When I started waking up at 5 AM, everything changed. Regardless of when I went to bed the night before, I had clarity and energy.

I could get more done before 8 AM than I would normally achieve in an entire day. In time, waking up at 8 AM began to feel like more of a hardship than waking at 5. I was missing my best time of day.

I’ve come to suspect that there’s nothing intrinsic to the morning hours that makes me so productive. Rather, the act of waking up early makes me feel virtuous and on top of things. I’m starting my day with an achievement that I feel good about.

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A colleague of mine told me how she used to spend hours in lesson planning.

Or so she thought. What she was actually doing was stewing in her own anxiety for hours, then spending a relatively short time completing the lesson plan.

As she became healthier, she realized that the hours of anxiety didn’t “count.” In other words, that time wasn’t actually helping her to accomplish anything.

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One day in March, a parent came to visit The Little Middle School to see if it would be a good fit for her child.

She sat in on a high-level discussion in which students were making plans for our spring trip.

When she left, she said, “My kid can’t do this.”

Maybe she was right. But what I wanted to say was, “It’s March!”

Our students had been learning together since August — almost eight months of growth. What she was seeing isn’t where they started.

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The stories we tell ourselves can help us our hurt us. The ways in which we measure ourselves can reinforce the awful story or help us to build a new one.

We keep the awful stories out of habit. There’s something comforting about clinging to the story that reinforces what we’ve always believed, even when it makes us feel terrible.

A story like, “I keep thinking I’ll be good at things, but I’m always bad at them.”

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