It´s better to ignore your feelings right now. Here´s why:

How you feel right now isn´t important.

When we review our performance at work, progression towards a specific goal, or progress in any area of our lives, we can fall into the trap of considering how we feel in the moment, and decide that that´s the right conclusion for our progress overall.

It´s simply not true.

How you feel right now doesn’t tell the entire story… and neither should it help you reach conclusions about yourself that eat away at your self-worth.

Let´s take fictitious Salma as an example.

Salma used to feel very confident in her job. But recently, there seems to be more issues being raised than solved in her projects, and whenever she has meetings with vendors and clients, all she hears is complaints.

Add to that the fact that she is training for a race and hasn´t gone for a run in the last week, Salma tells herself that she is pretty much failing in life.

She feels like everything she touches turns to rubbish, and she may ask well cancel the race because she won´t make it anyway.

Now imagine Salma looking up to the sky, the clouds parting and from behind the sun, James Clear appears and bellows:

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results

(Since James won´t be making a sky-appearance any time soon, this quote, and many other useful lessons, can be learned in his book Atomic Habits).

We often look at our results in the last few days, or even two weeks, and assume it is painting a picture of the future.

But what´s actually happening is that we allow ourselves to cloud all the progress we´ve made with a few setbacks (that we may not have seen coming).

And how we manage ourselves in these moments of self-doubt makes the difference between either inching towards our goals, or sabotaging them completely.

It´s like going for a bike ride, puncturing one tyre, taking a knife and cutting the other one, and then carrying your bike home.

So rather than sabotaging your efforts based on how you feel right now, it helps if you lift your head out of the detail, zoom out, and see the bigger picture.

Today I may feel like everything is going wrong, but am I on track overall?

Salma may want to deliver her project on time, but if she doesn´t have specific checkpoints in place to ensure the project is on track, she´s right on schedule to deem her project a failure.

Salma may also want to get strong enough to run a marathon, and a training plan that accounts for dips in performance, or life getting in the way, will help her get race ready in a realistic way.

With everything you do, you´re either inching closer, or moving further away from your goal.

Where are you on your trajectory?