Put it in your heart
Where tomorrow shines
Gold and silver shine

REM – Shiny, happy people

Trawling Twitter of an evening often makes me melancholy.  Sometimes it inspires, sometimes it riles me but a lot of the time it just makes me sad.  You see the human condition seems to make us want to see the worst in everything.  We take every single negative in our day and use it to form little, 140 perfectly formed characters full of ire.  What we are not good at is celebrating the little things.

A couple of years ago I was still in teacher training.  Those who know me will remember that things were not always good at that time.  I had a bad placement in Y1 (of my own making) and I was spiralling into a pit of depression.  Doubts crept into my mind as to whether I was actually good enough to do this job and I came close to quitting on more than one occasion.

Fortunately I had that one good friend who saw through my wallowing self pity and told me to look carefully at the great stuff that was happening.  Hence the #smallwins manifesto was born.

The idea is simple.  No matter how bad your day has been you look for that one, tiny positive thing.  Even better is if it is something you weren’t expecting to happen.  Then you celebrate it.  You shout it from the rooftops and, no matter what, you put that #smallwin ahead of all the bad stuff in your life at that moment.

Life is made up of all these #smallwins but we are in danger of not realising.  In these days of looking after our mental as well as our physical health it is of vital importance that we take the wins whenever and wherever we are.

Our lives are too short and precious to concentrate on the negative…