Believe it or not, I rarely, if ever, have everything figured out all at once. If one thing is going well, something else is giving me issues. Like, my business is doing great, but my relationship with one of my parents isn’t. I’m completing my goal of going to more speaking events, but I haven’t completed my goal of owning a home. I feel behind, and even though I know it will all work out, it still feels scary in the moment. 

So what can we do after we validate our own feelings? We make a plan and we stick to it. Because our feelings are valid, but we can’t let them hold us back. 

In this week’s episode, we’re working on letting go of the timeline. In this episode, I’m going to teach you how to stop feeling behind and start moving forward. This idea of a timeline and the American Dream is not the end-all all be-all of your life. You control your destiny, you know your circumstances, and what you have had to overcome. It’s time to stop letting the idea of a timeline control you and time to get moving. 

Follow Erika on:
Instagram @‌theerikacruz
TikTok @‌theerikacruz
LinkedIn

Website:
http://www.theerikacruz.com

How to work with Erika:

Sign up for the FREE webinar, Make 2026 Your Main-Character Year, here!

Join the waitlist for the Courage Driven Latina program here.

Join the waitlist for the Magnetic Mastermind here!

Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST, an Afro-Latina-owned boutique podcast production and copywriting studio. 

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello. Hello. Welcome back to this week’s episode of Chingona Revolution Podcast. This is your host, Erika Cruz, and I am a little congested, so I apologize. I’m going to sound a little stuffy in this podcast episode, [00:01:00] but it must be recorded today or else it would be late. So here we are. And I have a very important topic that I’d like to speak with you about, and this topic is something that I see come up on almost every coaching call with my clients, and something that I see with my friends in our group chat, and even with myself and this topic, is the topic of feeling behind in our lives or our businesses and feeling as if we’re not following the timeline that we think we should be on. This is a very timely episode because at the time of recording, my birthday is tomorrow, and I’m officially in my mid thirties. And I think for all of you who’ve been following me, and no matter how long you’ve been following me for, whether it’s from the beginning when I didn’t even have a business, and maybe you watch me create my business, or if you’ve just been following for the last year or so, or maybe you just found me, I think it’s really easy to look at my life and say, Erica has it [00:02:00] all figured out.

Or one day I wanna have a podcast like Ana Revolution, or one day I wanna be on Pod on the podcast of Ana Revolution. Or one day I wanna have a business like Erica’s, or I want to travel like Erica. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my life, but I do think that as we go through either the new year or birthdays, we tend to hit these reflection moments when we observe our life and we almost do this automatic check-in.

Am I, am I where I think I should be? Am I going where I want to go? And we just naturally do this check-in. And being that I’m now in my mid thirties, I’m very grateful for a lot of things in my life, but there’s also a lot of places in my life in which I do feel like I should have already figured them out.

So one of them is real estate. I am a very ambitious, [00:03:00] driven person. I was saving most of my, I wanna say, when I was working in the tech industry for about. Two or three years, I was saving 30% of each paycheck so that I could buy a house, and I had the money saved up and then the pandemic occurred and I decided to start a business.

And I invested my money in starting a business and essentially in sustaining my life while I grew a business. And I don’t regret that. But there are moments in which I’m like, damn, I should be a homeowner by now. When my parents were my age, they already had multiple homes and multiple children. Yet here I am, I moved back into my mom’s house to start my business, and I don’t regret that at all.

It’s actually been a beautiful time for my mom and I to reinvest in our relationship to redefine what our, our friendship was like. I contribute a lot of. Resources to my mom’s [00:04:00] home, which has allowed her to work a lot less. She’s getting ready for retirement. I pay most of the mortgage. I pay for most of our groceries.

So it’s not like I am sitting there freeloading. And honestly, even if I was, you know, even if I needed my mom’s support in order to run my business, there’s no shame in that. But there is a part of me that’s like, damn, I should already be a homeowner. I should have already moved out of my mom’s house. I should already be married and I should already have kids, and you’re hearing me say this and you’re probably like, oh my gosh, no, everything’s gonna work out for you.

But it’s so funny how when it comes to ourselves, we can be so mean to ourselves. So my logical brain knows that the right. Things will work out in the right time. How do I know this? I know this because I’ve been in this place many times before. When I knew that I wanted to leave the tech industry, I felt the same way that I feel right now about my current circumstances and.

Honestly, [00:05:00] everything worked out in the best possible way for me to start my business. If I would have started my business back in 2018, or maybe even 2019, it wouldn’t have worked out as great as it ended up working out, because I started in 2020. Everything worked out for me. My company sent us home, so we were working fully remote, so I had all this extra time on my hands because I wasn’t commuting and I wasn’t spent.

