Valentina opened MomentoVital on a Sunday afternoon, three hours after scrolling through her university classmate’s LinkedIn profile — the one who had just been promoted to regional manager.
Where she started
It wasn’t exactly envy. It was something colder: an ongoing evaluation that always placed her somewhere below where she felt she should be. At work she was competent — her supervisors said so — but every completed project felt like the bare minimum. Nothing worth celebrating. Nothing worth mentioning.
The internal voice was relentless. You’re not good enough. Everyone else can see it. When they finally figure out who you really are, they’ll leave.
The first days
On day 1, Valentina started a daily achievement log — writing down three things she had done well each evening, no matter how small. The first day she wrote: “Sent a difficult email. Got through the meeting. Ate well.” It felt absurd. She kept doing it.
The bigger challenge came on day 3, when a cognitive restructuring exercise asked her to examine the evidence for being “insufficient.” She wrote two lists: evidence for and against. The “against” list was longer at first. Then she paused — most of those “proofs” were predictions or comparisons, not verifiable facts. No manager had ever called her insufficient. No colleague had complained about her work. Only the voice.
The turning point
Day 8 was the hardest. A Kristin Neff self-compassion exercise asked her to talk to herself the way she would talk to a friend in the same situation. Valentina tried and froze. She wrote what she would say to that friend, then read it back. She had never said any of it to herself.
That didn’t silence the voice. But it changed her relationship to it. Instead of believing it automatically, she began to notice it: “There it is again.”
Where she is now
By day 14, the achievement log held entries that Valentina wouldn’t have considered achievements at the start: “held a difficult conversation without unnecessary apologies,” “said I don’t know when I didn’t know.” The critical voice still showed up. But it no longer set the conclusions.
She still doesn’t post much on LinkedIn.
Techniques that helped
- Self-compassion (Neff): treating the inner critic with the distance she would give a friend
- Cognitive restructuring: separating predictions from verifiable facts
- Achievement log: building concrete evidence against the deficit narrative