Count what counts - noticing achievements

Just now I found myself thinking ‘I did nothing yesterday – what a slack day I had.’ Long experience of how my thoughts quietly lie to me alerted me to a wrongful assumption about to slip past the internal radar.
‘Hang on,’ I said to myself. ‘Is that really true? What did I actually do yesterday?’

The list went something like this:

• brought firewood in
• tidied the bedroom
• did my asthma breathing exercises
• put a wash through
• dried firewood
• made a fire
• hung out the wash
• did some dishes
• spent time playing with the dog and training him
• put out the ingredients for the soup I’m planning to make
• finished my tax calculations and filled in the form
• typed up ideas for future blog entries
• posted a blog entry
• found pictures for it.

When I stopped and looked at it this was hardly ‘nothing’, especially for someone with a chronic illness having a bad day. The mistake I was making was focusing on what I’d planned to do and hadn’t got done (yet). Like: make the new soup recipe, cook a roast, make spaghetti Bolognese, make cottage pies, write new blog entries, add pictures to old blog entries, do some writing. When I looked at it I realised this was quite a daunting list, even for someone with good health. In paying attention to all the things I hadn’t done I’d overlooked all the things I had done and ended up thinking I’d done ‘nothing’.

I know why I do this – I was brought up by adults who pointed out to me what I hadn’t done, or what I could have done better. I don’t think they meant to be cruel or destructive (although there was a certain amount of, shall we say, ego enhancement in it for them). It was more how they saw the world. So my job is to overcome this childhood conditioning and remember to notice all the things I achieved, rather than getting fixated on everything I didn’t manage to do today.