I was getting my work done still, but I had all this extra time to create content. And then because the pandemic occurred, and suddenly all these people ended up on TikTok. That’s where my business boomed because I happened to be on TikTok at the right time, and there was all this change and uncertainty, and that’s exactly what I was talking about in my content.

So all of those things needed to occur in order for my business to happen in the way it did, and there was so many failed attempts before starting my business. That didn’t work out. And now looking back, I’m like, oh [00:06:00] my goodness, this all worked out in my benefit. I applied to Google, I applied to Instagram, I applied to TikTok and I didn’t get jobs at any, I made it to the last round of interviews at Google and then they restructured the, that part of the organization and the position was eliminated.

They were no longer hiring for this position. So. At the moment, it felt like total rejection, but now looking back, I’m like, oh, I know deep down that if I had just landed a job at Google or Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn or all these different places that I had applied to, I would not have left my job to go all in on my business.

But because those things didn’t work out. It created the perfect opportunity for me to go all in on my business. So notice I’m telling you this, in retrospect, we’re at the end of 2025 and now I clearly see how everything worked out for me, and I have full faith that everything will work out for me with buying a home [00:07:00] with.

Kids if I ever decide to have them, as well as with a partner. So I know this from my logical brain, right? But there’s still that human side of me that’s like, is this actually going to happen? When is this actually going to happen? And of course, as we look at other people, whether they are our immediate.

Friends, family or people that we follow on social media and we see that they are manifesting the things that we want. That comparison makes us feel as if we are behind and this. Feeling of, oh my gosh, I’m behind. Is nothing more than lack mindset. And what’s happening in these circumstances is we are making other people’s, or other people the main character.

And we’re just assuming that we are this like extra in the movie of life. But every single one of us is the main ca main character of our story. And we must see ourselves as that. But I think culturally, [00:08:00] if you come from. Immigrant parents if you are Latino Latina, we’ve constantly been conditioned to not take up too much space, to not really be seen, to be humble, and that has conditioned us to not look at us as this main character.

So. What I’ve learned is through coaching over 300 clients at this point, I’ve learned that nobody has their life figured out in every area. So people will join my program, courage driven Latina, because they either want to work on their confidence, they want to work on their relationships. They want to have a career change or they want to maybe start creating content or start a business or grow their business.

And it’s so interesting, the people who are unmarried usually get a lot of coaching around confidence and showing up for relationships or feeling behind. And then the people who are married rarely get coaching on. Finding a partner, [00:09:00] right? Because they already have their partner, but they’re usually getting coaching on I wanna create content, or I wanna start a new job.

And I can’t think of one client that has every area of their life figured out. And these. Different areas are going to change, right? Maybe at the moment I’m focused on, okay, I really wanna be a homeowner and that’s the next goal that I have. But once I become a homeowner, then the, then it’s gonna shift, right?

Maybe it’s about my business and maybe pivoting my business or maybe there, there’s family planning and you’re not going to feel like you are ahead or on track in every area of your life, and that is okay. What I want you to know with what I’ve vulnerably shared and what I’ve talked about about clients is that you are not alone.

Nobody feels on top of the world in every area of their life, and we never will feel that way. So. The real question is how do we let go of timelines? [00:10:00] Because when we’re constantly focused on other people’s lives and making them the main character, we are absent from our own lives. And that’s the last thing I want for you all.

So I would like you to think about a time in which you felt like you were behind and you were either waiting to land a new job, or you were waiting for an ideal relationship or an opportunity to come your way. And as you were waiting for it, maybe it felt like, oh my gosh, this is never going to happen.

Think about a time in your life. So review your past. Now, think about when it actually occurred, and think about how it ended up being the most ideal timing that you couldn’t have planned. Similar to me starting my business, because the thing is that we get so focused on where we wanna go, that we fail to recognize how far we’ve already come and that you are currently living [00:11:00] in the reality that you prayed for months ago or years ago.

And we dismiss that we, we really forget because the human brain is so focused on the wants and the future. We fail to recognize that we’ve come so far already. If somebody would’ve told me five years ago, you are going to run a multiple six figure business by creating these videos and coaching women, and you’re going to speak on stages and get paid $16,000 for a 30 minute keynote, I would’ve like fallen in my, I would’ve fainted.

I would’ve been like, what? It just felt impossible. And yet here I am and logically I know that I’m very grateful for this and I’m so grateful for it. But my human brain immediately wants to go to, well, we should have already had a million dollar year by now. Oh, we should have already, booked out [00:12:00] many speaking engagements by now.

And isn’t it so crazy how it’s kind of never enough? And this is like the ego side, which we all have. Everybody has an ego. It’s not a bad thing, but. We are so hard on ourselves, right? So here I am the day before my birthday and I, I think the first time I felt I usually have pretty happy birthdays, but I wanna say two years ago was the first time I had a pretty sad birthday and I had a lot going on.

