We are the worst at judging our own progress

A few weeks ago I decided to devote some serious effort to my flexibility. I found a few stretches that were most important to my goals and I started working on them daily. Nothing too serious. Just a couple sets of each stretch at the end of my workout. The whole routine takes about 20 minutes.

My intention was to document and post my progress regularly. I had hoped to show weekly changes and motivate people to work on their own goals. That hasn’t happened because I honestly didn’t think I was making any progress.

Yesterday I decided to take some progress pictures for myself and I realized how wrong I was. In three weeks I’ve made tremendous progress! As soon as I saw the above images, I knew I had to write about them.

I won’t be writing anything about stretching though.

What immediately became clear to me when I saw how much progress I made was how bad I am at assessing myself. I was trapped in my own tiny world and looking at changes in my body on a day to day level instead of looking at it from a week to week or month to month level.

Having coached hundreds of people, I even knew that everyone does this. We are all terrible at assessing our progress. That knowledge didn’t help me in this case. I still fell into the trap of looking at the micro.

Here is my plea to you. Take a step back and actually assess where you are. For many goals, pictures are great. For others, you might need to look at a video or old measurements. In your professional life, you may need to look at your last paycheck or plaques on the wall. No matter what your goal is, find an objective measure that actually demonstrates the changes you’re making.

We are all making progress. Usually much more than we think we are. The changes on a daily basis may seem tiny, but they add up over time. The bigger time scale you look at, the bigger the changes you’ll see. If I looked at my progress photos from last year, I’d be even more shocked at how far I’ve come.

Too often we worry about where we were yesterday or last week instead of thinking about where we were last year.

Where were you last year? How much progress have you made on your goals in the past 12 months? I bet if you’re honest with yourself it’s a lot more than you give yourself credit for.

If you’re still discouraged after thinking back a ways, talk to the person that knows you best. Ask them how much progress they think you’ve made. They may inflate it a little bit, but I promise they’ll be exaggerating less than you are and they will be far more objective than we can ever be with ourselves.

Whenever you get discouraged by your results, remember one thing…

You suck at determining what your results are.

Take a step back and find some genuine ways to measure your progress. Compare yourself now to where you were 6 months or a year ago. I guarantee you’ve done far more than you think.

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