If you ever feel like you’re struggling to meet your own expectations of yourself or reach your own goals, you may be too focused on the end result and not focused enough on the process. A simple way to feel much better about the direction you’re heading is to celebrate incremental improvements.
Reframe Your Progress
For example, imagine your goal is to pay off $10,000 in debt. You do the math and see that you can eliminate it in one year if you pay $834 each month. With some cuts in your budgeted expenses, you find that to be possible, and you send off your first payment. The next month, however, you experience some car trouble that requires a $500 repair. How discouraging! You couldn’t even make it through two payments of your plan.You could look at this in two ways. You might feel so defeated that you deem paying off debt impossible and simply give up, going back to making only the minimum payments and thus living with the debt burden for a much longer period of time.
