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Hey there,

You were disciplined. You made the sacrifice, whatever it was, for longer than was comfortable. And now you need some kind of signal that it was worth it. Not a medal or a t-shirt. Just a little reinforcement. Something you can use as fuel to keep going, because it’s getting hard and you’re craving that fuel.

And it’s not showing up.

Resonate?

I know this feeling in my body first. Every time I’ve held a calorie deficit, there’s a window around two or three weeks in where the scale stops moving. I’ve skipped the pizza & chocolate, passed on the cocktail, and trained hard. And the signal I craved to keep going just wasn’t there, while the peanut butter I craved certainly was.

I’ve broken at that moment quite a few times. Never in week one. But in weeks two or three, after I’ve already paid the startup price.

Almost every time I bailed in that window, I made things worse.

I overcorrected, got resentful, and ended up further back than when I started.

But the times I didn’t bail — the times I stayed in the deficit another week and kept doing the boring thing — the results came. Each time also brought some selective amnesia about how frustrated I’d been only days earlier!

My course Color Flow opened last week. I had some sales, which I was really happy about. I also had a bunch of technical problems that broke parts of my marketing, sales, and order system at the worst possible time. And then a full-day internet outage where I couldn’t even work on the troubleshooting. After months of building this thing, the moment I most wanted that reinforcement — it wasn’t there.

Deja vu.

So what do you do in that transition zone, seemingly stuck between the work you did and the results you want?

A younger version of me would have thrown a couple Gin & Tonics at it, and likely taken yet another step backwards.

There’s another version, the one I hope to inspire in you while reminding myself.

Hit pause and look at what you actually did, the discipline you held, and the sacrifice you made. And let that buy you some runway. Give yourself space for the returns to come, even if you need them sooner than they’re going to arrive.

I know, the wait is a grind and it seems to ask too much of us. But it’s the only way to deal with the lag, and the lag is real. It’s there with the body. It’s there with things you create and put into the world. Some things happen on their own timeline, not yours. And very often it’s only slightly delayed from when you needed it. If you can make it a few more days, those things tend to happen.

The best review I ever got on my first book came eight years after it came out. The payoff was there the whole time. I just couldn’t see it when I was getting up at five to write before my day started.

If you respect the work you put in, and I hope you do, give yourself a little extra space for the results to land.

If you need to hear this today: trust yourself and stay on the plan. Two more weeks. Maybe just a few more days. If you don’t need to hear that right now, tell someone who does, because someone probably does.

One more thing. I wanted to give away more of the experience of my coaching, so I added some things to my newsletter sign-up pack. It now includes a guided visualization, the full Color Flow course video on green, and a new coaching audio I recorded. If you’d like it, you can grab it here.

Until next time,
Jeff

— Coach Jeff Grant Hillseeker | Ko Samui, Thailand

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