Private Milestones.

Maybe our private milestones tell us more about how our lives are changing than our public ones do.

The small, often invisible moments that tell you something bigger has shifted within you.

I’ve been thinking about milestones lately. Not the obvious ones that elicit a card, flowers or champagne. Those culturally agreed moments when we’re allowed to say: something significant has happened here.

I’m more interested in the ones nobody knows you’ve reached…

The first time you say no and don’t follow it with three paragraphs explaining why.

The first time someone is disappointed in you and you don’t immediately start trying to make it better.

The first time you wear the red lipstick that’s been sitting in the drawer because some voice in your head has always said “who do you think you are?”

The first time you go to the cafe alone…

These private milestones feel huge, but nobody sends you flowers for them.

Nobody even knows.

And yet I’m starting to wonder whether these private milestones might tell us more about how we’re really changing than some of the big, shiny ones do.

Private milestones: the things nobody sends you a card for but you know something significant has changed.

I think we’ve made change far too theatrical.

Personal development has always seemed particularly fond of a transformation story.

There’s a before and an after. An old self and a new self. A rock bottom and a reinvention.

We quit the job, leave the relationship, move somewhere new, launch the thing, find our purpose, change our body, change our wardrobe, change our lives…

Even the language is enormous: Become your highest self. Step into her. Reinvent yourself. Level up.

I’ve always struggled with this idea of endless becoming, and I think I finally understand why…

I don’t want another identity. I don’t need to become someone new. I don’t want to optimise myself.

What I’ve actually been doing all along is retrieving tiny pieces of myself I put down years ago without noticing.

Or questioning rules I don’t remember agreeing to.

Or discovering that something I once believed was a fixed part of my personality was actually an adaptation, an expectation, a performance, a way of keeping everybody happy, or simply what I’d been doing for so long that I’d stopped noticing I was doing it.

And when those things begin to change, there isn’t necessarily a dramatic before-and-after photograph.

Sometimes you just stop explaining the no.

Which looks like absolutely nothing from the outside.

Except it might have taken you forty years to do it.

The action can be tiny. The distance travelled isn’t.

This is the bit I can’t stop thinking about…

I’ve been playing with the idea of internal mileage – the distance we have to travel inside ourselves to do something that can look completely mundane from the outside.

Take the red lipstick.

Putting lipstick on takes approximately twelve seconds. Hardly the stuff of a transformational memoir. But if you’ve spent most of your life with a little voice saying “don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t try too hard, that’s not really you, people will think you’re ridiculous”, walking out of the house wearing it can require an extraordinary amount of internal movement.

The same action might mean absolutely nothing to someone else.

Which makes me wonder how often we misjudge the size of change because we’re measuring the action rather than the distance someone had to travel to make it possible.

Saying no might be effortless for you and gargantuan for me.

Going somewhere alone might feel liberating to one person and terrifying to another.

Asking for help. Taking the photograph. Charging the price. Leaving early. Staying home. Wearing the shorts. Letting the phone ring…

The visible act tells us almost nothing about the internal mileage.

Sometimes an inch takes miles.

And I think this might be why some of our most important changes are so easy to overlook.

We’re waiting to feel transformed.

Meanwhile, we’re responding differently to a Tuesday afternoon text message.

There may be something important about the ordinariness of it.

I went looking into the research around this because I wanted to know whether I was just romanticising small moments, and there are several strands of psychology that make the idea more interesting.

One is the enormous role of repetition in behaviour.

We tend to think change happens when we finally Do The Big Thing, but much of everyday life runs through small patterns that have become automatic through repetition and context.

Which means change can happen through repetition too: not necessarily one magnificent act of courage, but enough occasions on which the old cue produces a slightly different response.

There is also research around what psychologists call self-perception: the idea that we partly infer things about ourselves by observing our own behaviour. I find that fascinating because it turns the usual confidence equation around.

We often imagine we must first become confident enough to do the thing. But sometimes doing the tiny thing becomes evidence from which a different understanding of ourselves can emerge.

Oh. I can say no.

I can let somebody be annoyed.

I can go on my own…

Nothing monumental has happened.

Except now there’s evidence.

And evidence is difficult to unsee.

Maybe this is what change actually looks like while we’re living it.

I think we often only recognise the shift resulting from these private milestones retrospectively.

There probably isn’t a morning when you wake up and announce, “Excellent news, I’ve officially stopped needing my mum’s approval”.

It might be that six months later someone says something that would once have sent you into a tailspin and…it doesn’t.

Or you realise you haven’t rehearsed that imaginary conversation for weeks.

I love the idea of these moments as milestones because milestone gives them weight.

A small step sounds like something insignificant on the way to somewhere more important.

A milestone says: something happened here.

Something changed.

Maybe not permanently. Maybe next Tuesday you revert to the old pattern and explain the no in a fourteen-page PDF with supporting documentation. Human beings are inconveniently inconsistent like that.

But you did it once.

And now you know you can.

And then there’s the strangest milestone of all: nothing.

This is where the whole idea gets even more interesting to me, because I don’t think every private milestone involves doing something differently.

Sometimes the movement is not moving.

We live in a culture that’s very interested in action – Make the decision. Have the conversation. Set the boundary. Leave. Begin. Change. Fix. Become…

But sometimes you can spend months thinking about something, reading about it, talking about it, turning it over at 3am, trying desperately to work out what you’re supposed to do about it…only to discover that the resolution is not an action at all.

Maybe you stay. You wait. You accept that someone is who they are. You stop trying to get the apology. You decide the conversation doesn’t need to happen.

Maybe you just let the water settle.

I think there’s an enormous difference between doing nothing because you’re paralysed by a question, and doing nothing because you no longer need the question answered in the same way.

From the outside, those two people look identical.

Inside, they could be miles apart.

Sometimes the decision is that nothing needs to happen. And sometimes arriving there is the biggest movement of all.

Maybe we’re looking for change in the wrong places.

I keep thinking about how many milestones in my own life I probably missed because I didn’t know they counted.

I knew the obvious ones counted – Leaving jobs. My mum’s death. Starting businesses. Moving countries. The things that divide a life neatly into before and after.

But what about the first time I didn’t need to be liked?

The first time I trusted my own interpretation of something instead of immediately looking outside myself for confirmation?

The first time I let somebody have their version of events without needing to make them understand mine?

Those dates aren’t in the calendar.

I couldn’t tell you when most of them happened.

And it’s why I’m so taken with the idea of Private Milestones. It gives me a way of recognising change that I haven’t really had before.

Not as one grand transformation, but as these almost imperceptible shifts accumulating underneath an ordinary life.

Tiny moments that would be completely unremarkable to anybody watching, and yet seem to contain the distance of an entire lifetime.

And now I’m wondering how many I’ve walked straight past because I was still waiting for something bigger to happen…