Permission to Reset

Momentum Isn’t Always Progress—Sometimes the Most Healing Thing You Can Do Is Give Yourself Permission to Stop

By Rachel Y. Hill, DNP, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC, AHN-BC, HWNC-BC

I sat down to write a fall post.

And honestly, that's fitting for more reasons than the calendar—because at first, I really had fallen.

Pretty far, actually.

Lol.

Turns out, “fall post” was accidentally the most honest title I could have picked.

What I keep landing on instead of pumpkins and sweaters is something simpler and harder to say out loud:

I needed permission to reset.

And I don't think I gave it to myself until I had no other option left.

Big Dreams, Small Windows

I've had Metamorphosis Holistic & Integrative Therapies LLC for over a decade.

For most of that decade, that's all it ever was—a name, a registration, and a dream I carried alongside a full-time day job.

Some weeks, I had only a few hours to give it.

Some months, only a few hours total.

Big dreams. Small windows.

That was the shape of it for years.

And I made peace with that shape a long time ago because it was the only shape my life had room for.

Then, for the first time in ten years, I reached out for help and guidance.

That decision itself felt significant.

It was an admission that I couldn't keep building this alone in the margins.

If the dream was ever going to become more than a name on a registration, it needed more than what I could give it in stolen hours.

So I set out to build a health and wellness empire.

Finally.

For real.

Not a modest little side project.

An empire.

In my head, it carried all the ambition ten years of waiting had stored up.

When Doing Everything Right Still Doesn't Work

For a while, it felt like it was working.

I had what I thought was my dream team.

I was paying for coaching.

Strategy.

Support from people who promised they knew the path from where I was to where I wanted to be.

I did all the things you're supposed to do for almost a year and a half.

And somewhere in the middle of doing everything “right,” I started noticing that the things I thought I had weren't actually there in the way I'd imagined.

It was costly.

In every sense of that word.

At the end of it, I had spent a great deal and had less to show for it than I'd hoped.

I want to be honest about how devastating that was.

Because the polished version of this story—the one where the setback becomes a tidy lesson by the next paragraph—does a disservice to how it actually felt.

It felt like the floor had been pulled out from underneath ten years of quiet waiting.

I almost gave up entirely.

I lost interest in the thing I had been so excited about only months before.

And that's its own particular kind of grief.

Not just losing the outcome.

Losing the appetite for it.

I couldn't look at another social media plan.

I couldn't open another email from someone offering me business coaching.

Every one of those emails felt like it was written in a language I no longer spoke.

Let's Be Honest, It Was Also a Ride

Before I go any further into the hard parts, I want to say something plainly:

It was also, most certainly, a fun ride.

I don't want to tell this story as one long slog because it wasn't.

I built websites.

Plural.

At odd hours, fueled by whatever was left in the coffee pot.

I went after a national accreditation and actually got it.

That involved interviews so grueling I'm fairly sure I aged during them in real time.

I sat there answering questions while some internal committee decided whether the last decade of my life added up to something legitimate.

It did.

I passed.

I still feel a small private smugness about that.

Meditation, Alani, and Jesus

I started my own practice.

An actual practice.

With actual clients.

And I built it around a coaching method I can only honestly describe as having been assembled from equal parts:

• Meditation.
• Alani.
• Jesus.

I'm not being cute about that.

That really is the recipe.

Some mornings, the method arrived during quiet prayer.

Some mornings, it arrived somewhere around can three, when the caffeine finally caught up with whatever I'd been chewing on spiritually since 5 a.m.

It is, I promise, a more coherent system than that origin story makes it sound.

But I'd be lying if I said the framework came down on a mountain fully formed.

It came through a fairly ridiculous, deeply human combination of prayer, exhaustion, and enough Alani to be legally concerning.

So yes.

The collapse happened.

It hurt.

And I'm going to keep being honest about that.

But I refuse to let the ending overwrite how genuinely fun most of the middle was.

A decade-old dream got websites.

It got a national credential.

It got a real practice with real people in it.

It got a coaching method with the strangest, truest origin story I will ever tell.

That happened.

Nobody can take that back.

Not even the parts that fell apart later.

“We Got You”

There was a team behind a lot of this.

And their whole method could be summed up in two words:

We got you.

I leaned into that phrase harder than I probably should have.

And I know exactly why.

I had never been held before.

Not like that.

Not in a way where someone else was holding the weight of the vision alongside me, telling me I didn't have to carry all of it alone.

When you've spent ten years building something in stolen hours by yourself and someone finally says, we got you...

You don't evaluate that sentence.

You fall into it.

When Being Held Comes With an Invoice

Here's the part nobody tells you about being held for the first time:

It has a price tag.

A real one.

Itemized.

Due on a schedule that doesn't care how emotionally significant the holding felt.

And the math on being held, it turned out, only worked if the holding produced a profit fast enough to pay for itself.

It didn't.

Not in almost a year and a half of trying.

So the story, by the time I finally looked at it honestly, boiled down to two options.

And I want you to know I'm only exaggerating slightly:

Either sell my body on the corner...

