Feel Behind? Read This.
We’ve all been there - myself included.
You might feel behind because you’re seeing others accomplish things that you haven’t yet – like getting married, reaching a milestone at work, buying a home, etc. Feeling behind SUCKS. It really does. It’s one of those feelings that spills over into pretty much all areas of your life and it’s hard to shake because it’s such a nagging feeling. You constantly feel like you’re chasing but not reaching. Which means that you’re probably exhausted a lot of the time from running on the nonstop hamster wheel of chasing after whatever it is you feel behind in (a career path, a relationship, etc.).
Then there’s the mental aspect of it – feeling like a failure. It’s so frustrating. See? I told you that I’ve been there and can relate. But I’ve done some inner work and mindset shifts that have really helped me stop treating my life like it’s a race to be run instead of something to be lived and that’s what I want to talk about with you today.
THREE REASONS YOU FEEL BEHIND AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM:
Why do we feel like we’re never quite where we’re supposed to be? Well, let’s start with the most obvious…
01. You’re comparing your life to someone else’s and getting your priorities muddled.
It’s no surprise that with the prevalence of social media in our daily lives, we have easy access to so many people’s lives. But what I think we forget is that we’re not getting the full picture. Even someone who is “vulnerable” and “transparent” online is only showing you a fraction of their life.
I was thinking about when I started feeling “behind” in life and it was my early 20s - when I graduated college (for the first time). Up until that point, I was kind of following a similar path to everyone around me. That’s usually what happens when you’re a kid in school right?
But then after high school or college, people’s paths start to diverge. We all kind of go our own ways and it becomes a habit to notice who is “farther along” in comparison to you. This is not ideal because that’s when you start comparing where you are in life to someone else’s perceived metric of success. Usually, when you feel bummed about being behind, it’s less about feeling like you need to have what others have and more about not really knowing how to measure your life according to things that really matter to you.
We might feel behind because so and so just went on a European vacation so shouldn’t we be planning one too?
Or so and so just bought a house on the water so shouldn’t we be trying to do that too?
Or so and so just retired her husband so shouldn’t our business be making enough money to do that too?
Comparison is a dangerous thing that can cause us to pursue random goals that don’t have meaning in our lives.
Maybe the person who went on that European vacation has been dreaming of visiting there since they were a teenager because their grandma lives there.
Maybe the person who bought a house on the water bought it from a family member who is moving so the house can stay in the family.
Maybe the person who retired her husband realized that it was more cost-effective for their family to have him home to watch the kids than to pay for daycare.
Instead of basing what we are or aren’t doing or becoming to others, we are better off spending our energy getting clear on what we actually want in our own lives. When is the last time you really sat down and pondered that. Where do YOU want to be? Not where does society say you should be or what does your mom think would be a good place for you to be? What do you actually want your life to look and feel like? I saw this quote on Instagram – I’m 99% sure my friend Saba shared it:
“It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re chasing someone else’s dream.”
When our eyes and hearts are glued to the lives of others, it’s gonna be really hard to decipher what really matters to us and what we really want out of life and that’s when we get caught up in that feeling of being behind. We feel behind when we don’t have a clear vision of what we really want our lives to be.
ACTION STEP: Spend some time deciding what actually matters to you. What do you want your life to look and feel like and how can you start taking action toward those things today?
02. You’ve created an arbitrary timeline.
Maybe you don’t struggle much with comparison and you really are pursuing goals that matter to you and align with your vision – that is amazing, really. But yet.. you still feel behind? This is the biggest reason that I find myself feeling behind – I create an arbitrary timeline that has no real weight or meaning but that I give all the power of my life to. I’m a planner by nature (shocking, I know) and I love creating timelines for my goals because not only does it help hold me accountable to making progress but it also helps me to work toward multiple goals while still honoring my energy.
But here’s the thing with timelines… they’re a lot like schedules and routines. Say it with me…the timelines we create are tools, not chains! I used to cling tight to my timelines and treat them as my metric of success. I had a timeline in my mind for life milestones and one for each goals and if I didn’t align with them, I told myself that I was a failure or that I wasn’t working hard enough so I’d put my head down and try to grind it out in the name of staying on track with my timeline.But then I started to ask myself the question, “Wait. Where did this timeline come from? What are they based on?” And when I couldn't give myself a concrete answer other than, “Well idk I think I saw this timeline in a movie once?” I knew that I had to stop letting these arbitrary guidelines be the leading things in my life.
