These land best one a day — today’s work needs a day to actually happen. Nothing expires and you can’t fall behind; whenever you come back, it’ll be here.
Five of them. And no, they don’t have to be big.
Ask you to name something you got wrong last week and you’ll have it in half a second. You’ll have three.
Ask you to name something you did well, and watch what happens. The pause. The searching. The little laugh.
That is not modesty. That is a broken scoreboard — you have kept a meticulous, unforgiving ledger of every failure, and no ledger at all for anything else. Of course you feel like you’re losing. You’ve only ever counted one column.
So today we count the other one. Five things. Out loud, in writing, where you can see them.
And they do not have to be impressive. They only have to be true.
Five. Not one — five. The number is the whole exercise. The first two come easily; it’s the last three that force you to actually look.
Small counts. Boring counts. You got up. You didn’t snap at anyone. You made the call you’d been dreading. You kept a person alive and then bought milk on the way home like it was nothing.
Start each one with the words “I’m proud of myself for…” — and say them out loud. Not thought. Said. Those five words are the ones you never let yourself use.
What are 5 things you can count as wins? “I’m proud of myself for…”
Small counts. “I got up” counts. If you can only find three, write three — and write that too.
You don’t have to do this part alone. I sit down with a few people at a time and we build the four weeks around them — where they actually are, not where a quiz guessed they were.
If that sounds like something you want, here’s my calendar. If not, I’ll see you tomorrow either way.
“You keep a perfect record of everything you got wrong, and no record at all of everything you carried.”
— Kara