Momentum Is Your Friend: How to Build Leadership Momentum (Even When You Don't Feel Ready)
How do you build leadership momentum when your team feels stuck? You stop waiting to feel motivated. You make the decision to move, in the smallest possible way, before the feeling ever shows up.
I'm Bryce Kenny. I'm a Guinness World Record holder, a professional Monster Jam driver, and a keynote speaker. I've learned that lesson the hard way, more than once, in front of stadiums full of people watching me try to prove it.
Most people think momentum is something you wait for. A wave of motivation that shows up when conditions are right. The way I see it, that's backwards. Momentum isn't a feeling you wait around to receive. It's a decision you make before you feel ready.
I proved it to myself, by accident, at NRG Stadium in Houston. People still call it one of the best saves of my career.
Here's what a "save" is in Monster Jam. A truck goes airborne, lands wrong, and starts spinning out of control. The driver has to find a way to bring all four tires back to the ground before the truck rolls. That's exactly what happened to me that night.
I landed crooked. All I could see were the stadium lights and the dirt. I had a 12,000-pound, 1,500-horsepower machine fighting me, and I had no idea which way was up.
I did not wait to feel in control. I stomped the throttle to push the truck forward instead of letting it rebound upward. I found a dirt pile I had no idea was there, and it gave me traction. I braked hard enough on four 600-pound tires to stop the spin and bring the truck back down on all fours.
I'll be honest with you: I call it lucky. But the decision came first. Keep moving. Generate traction. Don't freeze. That's why I tell every audience, right before I show them that footage, "momentum is your friend."
I built an entire framework around that idea. It's called G.E.A.R., and it stands for Growth, Engagement, Acceleration, and Risk. I didn't invent it in a conference room. I built it standing next to a leaky convertible, feeling like a failure. In this post, I want to walk you through where it came from, what each gear means, what I see when organizations get it right, and how you can use it to build momentum in your own team before anyone feels ready either.
The Moment the G.E.A.R. Framework Was Born
Long before Monster Jam, I was chasing a different dream: professional Top Fuel drag racing. Those are the cars that go 300 miles an hour in under four seconds.
Back in 2008, during the last major recession, I was working seven different jobs, mostly legal, all funneling into the same goal: finding a sponsor. I'd found a little support here and there in 2008, 2009, and 2010, but nothing close to what I needed.
I remember walking out of a corporate boardroom after what felt like the fiftieth no. I stood next to my own car, a six-cylinder Mustang with a convertible top that leaked. It was my road warrior. I'd put thousands and thousands of miles on it chasing meetings that kept ending the same way.
I looked down at my shoes. They were scuffed up because they'd logged a couple thousand of those same miles. And I asked myself a question I didn't have an answer for yet: how do people actually make it? I was working my guts out, and nothing seemed to be getting the results I was after.
So I started looking at the people who didn't make it. Not to feel better about myself, but because I genuinely wanted to know what separated them from the people who won. I looked at timing, upbringing, education. Everyone has a reason for not making it, and none of those reasons were the real answer. The one common denominator I found among the people who didn't make it was that they spent more time in their comfort zones than the people who won.
That's where the framework came from. Not from a desire to build a brand, but from a desire to control something, anything, in a season where it felt like nothing was in my control. I couldn't control the economy. I couldn't control whether a sponsor said yes or no. But I could control four things: my growth, my engagement, my acceleration, and my risk. If I worked all four of those every day, I'd stay outside my comfort zone longer than everyone else, and that alone would give me a better shot at winning.
I never became a Top Fuel driver. But I've had an eleven-year career in professional Monster Jam, as a keynote speaker, as a published author, and as a Guinness World Record holder. Everything good in my life has come from outside my comfort zone.
I want to be clear about something, because it gets misunderstood: comfort zones are not inherently bad. Think about a NASCAR race. Every car comes in for a pit stop, gets fresh fuel and new tires, then gets back out there. Your comfort zone is your pit stop. But the race isn't won in the pit stop, it's won on the track. Comfort zones become a problem the moment they stop being a pit stop and start being where you live.
The light bulb moment I want every audience to have, before I explain a single gear, isn't about effort. It's about hope, a genuine core belief that the person sitting in that seat already has what it takes to do the thing they're dreaming about. You don't need a secret formula. You need a playbook to stay outside your comfort zone a little longer, and you already have what it takes to use it.
The Four Gears, From Every Room I've Been In
After eleven years applying this framework with organizations from franchise systems to corporate teams, here's what each gear actually looks like in practice.
Growth means your inputs determine your outputs. My truck is twelve thousand pounds and runs on a very specific fuel. You cannot put eighty-seven octane pump gas in it and expect it to clear a forty-five-foot jump. I watch average performers try the equivalent every day, expecting top-level output while running on sea-level fuel, emptying their minds with a streaming binge and then refilling it right back up with email and social media instead of anything that actually grows them. The number one signal I see when a team finds this gear isn't more hustle. It's more grace. People start cutting each other slack because they understand they're a work in progress too, and that interpersonal shift is the clearest evidence that growth is taking hold.
Engagement means giving yourself permission to win instead of waiting for someone else to hand it to you. I've seen this proven with hard numbers: a call center struggling with seventeen percent annual retention tested three onboarding approaches on a new hire group, and the version where new employees said out loud why they joined the company, with their name on a branded sweater to back it up, produced a 230 percent increase in one-year retention. The mechanism behind it comes down to two questions every person is quietly asking themselves: do I believe in where this company is going, and do I believe my specific role matters to getting us there? Get both answers to an eight or higher, and you've got someone who shows up engaged every single day.
