When the next step isn’t obvious
When I’m struggling, I’ve realized I tend to do something almost instinctively.
I pull back.
Not because I want to avoid the problem. Usually the opposite. I need enough distance to understand what the problem actually is.
The day-to-day view can get very convincing. A delay feels enormous. A wrong turn feels permanent. A few hard weeks can start looking like evidence that everything has stalled.
But from farther back, the landscape often looks completely different.
A longer route than I expected
This past year has made that especially clear.
My father-in-law died in December. Seven months later, my mother-in-law passed away.
Neither loss was entirely unexpected, but both changed the rhythm of our family. There were logistics, decisions, grief, and a lot of energy directed toward helping my husband and kids through a difficult stretch.
ENSOhello slowed down.
At first, that made sense. Life had gotten in the way.
What surprised me was what happened after things became quieter.
The obvious obstacles were gone. I should have been ready to jump back in.
But I wasn’t.
The view from higher up
Once I stopped looking only at the launch calendar, I could see there was something else going on.
All the conversations about my husband’s childhood and family had stirred up some unresolved pieces of my own history. At the same time, I had been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the part of ENSOhello that asks me to be public-facing, visible, and very clearly the person leading it.
Those things were connected.
And once I saw that, I couldn’t really unsee it.
The work in front of me was no longer simply “get the launch moving again.”
There was another piece that needed attention first.
Sometimes progress looks like backtracking
So I stepped back.
I kept ENSOhello running. I kept the system alive. But I gave myself room to work on something more personal that I knew would matter to the way I showed up as a founder.
From the outside, that could easily look like a stall.
From where I was standing, it felt more like a planned detour.
A necessary one.
That distinction mattered.
Backtracking feels very different when we know why we’re doing it.
Direction matters more than speed
I’ve been called persistent for most of my life.
I used to think perseverance meant continuing to push forward.
I don’t think that anymore.
Sometimes perseverance is keeping sight of the destination while allowing the route to change.
A pause can belong to the path. So can a detour. So can a stretch where very little looks productive from the outside.
If we know where we’re trying to go, the slower parts don’t have to mean we’ve lost our way.
The timeline gets smaller from up here
A few months can feel enormous while we’re inside them.
Zoom out far enough, and they become a small section of a much longer story.
That perspective has helped me more than once.
It reminds me that I haven’t abandoned ENSOhello. I haven’t lost interest. I haven’t stopped moving toward what I want to build.
I’ve just taken a longer route.
And, at least for me, it was the right one.
The destination hasn’t changed. My understanding of the route has.