Or don't quit the day job yet.

I did not sell my body on the corner.

I kept the day job.

I'm telling you that like it's a punchline because, at this point, it has to be.

Otherwise, I'd never get through telling it at all.

But underneath the joke is something I actually mean.

Being held is real.

It's good.

And it's also not free.

No one warns you how disorienting it can be to feel truly supported for the first time in your adult life and then have to do math about whether you can afford to keep feeling that way.

I don't regret leaning in.

I just wish someone had told me to read the invoice a little more closely before I let myself believe the holding was the whole plan.

Nothing We Built Was Wasted

Underneath the joke and the hard math, there's something I keep returning to.

What got built in that season didn't disappear when the season ended.

The websites are still mine.

The accreditation is still mine.

The practice is mine.

The coaching method is mine.

Even the invoice I eventually had to stop paying became part of the education.

All of it became a springboard rather than a dead end.

I didn't walk away with nothing.

I walked away with a launching point I never would have built on my own, in stolen hours, at the pace ten years had taught me to expect.

For that, whatever else this season cost me, I am forever grateful.

The team.

The collapse.

The “we got you” I couldn't ultimately afford.

All of it left something behind worth standing on.

The Permission Nobody Hands You

Here's what took me the longest to understand:

Nobody was going to tell me it was okay to stop.

There was no official notice.

No clear moment when the world said:

You have done enough. You may rest now.

The emails kept coming.

The plans kept arriving in my inbox.

Each one seemed to imply that the only respectable response to a setback was more motion.

More hustle.

Another strategy call.

Another investment in fixing whatever had broken.

For a long time, resetting felt like something that required someone else's approval.

Eventually, I had to give myself the permission nobody else was going to hand me.

Resetting Is Not the Same as Quitting

I wasn't giving myself permission to quit.

That's something different entirely.

And I want to be precise about the difference because I confused them myself for months.

Quitting closes a door.

Resetting closes the door temporarily so you can hear yourself think without the wind blowing straight through the house.

I didn't know, in the moment, which one I was doing.

And I think that not knowing is actually part of the process.

You don't get a guarantee upfront that the reset will lead back out.

You simply have to take the permission anyway.

Before you're sure.

Because waiting for certainty can mean waiting forever.

What My Reset Actually Looked Like

So I retreated.

Mostly within myself.

Away from the plans.

The pitches.

The performance of having everything figured out.

I keep coming back to the image of a cocoon because it's the only metaphor that has ever felt accurate to what that reset actually was.

A caterpillar entering a cocoon isn't simply resting.

Inside that shell, its old form breaks down before something entirely different emerges.

From the outside, a cocoon looks like stillness.

Maybe even like nothing is happening at all.

From the inside?

It's reconstruction.

That's what the reset was for me.

Not stillness.

Not giving up.

A kind of internal dissolving that had to happen before anything new could be built.

You Cannot Alani Your Way Out of a Cocoon

The version of me who launched the empire was eager.

Maybe a little too trusting.

Certain that effort and investment would be met with equivalent effort and investment in return.

That version of me needed to come apart a little before a steadier version could take her place.

I tried, for a while, to force myself back into motion before I was ready.

It didn't work.

Turns out...

You cannot Alani your way out of a cocoon.

Believe me.

I tried that too.

The reset doesn't negotiate with your timeline.

It has its own.

Some People Are for a Season

The failures were real.

The disappointments were real.

And the relationships?

Some faded the way business relationships often do.

Not because anyone necessarily did anything wrong.

Sometimes seasons simply end, and people move where they're needed next.

I've come to see that as part of how this works rather than something to hold against anyone—including myself.

What I didn't expect was that some of those relationships would come back around.

I've had the privilege, since the reset, of reuniting with someone from that earlier season.

Someone who's now helping me see my own vision from a different angle than I could see alone.

I don't think I would have recognized what this person had to offer if I hadn't taken the reset first.

The dissolving made room for a clearer kind of seeing.

In them.

And in myself.

Some People Are for the Long Haul

Some people were part of the dream for a season and were never meant to carry it the whole way.

That's not a failure on their part.

Or mine.

They showed up for exactly the stretch they were meant for.

And some people are meant for the long haul.

You don't always know who they are until the dream has already fallen apart once...

And you see who's still standing there afterward.

Both kinds of people deserve gratitude.

The permission to reset made room for me to see that clearly in a way constant forward motion never had.

Momentum Isn't Always Progress

I want to be honest about something else.

It would be easy to tell this story as though the empire simply collapsed around me while I stood there blameless.

That's not quite it either.

After ten years of a dream squeezed into stolen hours, I got swept away by the momentum.

The meetings.

The plans.

The sheer feeling of finally being in motion.

There's a particular satisfaction in finally taking action after a decade of planning around the edges of a day job.

I was susceptible to it.

I said yes to nearly anything dressed up as productivity because it felt like proof that I was finally doing the thing instead of carrying it quietly for another year.

And I accomplished a lot.

Real things.

