Take Your Own Advice

Today, I spent about three hours editing Acing It!  (the book I'm working on that really fleshes out the test prep process). 

I left this morning's editing session feeling great: productive, discerning, articulate, astute... witty even. I'd edited a whole chunk of text, written new content, and made tiny tweaks to the website copy. Go me! 

This evening, I finished editing another, smaller chunk of text. 

I felt slow, tired, and like the process would NEVER COME TO AN END. Moreover, I worried that I was the problem. Since I was feeling lethargic, I must be holding the process back.

That's when I realized that I'd literally JUST finished editing a section about what it means to do your best.

In the book, I write, "A person's best is not a constant measure. It is dynamic." I was judging myself not for a bad day but a bad hour. Holy moly!  I was worrying about the exact same thing addressed in the text in front of me. The text in front of me that I HAD WRITTEN. If I were to take my own advice, I needed to offer myself a little compassion.

It's good to know that there's a part of us that knows the truth. That we are doing okay, and that we will keep showing up the next day, and the day after, and the day after. We will keep showing up for as long as it takes to accomplish what we set out to do. Or until we have the results we are going to have and we need to accept them and move on to other challenges. Sometimes when the going gets tough, we need to sit down, breathe, listen for a truth that transcends the moment, and take our own advice.

What advice did you give yourself today? Did you take it?  Tell me about it in the Comments section.

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