Some good news found its way to my new house a couple of days ago. The sleep meditations channel crossed 250,000 subscribers!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
A quarter of a million people, wild!
I was properly happy... for about four minutes 🤣😅
Because then I did the thing. I opened the analytics. And I spotted that when I posted about hitting 200,000, the channel was getting 2.4 million views a month. Now it's 2 million.
So there I was, standing in the middle of my own milestone, and my brain had quietly changed the subject to "hmm... so what are you doing wrong?"
I'd love to tell you the mindfulness teacher in me caught it straight away. He did not. He was too deep into the numbers!
Maybe you're familiar with this move? You finally get the thing... the promotion, the offer, the number... and within a day, some quiet part of you has found the gap in it and moved the target.
It's not ingratitude. For me, and maybe some of you reading today, the part that spots the problem first learned that job young, back when catching things early kept life safe.
And here's what I pondered (once I'd stopped scrolling the analytics). Two things were happening at once:
The first: our brains were never built to make us happy. They were built to keep us alive, so bad news gets priority boarding. The psychologist and mindfulness expert Rick Hanson describes the brain as Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good... a win slides off in seconds unless we deliberately hold it in place.
The second: nobody can feel ‘two million’ of anything. The number is simply too big to mean something. But "down 400,000"... that has a shape. A direction. So my brain skipped the miracle it couldn't grasp and grabbed the one thing on the screen it could. A minus sign.
And underneath both of those sits the question I now ask myself most days: what is this number for?
If 250,000 is a result... a quarter of a million people falling asleep a little easier... then the goal has been reached, and I'm allowed to feel it.
But if that number has sneakily become proof... proof that I'm doing okay, proof that I’m successful, proof that I'm enough, that I matter... then no number, however huge, will ever settle it.
Proof expires the moment it arrives. 250 becomes 500 becomes never quite enough.
The amazing win didn’t land because my brain had already left for the next one.
So I thought, what would I tell a client?
And here's what I did, four small steps, and it took me about five minutes.
I closed the analytics tab. I opened the comments instead, picked one person, and read their comment twice. Slowly. Then I made myself stay with it for thirty seconds, which sounds like nothing but felt strangely long... that's the Velcro part, giving the good news and positivity time to stick. And then I rang a friend and told them the good news… because it is good news.
I won't pretend one five-minute exercise rewired me. Knowing me, I'll be back in the analytics by Friday. But something did shift. The milestone finally landed where it was supposed to... in me, not on the dashboard.
So if a win of yours arrives this week, even a small one, try giving it thirty seconds before you audit it. Read the kind message twice. Say it out loud to someone. Let it stick for once.
The audit will wait. It always does.
And talking of good news…
Co-Lab FM, the new channel Aaron and I launched in May, just passed 1,000 subscribers. It's where we make what we call functional meditation... sessions for the moments that happen long before bedtime. The racing mind at 2pm. The reset between meetings. I look after the meditations, and Aaron composes original music and soundscapes underneath them.
A thousand is a tiny number next to 250,000, but it was also the one I could feel straight away... because most of you came over from here. Thank you. If you haven't visited yet, come and say hello:
https://www.youtube.com/@CoLabFM
And one more thing before you go. The same auditor that went through my analytics is the one that sneaks in to go through my day at 11pm... listing everything I got wrong, skipping everything I got right. I made a sleep hypnosis for exactly those nights. It's called Sleep Hypnosis for Self-Love & Letting Go, and it helps the day's ledger close so you can rest without earning it first 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
With love,
Chibs 💙
