, prioritized, and empowered.
When you compare yourself to other people and put them on a pedestal, you minimize yourself as a result. When you minimize yourself, your energy and confidence tend to go down, you tend to avoid acting or delegating, and hang on to emotional baggage that weighs you down and slows your momentum.
In summary, many people who feel stuck and lacking momentum in their lives are likely not clear as to their own mission and purpose in life, are subordinating to other people, comparing themselves to other people, clouding the clarity of their mission, not living by highest priority, trying to please others for fear of being rejected, and holding themselves back from doing something extraordinary.
A feeling of stagnation may not be comfortable, but it can provide incredibly valuable feedback to help guide you towards a more inspired, fulfilled, and meaningful life with so much momentum that you become unstoppable.