There was like a moment where I realized. One of my parents is not really in my life and that’s not really what I want. And you know, even though that’s much better now, even just thinking about that moment, I’m like, oh my gosh, that was so, that was such a sad birthday. And I think birthdays again, like New Year’s or birthdays can feel, can feel so vulnerable.

Because they’re this like check-in that we have with ourselves, and nobody’s looking at us being like, oh yeah, Sally’s behind. Oh yeah, Erica’s behind. Oh, can you, can you see [00:13:00] that Erica hasn’t, hasn’t reached seven figures in her business within one year yet, and nobody’s thinking that, right? We’re thinking that ourselves.

So as I sit here the day before my birthday, realizing that my life is not where I thought it would be in certain areas. But it’s also beyond my wildest dreams and imagination in other areas. And what happens, friends, is that when we focus on what we don’t have and we focus on comparing ourselves to other people, it actually paralyzes us and stops us from even enjoying the good things of our lives.

But it also stops us from taking action towards doing the things that we need to do and want to do to reach our goals. So, um, I’ve told this story before as I’ve talked about comparison, but I used to have two dogs. Now I only have one dog, Paloma. She, I swear this dog is like my soul dog. [00:14:00] She has been, uh, she wasn’t my dog, she was my mom’s dog.

And I think moving back to my mom’s house to start my business, part of why I needed to get there was because. This dog and I have such a strong bond. We just get along and I can’t even explain it. If you have a pet, I, I think you’ll, I think you’ll understand, but very, just like a very sweet dog. Uh, I, now I know why dogs are emotional support animals.

For some people, I truly feel like she’s my unofficial emotional support dog. But anyway, back to my story about comparison, we, I would. Me tortillas, homemade tortillas. And then I would put little like kibble, dog kibbles inside of the home tortillas and then give them to the dogs. And when we had two dogs, one of ’em was Noah and the other one’s Paloma.

I would always give Noah his tortilla first because Noah was much older and he was missing some teeth, so it took him a lot longer to eat. And [00:15:00] Paloma’s really agile. She’s like a very energetic dog, and she eats her food really fast. Sometimes she doesn’t even chew. It’s kind of dangerous. We kind of have to cut it up for her sometimes.

So because she would finish her so fast, she would then try to go take Noah’s. So I got into the habit of giving Noah his tortilla first. So there I am making my little tortillas for the dogs and I would make little mini ones. And I would give Noah his first and multiple times. What would happen is I would give Noah his, and he would run off to go eat it on his dog bed.

And I had Palomas in my hand, but Paloma would run after Noah. try to take his tortilla and she was missing out on hers. And this is what we look like sometimes when we’re over there comparing ourselves to other people’s journeys. Whenever we are looking at other people’s, oh my gosh, this person landed a client.

Oh my gosh, this person started a podcast. And we’re so focused again on making this person the main character in our story that we miss out on [00:16:00] our own blessings. Just like Paloma was missing out on her tortilla by chasing Noah’s. So let that sink in, right? If you’re so focused and your attention is on other people or where you think you should be, you’re missing out on the possible opportunities that could be right in front of you.

 Let’s say you’re at a networking event. And you’re so hyper-focused on how this person is doing so good at networking and all you’re doing is observing them, that you don’t end up even networking with other people, or you’re just energetically not available for people to come up to you because you’re so focused on something else and you’re not even open.

You could miss out on a great networking opportunity or a collaboration opportunity or a potential client, all because you were so focused on somebody else’s story. So I’m sharing this. Podcast. Yeah. In twofold, right? One, I’m vulnerably sharing my own experience with this. And even though I logically know what to do, it doesn’t mean that I’m not having the human experience.

So I wanna [00:17:00] validate anytime that you have felt behind, anytime that you’ve compared yourself. Allow yourself to feel those feelings, validate yourself, have compassion for yourself, but then decide what it is that you want to do next. So for me, I could sit here and I could be upset that I don’t own a home yet.

Or I could literally be like, all right, what? What needs to happen for me to own a home? Well, I already know how to manifest. I already know how to do business. What if we decided that? 20% of our next enrollment was gonna go to saving for our house. And what if right now is maybe not the time to buy a house?

Because the interest rates are crazy high and. We are in the process of increasing profit in the business, which we know we can do. And what if the timing is simply not right? Right now? What if we did everything we can to prepare? But once the opportunity prepared itself, [00:18:00] then we buy a house, 

Or for you, let’s say that you have a goal of creating content, but you are just consuming other people’s content and comparing yourselves and saying, oh man, I can’t do this type of content because now this person’s already doing it. So this’s really leaning into lack mental. But what if instead of looking at that person and saying, oh, I can’t do it because they’re doing it, what if that was evidence that you can do it?