That deserves to be named alongside the harder truth:

I had the power to stop and reflect, and for a long stretch, I didn't use it.

When Motion Feels Like Proof

I kept moving because moving felt like progress.

Stopping felt like losing ground I'd worked hard to gain.

It took the collapse to make me stop.

And perhaps a much smaller pause, taken intentionally, might have shown me the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

That's worth saying plainly to anyone caught in their own momentum.

It can be costly—mentally, physically, and spiritually—to keep moving simply because stopping feels like the bigger risk.

Lessons learned in hindsight are valuable.

But I've come to believe intuition deserves just as much weight as the lesson.

The quiet sense that something needed another look.

The flicker of doubt I moved past because I was already in motion.

That was information too.

I simply wasn't willing to stop long enough to listen to it yet.

When Busyness Becomes Its Own Addiction

I've learned something else.

And I don't think it's specific to entrepreneurs.

Being busy can become its own addiction.

Whether you're building your own venture or working a job for someone else, motion can start feeling like proof of worth.

And underneath all that busyness, your body may already be telling you what feels right...

And what doesn't.

Mine was.

I just couldn't hear it.

I was running on adrenaline.

And adrenaline is very good at drowning out the quieter signal underneath it.

If I'm honest, there were sleepless nights in that season.

There was worry I pushed straight through instead of stopping long enough to feel it.

I didn't lack the information.

I lacked the stillness required to receive it.

Learning to Listen Before the Collapse

I know what to do with those feelings now.

And I know how to speak up when something doesn't feel right.

Because I know, in a way I didn't before, the real price of not weighing the odds before committing to something.

That knowledge came at a cost.

I'd still call it one of the better trades I've made.

When We Get the Verdict Backwards

I've been sitting with a question lately:

Have you ever thought something was good for you, and it wasn't—and the thing you thought wasn't good for you turned out to be exactly what you needed?

The empire looked good for me.

It looked like exactly what I should be building.

The momentum.

The growth.

The feeling that I was finally doing the big thing.

But underneath, it was costing more than it was giving.

And I couldn't see that clearly until it had already cost quite a lot.

The reset looked like the opposite of good.

It looked like failure.

Like losing my nerve at the exact moment I should have been pushing harder.

And it turned out to be the thing that actually was good for me.

I got the verdict backwards in real time.

I suspect most of us do more often than we'd like to admit.

Which might be exactly why permission to reset has to be self-given.

If you wait until resetting obviously looks like the right choice...

You may wait through the entire window when it actually was.

Permission Matters More Than Strategy

I don't have a triumphant relaunch to report yet.

And I'm not going to manufacture one for the sake of a tidy ending.

What I have instead is smaller.

And, I think, more honest.

I've started to feel interest returning in small, unglamorous doses.

A little curiosity here.

A little willingness to open one email...

And then close the laptop before the next ten arrive.

A sense that the appetite I lost isn't gone forever.

It's simply coming back slowly.

The way appetite actually does after something has made you sick.

Sometimes the Pause Is Part of the Plan

What I want to say plainly to anyone circling their own version of this decision is this:

The permission matters more than the strategy.

I had plenty of strategy the first time around.

I paid for it.

Followed it.

Executed it.

What I didn't have was permission to stop long enough to find out whether the strategy was even pointed toward the right thing.

Resetting isn't a failure to execute.

Sometimes resetting is what allows you to discover whether the plan was ever sound in the first place.

If You're Waiting for Permission

If you're circling your own reset right now...

If some part of your work, purpose, or dream has quietly gone dormant...

And you've been waiting for someone or something to tell you it's allowed...

I don't think that permission is coming from outside.

It didn't come to me that way either.

I don't have a formula to hand you instead.

What I can tell you is this:

The reset itself is not the failure.

It might be the most honest thing you do all year.

You don't have to know yet whether you're coming back out.

You don't have to answer another email today.

Consider this, if it helps:

You have permission.

Not because I'm handing it to you exactly.

But because you never actually needed anyone else to.

Maybe you simply needed someone to say it plainly...

The way I wish someone had said it to me sooner.

The Blessing Hidden Inside the Reset

The past two years—all of it together—have been a genuine blessing.

The building.

The collapse.

The cocoon.

The reset.

The sleepless nights.

And the nights I now know how to protect.

Even the parts that didn't feel like blessings while I was living them taught me something I needed to know.

And perhaps that's another thing seasons teach us.

Not everything that falls is lost.

Sometimes falling creates the space for something to rest.

To dissolve.

To reorganize.

To become something different.

And sometimes the next season doesn't begin with pushing forward.

Sometimes it begins with permission to reset.

A Few Questions to Sit With

• Where in your life have you been waiting for permission to stop, reset, or slow down?
• What would it look like to give that permission to yourself?
• Is there a difference in your situation between resetting and quitting—and have you been treating them as the same thing?
• Has something ever looked good for you and wasn't, while something that looked like failure became exactly what you needed?
• Where has momentum convinced you that motion was progress?
• What might your intuition already have been telling you if you'd stopped long enough to listen?

--Dr. Rachel