Celebrating Small Victories

The podcast app on my phone often sends me notifications when new episodes of podcasts I'm subscribed to are released. This morning, I got one for today's CXMH episode.

I immediately noticed I had left an old title with the wrong number on it, so it was showing up as episode 42 instead of 44. Similar things have happened before, and I've often jumped out of bed and rushed to my computer to fix it.

I saw it this morning at 4 or 5 when I was up with the baby, and I remembered again when I got up at 7:30 for work. Neither time did I feel an urge to go fix it immediately. It would've been easy enough to squeeze in before my morning routine, and I've done that before.

It probably seems like nothing that I waited until I got to work at 9 to fix it. After all, who cares if something is slightly mislabeled? But with my habit of perfectionism & history of rushing to fix small things, it was substantial to just let it be until it was convenient.

More importantly, I noticed that slight change and gave myself permission to be proud and celebrate it instead of hand waving it away as 'what most people would've done.'

I've been trying over the past few months to hold things with looser hands. This includes things like taking chunks of time off of social media and inviting dear friends I trust to take over CXMH for entire episodes.

Again, these probably seem like small things that aren't that big a deal. But I've always found too much value in these things, so I've always put too much energy and effort into them. Letting them go a little bit is me trying to move in a healthier direction.

So being ok with a slightly wrong title for a few hours seems like nothing, but I get to be proud of a looser grip. If we don't celebrate the small steps, we'll have a hard time working up to bigger ones.

Our daily victories count.
Our small steps are still steps.

Stop waiting to be proud of yourself until you've made a huge, life-altering change.
In fact, stop equating life-altering with huge things.
Small changes are changes.
Our lives come to look different progressively.

I think maybe taking smaller steps towards where we want to be is more important than making big, bold changes that oftentimes don't last. Consistency is more important than drama in the end.

As a friend said to me recently, 'the beauty is in the long haul.'