Because the universe is showing you it’s possible and that person is not you. So rather than  obsessing over not feeling ready over,It should have already happened. What if you simply started taking action towards that now, because what I have learned through coaching so many women is that so long as you are starting to take brave action towards your goal, you feel better.

The reason that you feel crappy right now is because you’re not doing [00:19:00] anything to change it. So let’s say that your goal is to. Make a career pivot. The moment you start looking for jobs, applying for jobs, updating your resume, you feel better because you know that you are doing what’s in your control to take action towards that.

Versus if you are just observing other people land promotions and land jobs and feeling crappy about yourself and feeling that you are behind that is what’s going to make you feel crappy. So action is the solution to anxiety. Just some momentum. It doesn’t mean you have to already be at your end goal.

Let’s say your goal is to manifest a dream partner. Well, maybe loving yourself as if you already have a dream partner. Maybe getting on apps, if that’s your thing. Maybe going out to places where you can actually meet people. Even if you haven’t met your person yet, those actions are going to make you feel better because you know that there’s momentum towards the goal.

So if I want you to take anything away from this podcast episode, [00:20:00] it’s that if you have felt behind, you are not alone. It’s a very common experience. And if you find yourself comparing yourself to other people in your life or on social media, I want you to know that you do not see the f the full picture, right?

You don’t know for, you don’t know how long they’ve been attempting to do this, what kind of struggles they’ve had to overcome. It’s so easy to look at somebody else and say, oh yeah, it must have just come so easy to them. And that is very rarely the case. And ifyou’ve been thinking the thought, I’m so behind, or I’m too late, I wanna share some amazing people who have either had a late star or a late breakthrough to show you that it’s not too late.

You’re not too old. And things can happen at any time in your life. So, Julia Child, who’s known for her foot, her cookbooks and um, has even, you know, there’s even been movies written about her, her first cookbook didn’t come out until 49 years old, and she had Hert TV [00:21:00] debut at 51 Samuel L. Jackson, the the actor.

Didn’t have his major film until 46 after decades of working smaller roles. But these people, he didn’t give up, right? It wasn’t like it didn’t happen and he just gave up. He kept at it. Vera Wang didn’t become a designer until she was 40 years old, because before that she had a journalism career and was a figure skater. Martha Stewart didn’t become this like. The Martha Stewart that we know until her forties and fifties. And you know, if you’ve seen her documentary, you know, she, um, ended up doing like some, some jail time and then she came out and she still grew her brand. I highly recommend looking at that documentary, she was totally attacked for being a successful woman like she was.

It was wild. Sonya Soto appointed to, to the US Supreme Court at 55 years old is who’s a [00:22:00] Latina author. Didn’t publish her breakthrough novel until she was 40 years old. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, didn’t do that until 40. And this was back then when 40 was like, I don’t know, a lot late, a lot later in life. Uh, people didn’t live as long as they live now. So may those examples show you that it’s not too late. You’re not behind and so much can happen. But when we are so focused on where we think we should be, we are missing out on the magic of right now.

And when we’re so focused on other people, we’re missing out on our own lives. I would love to invite you. To be the main character of your life. I know I talked about that a couple of times today. I’m actually hosting a completely free webinar. It’s called Make 2026. Your main character year. I know we are in currently in October, but if you want 2026 to be the year that you step into your main character energy, it starts right now, [00:23:00] not on January 1st.

So what we’re gonna cover on this. Training, this free training. It’s three steps to confidence, career pivots, as well as CEO Energy. This is for you if you are torn between. I should just be grateful for what I have and wait. No, but I want more. And that tension keeps you kind of second guessing your every move.

If you want to exude confidence and and self-trust so that you stop filtering every decision around like, what will people think? What if I fail? Then this training is for you. If this podcast episode resonated with you, if you are trying to let go of timelines and you want to start feeling better by taking action and momentum, join us for this free training. You are going to learn how to start without a perfect plan and how you don’t need a 30 step blueprint. You just need clarity on your next step, and I’m gonna help you do that inside of the webinar. You’re also going to learn why motivation is actually not your problem and [00:24:00] the real reason that you feel stuck.

We’re also talking about why being seen can feel so unsafe and what to do about it, especially in this political climate. If you have a family member who’s undocumented or maybe you are, and how the ICE raids have really affected the way that we, that we show up. So if you are ready to step into your main character energy, join me for this free webinar.

The link is down below in the show notes. Share this with a friend. I can’t wait to see you there. And yeah, friends, you are not behind. And I’m sharing this with you as somebody who has felt all the feelings that you are feeling. But time and time again, my life, my business have proved that. I’m not behind even if in the moment I felt like that.

Okay. I can’t wait to see you at the training and I’ll see you next week for our next podcast episode. Alright. If this episode resonated with you, let me know. I love hearing from you. Take care and I’ll see you next week. [00:25:00]