Tiny unnoticeable things: the small business wins your brain is ignoring

Show us your T.U.T.s!

Do please re-read that. It almost certainly did not say what you thought it said.

T.U.T.s. Tiny Unnoticeable Things. The small moments of quiet success that happen in your business every single week (that your brain, with the best of intentions, consistently fails to log).

This post is about those moments. And why noticing them might be the most useful thing you do this week.

Your brain is not on your side (but it thinks it is)

Your supercomputer brain is working hard on your behalf. Constantly. It is scanning for patterns, tracking progress, predicting outcomes based on what it thinks you need to do to stay safe... because safety (to our prehistoric brains) equals survival and survival equals success.

The problem is that success doesn't have to look like that any more.

Even if you ditch the "sabre-tooth tiger not dragging your from the cave" version of success, it is still likely that your brain's current version is built from a combination of other people's benchmarks, unrealistic comparisons, and a running internal commentary that tends to notice what is missing far more readily than what is already there.

It is not malicious. It genuinely wants you to 'succeed'. It is just working from slightly skewed data.

"Do what you've always done and you'll get what you've always got"

That quote applies here. Your brain will keep returning to its established picture of what success looks like. If that picture does not actually reflect who you are and what you genuinely deserve, the gap between where you are and where you think you should be will always feel bigger than it really is.

Which is where the T.U.T.s come in.

What a T.U.T. actually looks like

Tiny Unnoticeable Things are not dramatic shocks to the system. We are not trying to overwhelm the brain with sudden, exhaustive change. They are the smaller moments of competence, capability and value that happen in the margins of your working week (that fade before your brain has a chance to register them as evidence).

Things like:

• An unsolicited thank you message you read, felt briefly warm about, and immediately filed

• The brave "no" you said to something that did not feel quite right

• The extra minute you took to finish your tea before jumping back in (and how that brief pause gave you more back than you realise)

• The new room you walked into, even though it felt big and unfamiliar, but went in anyway

None of those feel like victories in the moment. They feel ordinary. Unremarkable. Barely worth noting.

That is precisely the point. They are unnoticeable... which means your brain is not counting them. And if your brain is not counting them, they are not making it into your accumulating body of evidence. Which means your picture of how you are actually doing is incomplete.

The gap between the story others tell and the story you tell yourself

In my annual survey of creative business owners, 43% said that "I am not good enough" was the fear that resonated most with them. The most common response for three years running.

And yet 35% of those same people said that what kept them moving forward was hearing from clients how delighted they were with the work.

Think about that gap for a moment. Over a third of the people who feel most held back by the 'not good enough' fear are simultaneously receiving consistent external evidence that they are, in fact, good enough. The evidence is arriving. It is just not being filed in the right place.

The unsolicited thank you message gets read and filed. The doubt gets rehearsed and replayed.

That is not a capability problem. That is a data problem. And data problems can be fixed.

What does 'good enough' actually look like for you?

This is the question worth giving some genuine time to, because most people are measuring themselves against someone else's answer.

• Maybe 'good enough' looks like the LinkedIn post from the person whose content you love – if only you could produce work like that more consistently

• Maybe it looks like shaving two slides off a presentation that already got brilliant feedback... but if you had just had a little more time it could have been so much better

I put it to you that those are someone else's version of 'good enough'. Borrowed benchmarks. Standards that were never yours to begin with.

Your version of 'good enough' is built from your own story. Your own clients. Your own evidence. And the only way to find it is to start collecting that evidence deliberately rather than letting it disappear into the archive the moment it arrives.

The smile file (save those small business wins)

The smile file is an idea that came out of a conversation I had recently. It's not mine, but the people I mentioned it to absolutely jumped on it.

The file is a dedicated, deliberate record of the tiny wins. The thank you messages. The brave decisions. The moments where you showed up for your business in a way the version of you from twelve months ago would not quite have managed.

It does not have to be elaborate. A note on your phone. A page at the back of a notebook. A folder in your inbox. The format is irrelevant. The act of recording is everything.

Because what you are building, one T.U.T. at a time, is a body of evidence. A truer, more complete picture of how you are actually doing – one that includes the small, unremarkable, genuinely significant moments that your brain has been quietly overlooking.

Read the smile file back the next time the 'not good enough' voice gets loud. More as a correction. A more accurate data set (than as a motivational exercise).

Your turn...

Take five minutes this week and write down three T.U.T.s from the last seven days. Small moments where you showed up, made a good call, said the right thing, or simply kept going when stopping would have been easier.

• Write them down

• Read them back

• Start the file

Each one is evidence that you are already living a version of 'good enough' that is more solid, more real, and more yours than the borrowed benchmarks you have been comparing yourself against.

Oh, and one last thought. Being inspired by other people's small business wins is perfectly acceptable. There is nothing wrong with ambition. It just helps to know you are starting from a better place than you think.

Mark Franklin is The Four Fears® Guy: a transformational mindset coach and speaker working with people who are building something of their own.

What is your T.U.T. from this week? Drop it in the comments. Let's build a smile file together.