I realized that, no matter how Hallmark cheesy it sounds, I had to find joy in the journey of my life or else I would always come back to feeling behind or overwhelmed. Finding joy in the journey means that you are pursuing your goals in a way that is enjoyable. You’re not grinding miserably until you get there only to find yourself completely burned out and unable to enjoy the achieved goal once you do arrive.That’s a scary place to be…I lived there for a lot of my 20s. Finding joy in the journey for me in pursuit of my goals has looked a lot like scaling back with Hustle Sanely so I can enjoy my life now and not after X has been accomplished. When I first started Hustle Sanely, success came in HOT. And of course, I’m grateful, but it set me up to set unrealistic expectations on myself to continue doubling + our income every year. Chasing that sucked all the joy out of what I was doing and caused me to carry these really intense timelines for new products and projects that ultimately led to me feeling spread incredibly thin.
Can I tell you a limiting belief I’ve had to work through? My best business days are behind me. This is something that used to scare me when I first started scaling back at work. When I scaled back, I chose to hire more help so I could continue to serve the Hustle Sanely community well. Paying a team to help run a company is a big financial investment that lead me to believe that I’d never see the income I did my first and second years in business again (when I was doing everything myself). But what I had to realize was that me scaling back at work meant that I was scaling up in life. I was able to be a better version of myself because I was prioritizing my mental and physical health. I’m SO much happier now than when I was chasing an arbitrary timeline and always feeling like I wasn’t quite where I should be.
ACTION STEP: Define a new metric for success that isn’t a timeline. Yes, totally use timelines as tools to help you make consistent progress on your goals but don’t give those timelines so much power over your life. So for me, instead of my metric of success being doubling profits every year, it looked more like having the opportunity to prioritize taking care of my mental wellbeing every day. Being able to clock out of work by 5 PM. Being able to transition into a 4-day workweek. What are some things that make you feel like you are truly successful?
Another point I want to make that goes along with this: sometimes it’s not the right season to do something even if the timeline we created tried to tell us it is. For example, one of my big dreams is to write a book. I have felt behind with this dream because I see all these other people getting book deals, so then I start to question why I’m not doing that yet and if I missed my chance. But when I zoom out a little, I realize that if I would've tried to write a book anytime within the last 3 years since Hustle Sanely has been a thing, it wouldn’t have turned out well because I wouldn’t have been able to give the project my best work. I’ve dedicated the last 3 years to building up our course offers and our paper product line. There is just no way I could’ve written a book while building those 2 foundations because my capacity doesn’t allow for it. I could’ve “powered through” and tried to do it anyway so I didn’t feel behind but the result would’ve been a subpar book that I wasn’t proud of and that just won’t fly for me. Just because you’re not doing something right now doesn’t mean you’re never going to do it. Create realistic timelines that align with your life and what season you’re in…not these dumb arbitrary ones.
03. You're out of touch with your why.
You know that feeling when you’re just going through the motions every day? You feel like a robot in your own life.
Wake up.
Plop down at your job.
Do the tasks that need to be done to keep things going with glazed-over eyeballs and not much creativity to be found anywhere?
Come home.
Go to bed.
Repeat.
It can feel like a boring loop…a Groundhogs Day cycle. Definitely, surviving over thriving mode vibes, you know? I found myself here a few months ago…feeling very uninspired with work and what I was doing and I was determined to get to the bottom of it. After some reflection and journaling, I realized that I was just going through the motions every day and I’d lost touch with why Hustle Sanely mattered to me and why I’m so passionate about what I do.
I felt very behind every day because I wasn’t making the progress that I wanted to make on certain projects, and that catapulted me into the rut of going through the motions day after day to kind of “hide” from making real moves. I threw myself into the mundane tasks so that I wouldn’t have to face the hard work required for reaching new levels.Have you ever found yourself doing that? Putting off goals that do matter to do because maybe you’re nervous about pursuing them? CONGRATS YOU’RE NORMAL! But the sucky thing is, when we put these goals off, we feel behind and we lose our spark for the goal. So what’s a solution here? You need to rediscover your spark!
ACTION STEP: So this worked for me a few months ago when I was feeling a little out of touch with Hustle Sanely and nervous to pursue big bold dreams: go back to old journal entries or photos from the beginning of your goal journey and remind yourself why you started in the first place. Get reacquainted with why whatever it is matters to you. I looked at the Instagram post that I shared announcing that I was officially going to pursue Hustle Sanely full-time so that I could make it my life’s mission to help women pursue their goals without losing their minds. I read old messages and DMs from you guys sharing your #hustlesanelywins with me, which served as proof that the work I’m doing is making a difference. I watched old YouTube videos of mine where I was unboxing our first-ever paper planner.
I just needed to get re-acclimated to why Hustle Sanely mattered to me to help me stop feeling behind. I was focusing too much on the tasks and not enough on why I was doing them.
When you’re pursuing goals, it can be easy to do that – hyperfocus on the what instead of the why. But the why is the fuel that powers you through the what a lot of the time.
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If you enjoyed this blog post, tune into Episode 133 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to dive deeper into this topic:
