You’ve worked really hard for progress. You’ve slaved day and night, moving tirelessly towards your goals. And yet, after all this time, the improvements are scarce, minimal, or - and this is the worst - negative. Sometimes, it feels like despite all your efforts, your shoes are fastened to the floor.

Essentially, you feel helpless and you feel like you’re right back where you started. You feel like you should be at your endpoint; you’ve done all the steps to get there, after all. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t look like it. It instead looks like you blindly walked backward all the way to the start.

However, here’s the thing. Though the end looks a lot like the beginning, you’re not at the beginning. (There really isn’t even an “end” anyway; even if you were to achieve your goal, you’d still be in the beginning of another.) Even in one part of your life, there are many dimensions.

There’s the physical one, where you physically can see or hold the tangible fruits of your labor. Then there’s the emotional one, where you feel pride and you feel all the hard work pay off. And, of course, there’s the one that deals with your personal, inner growth. Though the first two contain the possibility of retracting back to square one, the third one never does.

Here’s why: no matter what, your experiences help you grow and thrive as a person. It doesn’t matter if they were good or bad, progressive or non-progressive.

Though you may not have gone much further physically or emotionally, you certainly have internally - even without your conscious realization. That is why this aspect is more important than the first two - it takes all of your experiences and molds them so that they become the lesson that fuels your progress.

Now that you know that, there are certain things that you should do. The first thing is that you should sit down and review your inner self and how you’ve changed from how you were at first to how you are currently.

This reflection can be over a week, a month, a year - as far back as you deem most beneficial for you. This activity will not only show you that you have grown, but it will also be immensely useful in the future when you approach other circumstances.

The second thing you should do is that you should be grateful for the learning experience. This may seem ludicrous; why would you want to be grateful for something that seems like a failure?

You should be because when you’re grateful for your experience, no matter how sour it may have been, you’re actually acknowledging that you’re capable of handling a setback maturely and that you’re capable of understanding that every setback occurs for some reason (even if it may be unseen or ridiculously obscure at the moment).

It also means that, when you’re grateful for what has happened, you’re keeping a positive learning mindset that can only propel towards greater things to come. And, trust me, a positive mindset is the mindset you need.