We are ruthless with ourselves.
Forget the small stuff – the laundry left in the machine, the email sent with a typo. We breeze past those.
It’s the big ones we save our real cruelty for.
The launch that didn’t land. The client we lost. The quarter that fell short. We replay those on a loop and file them away as evidence of all the ways we’re not quite enough.
I’ve had plenty of those moments. In corporate. In business. And I got very good, over time, at knowing when criticism from others was worth listening to – and when it wasn’t.
But the criticism we reserve for ourselves? That one hits differently.
So at the start of this year I did something that felt a little ridiculous. I wrote myself a love letter.
I know. Stay with me.
Not a gratitude list. Not an affirmations poster. An actual letter to myself, as if I were writing to someone I deeply respected. Someone who had navigated a lot. Who had kept going when she had every reason not to.
It cracked something open.
The research backs it up – people who engage in genuine positive self-evaluation are more motivated, more resilient, and more willing to push through difficulty. In business right now, with everything shifting around us, that resilience isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the strategy.
So if you’ve been white-knuckling your way through this quarter, why don’t you put down the criticism for ten minutes and pick up a pen.
Start here:
- What’s one trait you love about yourself that you rarely acknowledge?
- What did you do in the last three months that you’re quietly proud of?
- When were you most alive in your business – and what did you do to create that moment?
- What’s one thing you pulled off that you genuinely didn’t think you could?
Your business needs your best thinking right now. And your best thinking doesn’t come from a woman who is constantly tearing herself down.
Write the letter.
And then, when you’re done, think about who else is in your corner when you need to reset like this.
Every 90 days inside Elevate and Inner Circle, we do exactly this. We stop. We reflect. We celebrate the glimmer moments – the wins that felt small at the time but weren’t. The rate raised. The client said yes. The boundary held. We acknowledge them properly, because you can’t level up from a place you’ve never recognised.
Go for it. Do the same with your personal board of directors, your inner circle. The people around you who know what it actually took for you to get here.
And if you’re doing this alone right now – send me your love letter. I genuinely want to read it. Hit reply and share it with me – the wins, the hard bits, all of it. I’d love to hear.
Because nobody should be sitting with their own brilliance and no one to witness it.
We have a few spots opening up in Elevate and Inner Circle. Just reply and let’s talk.
J x