Little Wins Are Everything

You have one of those days. Everything goes wrong at once, and the voice starts in: you're the worst, you're horrible, you can't even hold it together for five minutes.

Here's the part nobody talks about — you don't just spiral. You judge yourself for spiraling on top of it. So now you're not just frustrated. You're frustrated, and ashamed of being frustrated, and convinced both of those things mean something terrible about who you are.

I notice this in myself constantly. On the days that go sideways, my first reaction isn't "I'm frustrated." It's "I'm the worst." I skip right past the accurate word and go straight to the character verdict.

I'm good at catching this for other people. If a client tells me she snapped at her kid because her day was a disaster, I tell her that's frustration, not evidence she's a bad mom. I believe that every time I say it to someone else.

But when it's me, the inner critic doesn't even build a case. It just says: you're too much. And right behind it: this is exactly why nothing works for you.

Underneath that is the real pattern: if I'm not calm, I'm not in control. And if I'm not in control, I'm failing.

Dr. Dan Siegel has a phrase for this exact moment: flipping your lid. When stress spikes fast, the thinking part of your brain — the part that can hold something specific and true, like "I'm frustrated" — goes offline, and your brain's alarm system takes over instead. The alarm system doesn't deal in specifics. It deals in verdicts. It doesn't hand you "frustrated." It hands you "horrible," because a global threat label fires faster than an accurate one ever could.

Here's the reframe: noticing isn't the thing that happens before growth. Noticing IS growth. The moment you catch the voice and correct the label — even if you're still frustrated five minutes later — you've just done the exact thing this whole practice is built on.

John Maxwell put it simply: little progress is better than no progress at all. Catching the voice, mid-moment, is progress. Full stop.

A few things that help:

• Swap the verdict for the accurate word. Not "I'm horrible." "I'm frustrated."

• Don't try to fix the day. The win isn't calming down instantly — it's that you caught it at all.

• One breath after you name it. Just enough for your body to register that you noticed.

• End the day naming one moment you caught yourself. Not to grade the whole day. Just to clock the win.

You are not the worst. You are not horrible. You are a woman having a hard moment, and you noticed it — which means something in you is already changing.

This piece pairs with Episode 51 of Unapologetically In Power. If this named something you're living, take the Identity Mask Quiz to find out which mask is costing you the most right now.