Acceleration means doing more of the right things, not just doing more. I worked with a Great Clips franchise group whose stylists insisted they weren't salespeople, and they were right, they didn't need to become salespeople. They needed to ask one extra question per customer about hair products. That single signal of expertise, repeated and refined, took some stylists from one product sale a week to eight, not through more effort, but through more of the one right activity, applied consistently until it compounded.
Risk is the gear I see organizations misdiagnose most often, because the word itself gets misunderstood. Most people hear "risk" and think only about loss, when a real risk decision requires both halves of the coin: what you get if you win, and what changes in your life if you lose. There's a study, I believe out of Harvard, where executives at six hundred companies estimated that 64 percent of their employees could name the company's top three priorities. When employees were actually asked, the real number was 2 percent. That gap, not laziness, is why most teams lack urgency. The leaders who get this gear wrong usually default to fear, hit the number or you're fired, which works briefly and quietly kills culture. The leaders who get it right go back to the company's real why and attach honest stakes to it, framed around what the team is building, not what they're afraid of losing.
What I See in Every Room, Regardless of Industry
I've delivered the G.E.A.R. framework to virtually every industry you can think of, and one thing is identical in every single room: everyone is starving for a common vernacular.
That sounds almost too simple, but go test it yourself. Walk into any organization, a Fortune 500 company or a small business, and ask employees and leadership to each name the top three priorities. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you'll get different answers depending on who you ask. It's not that people don't understand the problem they're facing. It's that they're speaking completely different languages about it, with no shared vernacular tying it all together around one common goal.
That's exactly what the G.E.A.R. framework gives a room: a shared language for naming the next gear in the middle of a real problem. What does the next gear look like here? What traction do we need today to move this forward? That question alone, asked in a shared vocabulary, is often the difference between a team that stays stuck and one that gets unstuck together.
What Changes 90 Days After This Keynote
I ask organizations to report back roughly 90 days after they hear the G.E.A.R. keynote, and I hear the same three things almost every time.
First, a common vernacular takes hold. Teams start communicating with the same verbiage instead of talking past each other. Second, I see a record number of people giving an all-in effort, because they left the room having given themselves permission to win instead of waiting for someone else to hand it to them. Third, innovation skyrockets, because the acceleration gear is fundamentally about how fast a team can move through failure to get to success. What used to take an organization six months to a year to work through, testing, failing, adjusting, now happens in about two weeks, because people have shifted from a fear of failing to a mindset of failing forward. It stops being sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It becomes sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. That shift alone changes how fast a team is willing to move.
How to Build Momentum Deliberately
Momentum-building starts with the same principle I applied off that dirt pile at NRG Stadium: keep moving before you feel ready, because feeling ready is never a prerequisite for traction.
Start with Growth by auditing what you're filling your team back up with, not just whether they're taking time to rest. Move into Engagement by asking both confidence questions honestly, and treat anything below an eight as worth a real conversation. Push Acceleration by finding the one right thing your team already does well and asking them to do it more often, not by piling on more tasks. And finally, name the Risk clearly and honestly: what do we get if we win this, and what changes if we don't, framed around what you're building, never around fear.
If someone remembers just one thing from everything I've written here, it's this: high performers don't get unstuck by working harder in the same gear they've always been in. They learn how to shift out of what used to work and into the next gear they never knew they had. That's what it means to find your next gear: not waiting for a feeling of readiness, but deciding, one input, one ask, one honest conversation about stakes at a time, to keep moving.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean that momentum is a decision?
It means momentum is generated by action taken before motivation arrives, not the other way around. My NRG Stadium save illustrates this physically: in the middle of a 12,000-pound truck spinning out of control, the decision to keep pushing forward, rather than freeze, is what created the traction that brought the truck back down safely.
What is the G.E.A.R. framework and how does it build leadership momentum?
The G.E.A.R. framework stands for Growth, Engagement, Acceleration, and Risk, the four areas I've identified as fully within a person's or team's control. Momentum builds when leaders work all four gears together: protecting inputs (Growth), giving people permission to win and answering their confidence questions honestly (Engagement), increasing the right activity rather than just more activity (Acceleration), and making the stakes of success and failure genuinely clear (Risk).
How long does it take to build momentum in a team?
Momentum compounds rather than appearing all at once. In my call center retention example, a single onboarding change produced a 230 percent increase in one-year retention, but the shift itself, asking new hires to share why they joined, took only a few minutes per person. Many organizations report measurable shifts in communication and effort within about 90 days of committing to the framework.
Which gear do most organizations get wrong first?
Risk, almost without exception. Most leaders hear the word and think only about loss, when a properly understood risk decision requires knowing both what you get if you win and what changes if you lose. Organizations that get this wrong tend to lead with negative consequences instead of a positive, mission-driven why, which works briefly but quietly damages culture over time.
What results can a team expect after a G.E.A.R. keynote?
Organizations typically report three changes within about 90 days: a shared vocabulary for naming problems and solutions, a higher percentage of employees giving an all-in effort, and a noticeably faster pace of innovation, since teams shift from fearing failure to learning from it quickly.
Momentum Is Your Friend
The whole idea collapses into one sentence I say on stage, the same one I said right before I showed you that NRG Stadium footage: momentum is your friend. Get your hand back on the shifter, get out of the gear you've been relying on, and find your next gear. It doesn't matter what obstacle or resistance shows up, because momentum isn't something you wait for. It's something you decide to create.
Bring the G.E.A.R. Framework to Your Next Conference
I deliver the G.E.A.R. framework keynote to franchise conventions, corporate conferences, and association events. If your team has stalled and is waiting for motivation that never quite arrives, this keynote gives them a practical, decision-based playbook, four gears they can put their hands on starting the day they walk out of the room.