Today I recognised how much I’ve learned over the last few years. I’ve been learning and practising my skills but doubting my abilities all the way along. Today, was different. I had to prepare a strategy for a client and realised….”wow I actually know a lot more than I realised and am actually able to offer a lot of value to my client”.
The biggest thing was that when I had these great thoughts about myself. I actually accepted them instead of ignoring or rejecting them. So I get two pats on the back for breakthroughs today. I have been practising recognising my achievements and literally patting myself on the back, rewiring my neural pathways to encourage my natural tendencies to recognise, focus on and celebrate my wins rather than downplay or ignore them. This has not come easily.
You see, I am a lists person. I make lists for everything! I have lists on random sheets of paper, in journals, in books, on several different online platforms, and list-after-list on my phone. As part of this new habit of recognising my achievements, one of the lists I’ve started keeping is that of my achievements each day. I know that that it sounds like I have way too much time on my hands but allow me to explain.
I have always focused on my “To-do” List but, being the overachieving perfectionist I am, there are always far more items on my “To-do” list than I could ever possibly achieve with a small army of helpers, let alone on my own. Also, being the overachieving perfectionist re-reading back through this paragraph I felt the need to clarify my definition of ‘overachieving perfectionist’ as some may think that I have made millions or that my house and life are in perfect order, however, this is not the case for me. For me, my overachieving perfectionism is centred around trying to do better, be better, learn more, implement new things, make improvements. I am an entrepreneur I generally have several projects I’m working on in addition to having a household to run, my husband works away and I have three children at various stages of life and three different schools. To say I spread myself thin is an understatement but to me no matter what there is always room for improvement. Now that I’ve clarified this we can move on.
In keeping my “to-do” lists each day, as I progress through the day and my list fails to become shorter, slowly but surely I feel my stress levels rise as, once again, I have failed to achieve what I’ve set out to. Feelings of failure start to creep in, self-criticism starts to rear its ugly head. Day-after-day this was happening until one day I realised that it probably didn’t serve me and that it was most definitely time to do something about it. I decided that I would flip it on its head to include each and everything that I’d made my way through that day even if it hadn’t happened to be on my “to-do” list. This has helped me to recognise my achievements each day, to improve my self-talk, notice how well I’m doing and slowly but surely train myself to celebrate the small stuff rather than overlook it because I didn’t achieve the big things. Little did I realise that in all these ‘small steps’ I was actually achieving the ‘big steps’ just a little slower than I had expected.
So although this may seem like a big waste of time to some it has been exactly what I needed to change my focus, improve my self-perception and celebrate my wins and to me, those feelings of accomplishment are worth the time taken.
"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together"
-Vincent Van Gogh
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