"It's just not the right time right now."
I heard it over and over this fall. Not from women who didn't care. Not from women who weren't ready. From smart, capable leaders who know exactly what they want next, and who are waiting for a calendar that never clears.
The kids' schedules. The big project. The busy season that somehow lasts all year.
I want to say this up front: enrollment for the Momentum Circle is closed. This isn't an invitation to join anything. It's what I've been sitting with since, because I've watched this pattern for years. And this fall, I finally saw it clearly in myself.
I said it too
For two years, I told myself I'd build a referral program for Growth By Design, my consulting company. A real one: a process and materials to connect with architects, bankers and commercial builders, the people who hear about a nonprofit's building plans long before the public does.
And for two years, I had a reason not to.
I'll do it later. I'm just too busy right now. Once we have more clients, I'll have the space to think about it. It'll take too long to bring in new work, and I need clients now. I should focus on what I can do today. What if they think I'm using them? Do I even know enough people?
Every one of those sounded reasonable. None of them were true.
Then, in the first session of the Powerhouse Women Upgrade program, Lindsey gave us an assignment: the Surprise Me Challenge. Thirty days on something that would grow you and grow your business. Something big enough to matter, and scary enough that, in her words, it makes you want to throw up a little. Uncomfortable, not frozen.
I picked the referral program.
The timing was terrible. Our Luminary Conference landed right in the middle of those 30 days. I committed to three hours a week and two conversations a week, which meant staring at my very, very full calendar and deciding what had to go.
Here's what surprised me. It wasn't that hard. Once I actually looked, saying "not right now" to a few things was easy. I just hadn't been willing to look.
And the people I was nervous to ask? They said, "This is a no-brainer. We see the difference you make on these campaigns. It makes our jobs easier. Just give us the materials."
Four new prospects I would not have had otherwise. From the thing I'd been putting off for two years.
Then came Costa Rica
In the middle of all that, a spot opened on the Becoming Experience, an intense retreat in Costa Rica. I had ten days to decide.
The timing was worse than terrible. We'd leave the Monday after Luminary wrapped. I'd land back home in the early hours of the Monday I was due at the Minnesota Gift Planning Conference, where I was speaking and coordinating podcast recordings.
The old me would have said no. But the Surprise Me Challenge had just shown me something: sometimes the most inconvenient timing is exactly where the biggest growth lives.
So I went.
While I was there, I set a goal I'm almost nervous to type: growing Growth By Design from four employees to 150 in the next ten years. And then I spent the week acting like the CEO of a company that size. I started every morning in reflection, with an abundance workbook and a walk on the beach, picturing that future.
I said yes to snorkeling in open ocean, feeding wild monkeys and eating far more fish than I ever do.
And one night, we swam in the bioluminescence.
Here's something most people don't know about me. I am deeply uncomfortable swimming anywhere I can't see the bottom. In twelve years in the Navy, I had plenty of chances to join swim call in the open ocean, right off the side of a destroyer. There were trained rescue swimmers. Boats in the water. Sailors on deck with weapons, watching out for us.
I never once jumped in.
In Costa Rica, it was dark. I couldn't see a thing beneath me.
I went in first.
Because that's what the CEO of a 150-person company would do.
I came home energized in a way I haven't felt in years. In the weeks since, I've built a growth framework for the company and a six-module training program for our new associate consultant, one I'll use for every consultant who comes after her. I've set my business, and my clients, up for a level of success I couldn't have planned from inside my routine.
All of it in the most inconvenient stretch of my year.
Real talk
This is the part I've been hesitant to say out loud, because I didn't want it to sound like a sales pitch. It isn't one.
I am frustrated for you.
When I hear "it's not the right time," I know what usually follows. The next step gets pushed to spring. Then to after the holidays. Then to next year. And the thing that could unlock everything you've been working toward waits behind a hundred small things that feel urgent and aren't.
Sometimes I want to gently grab you by the shoulders and say: the inconvenient time is the right time.
Not because hard is good for its own sake. Because inconvenient timing forces you to choose. It makes you look at your calendar and decide what actually matters. It makes you behave like the next version of yourself before you feel ready. That's the whole point. A clear calendar would never have asked that of me.
And I truly don't care whether your next leap happens with Alma, in another program, or somewhere else entirely. I care that it happens.
White Space Wednesdays
Those three hours a week taught me something, so I've made it permanent. Every Wednesday is now blocked off. I'm calling them White Space Wednesdays.
That's where the Upgrade program lives, along with another program I'm starting in January, my strategy time and my own growth. Not squeezed in around the edges. Protected first.
Because I've finally accepted something I used to only say: to grow the business, I have to grow me.
So here's my question for you. What have you been telling yourself "not right now" about? And what would it look like to go in first, even if you can't see the bottom yet?
With love,
Kristi
P.S. If someone in your life keeps waiting for the right time, forward this to her. She might need permission to stop waiting.
