Momentum — How To Build It, How To Keep It
Momentum (n)— the force or energy gained by a moving object
Momentum plays a much bigger role in our day-to-day lives than we may realize. You know that feeling when everything is going your way and you feel like nothing can stop you? Welcome to a moment with a lot of positive momentum.
Ever tried to get back into a gym routine after a taking a few weeks off? It’s hard, and not fun, and the product of low momentum.
From sports, to business, to relationships, to pretty much everything else in life… momentum is huge.
The purpose of this post is to share a few ways I keep momentum, in less than 5 minutes.
How To Build Momentum
Physics measures momentum as an object’s mass, multiplied by it’s speed. Basically, how much does it weigh, and how fast is it going. I think of momentum as “how hard would it be to stop this thing”? Whether it’s an object, organization, idea, or person, they are all capable of gathering momentum.
So, what does that mean to us? Well, it means to increase our momentum we need to increase our weight and our speed. So go out there and eat:
Ok, maybe not so much. But really though, we can think of building momentum in terms in increasing our weight (improving ourselves) and our speed (rate of taking action).
Think small, daily actions. Things like exercise, meditation, healthy diet, brainstorming new business ideas, networking, etc.
The more positive momentum generating activities we can do in a given day, the more positive momentum we’ll build. Simple as that.
However… we’re not always going to be in periods of positive momentum. We’re going to go through times where our motivation runs short, or our momentum starts to take a backslide. But that’s ok, it’s natural, and all we need to do is:
Cut Negative Momentum Cycles Short
This is just as important as building positive momentum. We’ve all had the experience of spending months building up positive momentum (going to the gym every day for example), only to let our motivation fade and our momentum to drop to a standstill.
The key when this starts to happen is simply to recognize it. In moments of momentum backslide, it’s not always possible to reverse the backslide and start building positive momentum again right away. It usually takes some time to break the cycle of actions causing the backslide, and then more time to break back into positive momentum.
In these times, it’s best to force ourselves to do the small daily actions that we know are associated with positive momentum. To go to the gym, for example, even though we realllly don’t want to. Over time, these small actions will cut the backslide short and get us moving in the positive direction again.
