There’s a version of me from a few months ago that I think about sometimes.
She had a blog that she updated regularly. She had a content schedule. She had good intentions and a genuine desire to show up consistently for the people who read her work. And then life happened — the kind of busy that doesn’t announce itself, it just accumulates — and the blog & social media went quiet.
For not just weeks. Months.
And instead of treating that the way she’d treat a client who needed to reschedule, or a friend who’d gone through a hectic stretch, she treated it like evidence. Evidence that she wasn’t cut out for this. That she was disorganized (the irony). That she’d probably always be the kind of person who starts things and doesn’t finish them.
That version of me was exhausting to be around.
I wrote recently about why getting back on track is harder than starting fresh — and a lot of you told me that post landed somewhere real. But what I didn’t write about was the part that came before getting back on track. The part where I had to actually come to terms with how unkind I’d been to myself in the meantime.
That’s what I want to talk about today.
The standard we hold ourselves to (that we’d never hold anyone else to)
Here’s something I’ve noticed in my own business — and in the conversations I have with clients — over and over again:
We are so much harder on ourselves than we would ever be on another person.
If a friend told me she’d fallen behind on her blog for a couple of months because she was juggling client work, family, and a course she was building, I would say: that makes complete sense. You were doing a lot. It’s okay. Start again.
I would not say: well, that basically proves you can’t be trusted to follow through on anything.
But that’s often exactly what we say to ourselves. In the quiet moments when we look at what we haven’t done. In the spiral that starts with “I missed one blog post” and ends somewhere around “I’m not a real business owner.”
Running a business has taught me that this pattern is almost universal — and that it’s one of the most quietly destructive things we do to ourselves.
Why we do it (and why it doesn’t actually help)
The self-criticism usually comes from a place that means well. We think being hard on ourselves will motivate us. That if we let ourselves off the hook too easily, we’ll just keep slipping. That the guilt is functional — a signal that we care.
But here’s what I’ve actually observed: the guilt doesn’t move us forward. It stalls us.
When I spent weeks being hard on myself for letting things slide, I didn’t suddenly start showing up again. I avoided it. Because the thing had accumulated so much weight — so much shame — that sitting down to do it felt enormous. It wasn’t just about writing a blog or scheduling a post anymore. It was confronting everything I’d told myself it meant about myself.
The kindness, when I finally found it, was what got me moving again. Not the criticism.
What being kind to yourself actually looks like in a business context
I want to be specific here, because “be kinder to yourself” can feel like advice that sounds nice but doesn’t translate into anything practical. So here’s what it has actually looked like for me:
It looks like having a short conversation instead of a long spiral. When something slips — a deadline, a habit, a commitment to myself — I’ve learned to treat it like a brief check-in rather than a tribunal. What happened? What made this hard? What’s one small thing I can do differently? Then move on.
It looks like separating behaviour from identity. I missed some blog posts. I stopped posting on my social media. That doesn’t make me someone who can’t follow through. It makes me someone who missed posting some content during a busy stretch. Those are very different things, and keeping them separate matters.
It looks like building systems instead of relying on willpower. One of the most compassionate things I’ve done for myself in this business is stop expecting myself to do everything from scratch every time. Systems aren’t about being rigid. They’re about making things easier so that when life gets full — and it always does — there’s something to come back to that doesn’t require starting over.
It looks like acknowledging the win alongside the gap. When I finally wrote again after my quiet stretch, I tried to notice that I did it — rather than immediately cataloguing everything I should do next to make up for lost time. That noticing matters more than it sounds.
The thing nobody tells you about running your own business
When you work for yourself, there’s no manager checking in on you. No performance review. No external accountability structure telling you that you’re doing okay, or that this quarter was hard but you showed up anyway.
Which means you have to become that for yourself. Not the harsh critic, not the impossible standard-setter — but the fair, honest, encouraging voice that sees the full picture.
That’s genuinely one of the most important skills I’ve developed as a business owner. And I don’t think we talk about it enough, because it doesn’t look like productivity. It doesn’t show up in a content calendar or a revenue tracker. It’s internal. It’s quiet. But it’s the thing that keeps you going through the harder stretches.
A gentle prompt for you
If you’re in a season where you’ve been hard on yourself — whether that’s about something in your business, a habit that’s slipped, or just the general feeling that you’re not quite keeping up — I want to offer you the same thing I had to give myself:
You’re doing more than you’re giving yourself credit for. The fact that you’re still here, still trying, still building — that’s not nothing. That’s everything.
And if you’re wondering if I’ve magically got everything back on track — I haven’t. The blog is back. The social media isn’t. Right now, I’m just taking it one step at a time.
I’m trying to be kind to myself along the way, and I hope you will too.
And if you need a little help quieting that inner critic, I made this for you — a free meditation to help you boost your self-confidence. Grab it here.
