A Note on Feeling Progress

This week’s post is going to be short and sweet.

Recently I was reminded that it’s easy to fall into the trap of not seeing progress without a finished product. In a creator community I’m in, we share our progress from the previous week and our intentions for the next week. Here was my response last week:

Here’s a reply from another member of the community:

Re-reading my response, she’s completely right! In the “what worked” part, I talk about the progress I made the previous week and how I got over a stuck point with my memoir. Then immediately following that in the “what didn’t work” part I say I feel like I’m not doing enough.

The kicker is that I didn’t even realize that I had put that as my response to what didn’t work. Why did I put that? I felt better about my progress than I had in weeks!

I think it boils down to two things:

1. All of the projects I’m working on right now are long-term projects.

2. I’m so used to feeling like I’m not doing enough.

Even though I have been working on my memoir and my dissertation for months and for years (respectively), they’re still not finished. Because they’re BIG undertakings. They both have several time-intensive steps.

If I take a second and look back at both of these projects, I’ve made incredible progress on both, even just in the past few months. There was a long period of time where I legitimately thought I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation. So to be at a point now where I know the finish line is this coming Fall semester, that’s HUGE! But since I still don’t have a finished product, it’s easy for me to lose sight of that progress.

I need to remind myself of all of the things I’ve already accomplished with these projects.

As far as always feeling like I need to be doing more, that was basically a response written in autopilot. I’ve always been someone who takes on more work than I should because I never feel like I’m doing enough. I tend to feel like if I’m not doing all of the things then I’m failing. I’ve made a lot of progress over the years in shifting that mindset, but I still get stuck there sometimes.

But it’s weekly check-ins like the one in this creator community that help keep me in a space of reality. When I sit down and type out my responses and I talk with the other community members, I’m reminded that I’m actually doing a lot. So when I feel like I’m not doing enough, I need to sit down and write out everything I’m doing.

In the end, having a community of people to help keep your perspective on the progress you’re making is undeniably helpful. It doesn’t have to be a full on community, but just a few friends who can help remind you that you’re doing a lot and you ARE making progress, even when it doesn’t feel like you are.

Tell me, what have you found works best for you when you’re not feeling progress?

Until next time,

Rychelle 💜