The person who notices their own progress has a source of encouragement available between compliments.

Praise from other people is welcome and it arrives on someone else’s schedule, usually at the end of things and rarely during the long middle. If that is your only fuel, the months without it feel like months without movement. Noticing your own progress is not vanity, it is maintenance. It gives you something true to lean on when nobody is watching, which is most of the time.

Keep a short record of what you could not do three months ago. Two lines a week is enough: what got easier, what you handled without help. On the days when nothing seems to be changing, read backwards rather than forwards.