🤔 What did you do this week?
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It might sound like an odd question, but what did you do this week? I mean what did you REALLY do? Recently I was running a few minutes late for the school run, and I found myself entering into some negative mind chatter about it.
‘Wow, Jessica, I can’t see anyone else sprinting up this hill to get to the school gate in time. Why didn’t you just leave on time today?’
I don’t know about you, but my inner critic is often right there waiting to point out that I’ve messed up 🤪🤪
I was feeling worse about it because my neurodiverse son can get really anxious if I’m not there to pick him up on time, and on this occasion he was pretty upset with me.
But I found myself creating a powerful reframe and I’d love to share this in case it helps you too.
Actually, the reason I was late was because I got a phone call right when I was due to leave from a repair company that was too important to miss. And when I thought back about everything I had done that day, and that week, it really shifted the way I was feeling from annoyance with myself to being slightly in awe of myself (does that need a trigger warning?? 😜)
That week we were having building work done on our house, which meant we were living out of the house 2 miles away. That day I had taken my son to school, popped back to the house to put some laundry on, fed the cats who were staying put and not with us at the Airbnb, checked in that the builders were on track and planned to still finish on time, walked for an hour with the dog who WAS with us at the Airbnb, sorted and paid for all the fittings the builders needed, ate a healthy lunch, worked with a client, made an unexpected sale, hired a new accountant, took the phone call about the house repair and then was back at school for pick up… all in a single day!! 🥵🥵
Now it’s not normal to be in the middle of a building project and thankfully it was only a couple of weeks for this one. But it really got me thinking, actually a lot of the time we do incredible amounts during a single week. We balance multiple priorities at home and at work. We put the high achievement in high-achieving!
And it made me realise, not for the first time, that the negative committee inside my head that is hypercritical and often just plain mean, frankly doesn’t know what it is talking about. And I’m willing to bet the same is true for you.
So, what did you do this week? What did you REALLY do? Maybe you’ve had a week where you felt like you couldn’t make any real progress and it was kind of like wading through treacle.
Maybe you made some real progress in your business but you’ve not had a moment to actually notice how much progress you’ve actually made. So often we automatically minimise our achievements or dismiss them because we’re telling ourselves the wrong story about who we are and how much amazing stuff we have actually have going on.
I’m here to tell you that however you’re feeling today, there’s a decent chance you are tempted to put the wrong label on the week you just had. And I’d love to invite you to re-evaluate all the amazing things you took care of, and the ways I bet you knocked the ball out of the park 🤩
The negative committee inside our heads loves to get loud, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It is always acting on partial information or old information. So maybe it could be a good moment to start talking back to those self-critical thoughts and reminding yourself what the real story is. Everything starts to change when we do this 🤓
Hope it’s been a great week,
Jessica x
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