Today.

This email will be landing in your inbox later than usual. Normally, I write these with the aim of getting your day off to a kick start. I hope that they set you up, perhaps even make you feel a bit more empowered and active in your own life because it’s very easy to feel like life is happening to you when real life gets busy.

But, this is an evening email, a lullaby email, if you will. If this is the last thing that you read before you go to sleep then I want you to go to sleep knowing that you did a good job today.

We have a tendency to get to the end of the day and focus on all the shit that went wrong. We beat ourselves up about the time we lost our shit and started shouting before they went to school. We worry about the fact that we still haven’t gotten around to booking the kids’ dentist appointments. We sigh inwardly because we were late for pick up or we forgot to help the kids learn their spellings. We lie in bed and promise ourselves that we’ll do ‘better’ tomorrow and, guess what, tomorrow comes and we mess up in a million different ways.

And that’s normally. Complete, utterly, 100%, truly normal.

But, instead of playing our many tiny failures of the day on a Super 8 loop over and over in the cinema of our mind, how about we try a different movie? Because for all the fuck ups, I promise you there were a million tiny successes too and there’s absolutely no reason why the fuck ups should hold more weight than the successes.

And just to be clear, we’re not looking for headline grabbing successes here. We’re looking for the small wins, the hugs you found time to give the kids, the meals that filled their tummies, that fact that they got to school with pretty much everything they need, the smiles on their faces when they saw you at pick up time, the phone call you answered from a friend and the time you made her laugh on a crappy day, the work that you got done (and no, you couldn’t have done any more…you did what you could), the bed you may have changed, or the laundry that you finally put away. Maybe you squeezed in a walk or a maybe you managed to simply squeeze in a shower?

The only bar you need to measure yourself against is the one that you set yourself. Some days you can raise it up and some days you can drop it right down to the floor - and you may still trip over it. Some days are just like that. But no one else gets to decide how high or low your bar is on any given day.

So before you go to sleep, congratulate yourself on another day well done. List those little wins in your head, out loud, write them down…whatever you need to do to make sure that’s what you’re thinking about before you sleep.

And then, put that phone down and get yourself an early night because we’ll be doing it all over again tomorrow.

Cat x