Do you ever impress yourself? This may seem a strange question. Most of us are busy thinking about how we can impress other people. But isn’t it more important to impress ourselves? After all we live with ourselves all the time, so we are definitely the number one person we need to impress.

Magically if we impress ourselves, we often don’t feel the need to impress other people. We have a level of security that doesn’t need validating by other people being impressed.

So far so good, but then the question becomes: How on earth do I impress ME?

Often our response to that question is something big:

• I’m going finally to lose all that weight.
• I’m going to go to the gym every day and get a toned body.
• I’m going to declutter the house and keep it spotlessly clean.
• I’m going to learn to speak Mandarin fluently.
• I’m going to be patient with my teenage children and rebuild an amazing relationship with them.

Of course, if you do that,  you will impress yourself and probably other people too.

The answer is probably not that high. How many times in the past have you promised yourself you will do amazing things, and everything has unravelled?

I’ve been interviewing people for my YouTube channel, both experts and ordinary people.

All the interviews offer hope that things can improve. A recurring theme from many of the experts and the ordinary people is to make small changes. Once a small change has become embedded in your life, you can add more improvements.

This seems to be the key to impressing yourself – find small things you can achieve each day, so that you can impress yourself in a small way each day.

Take a moment to think about things you could do to impress yourself. Here’s some I could do:

1. Put the books that have been sitting on the stairs for several days onto the bookshelf.
2. Wash the glass and put it away at least once today rather than leaving it out.
3. Phone a friend I’ve been intending to speak to for ages.
4. Check through my emails and find 10 I can delete, because they don’t need an answer.

These are just some ideas that came to me quickly while I was writing this. I’m not aiming to do them all – I just want to do one today, so that I can start to impress myself rather than trying to impress other people. Surely that is the way to good mental health.

My book “190 Weight Loss Hacks” gives you lots of simple tips you can try. Rather than committing to losing X pounds in X weeks, buy this book and find one hack and do that regularly till it’s a habit. Then do another one. Build momentum that way and impress yourself.