Measure your growth by other people’s reactions and you’ll feel stuck every time they’re busy.

If your sense of progress runs on other people’s attention, you will feel like you are going backwards every time they are distracted. Their silence usually means a bad week of their own, nothing about you at all. Borrowed measurement is unreliable because the instrument keeps wandering off.

Choose something you can check without an audience. Reps completed, pages read, a conversation you would have avoided last year. Look at that on Sunday instead of scanning faces for confirmation, and the week stops depending on whether anyone happened to notice.