I wanted to write a little bit about being observant, because often when we’re making big personal changes, it can be hard for us to see what an improvement it’s making to our quality of life. It’s all about being objective, & when it comes to something so personal & close, it’s tricky to assess it accurately.

This is why journalling any kind of transformation (leaving a relationship, moving city, changing your lifestyle) is so valuable. It’s like a little time machine on paper, & whenever we want to go back & see how things used to be, all we need to do is flick back a few pages. We can see how we were feeling, what we were doing, what kind of things were on our mind & really get a picture of how we used to be. It’s much more accurate than trying to remember, which is almost impossible. I have journals which boggle my mind — I am so different now to the girl who wrote them! That’s why, when I announced the iTC, I recommended you all go out & buy journals to use for this purpose. It wasn’t just because buying stationery is fun — though I must admit that was part of the motivation!

If you didn’t start a paper journal, that’s okay, & you’re forgiven! You might like to try read back on your old comments on the iTC discussion pages. It might be a good idea to search by your name, & then copy & paste all your comments (in chronological order) into a text document. While this won’t necessarily be hugely illuminating (at least at this stage), by the time the challenge is over you should have some inkling of where your new changes have taken you, & the ways in which they have improved your life.

However, some of you haven’t been leaving comments about what your goals were or how things are going. (I know, because there are over 1300 of you subscribed to the iTC mailing list & the comments are at nowhere near that level! You can’t fool me!) If you fall into this category, there are a couple of other ways you can measure your progress. Have a look through the personal emails you sent around the time you started your iTC. What kind of things were you saying? How were you feeling? How does that compare to the last 10 personal emails you sent?

How else can you measure your progress? If you are ordinarily quite artistic or creative, you might like to compare the quality, tone & mood of what you were doing before you started the iTC with the kind of thing you’re producing now. Otherwise, have you noticed any breakthroughs in terms of your feelings about your life? For example, did you want to quit your job pre-iTC, but have since decided to stay on? Have you cleared out any toxic relationships? Are you attracting a new calibre of friends?

If you think about it, all of these things are good markers to help you chart your progress. Often when we’re making changes, we give up because we feel like nothing is actually happening. I know, for example, that sometimes I feel like I’ve hit a wall with EFT, & nothing has actually changed. Of course, it has — I am now a completely different person to who I was — but it just goes to show that being objective about our personal progression can be difficult at the best of times!

I hope this helps you draw a nice, clear picture of what’s been going on with you during the course of the iTC!