We think progress is supposed to feel exciting. Like something you’ll notice right away. A lot of the time, it just doesn’t. Many times actually, progress looks like being stuck, then slightly less stuck. It looks and feels like repeating the same thing a few times until it finally clicks, or like managing something this month that completely overwhelmed you last month.
And because those shifts are subtle, we miss them. You start thinking you’ve made no progress at all. But if someone who hasn’t seen you in a while looked closer, they would probably say “you have really made progress here”. It’s the softening up in the right places for example, or the toughening in others that everyone but you will notice. You have probably learnt things you haven’t even realized you were learning and you have handled more than you thought you could. But you haven’t turned around to see it. Because you don’t feel it, you have not acknowledged or maybe even realized that it’s happening.