When my kids do something I try not to lead with “I’m proud of you!” I try to remember first to ask “Are you proud of yourself?” It’s beautiful for people to be proud of you, but how you feel about yourself and what you accomplish is more important.
So, I let them know that I’m proud but the primary thing is them knowing how essential it is to validate themselves. External validation has its place but nothing tops the confidence from knowing you did that! That goes for them, me and you.
After being proud of yourself, the next logical step in some situations is celebrating yourself. Why? If you don’t who will? Sometimes we feel like we’re being arrogant or self-centered to celebrate ourselves. Let’s talk about why that’s absolutely not the case.
Reasons to celebrate
Celebrating yourself allows you to be positive about you. There’s really no downside to that. How you feel about yourself changes the way you show up. If you are regularly finding a way to feel positive about yourself, then it has to present itself in other areas of your life.
Another perk of being on team: celebrate yourself is that you eliminate the need for external validation. The only validation we seek from others is for parking. Other than that, we validate ourselves around here. The good things other people say about you are just icing on a pretty sweet cake.
Making this a practice also reminds us to enjoy the journey and not just be focused on the destination. If we celebrate benchmarks along the journey, it will only encourage us to keep going on our way to the big goal.
Make it a practice to look at your accomplishments and all you’ve achieved. Identify the ways you are accomplishing your purpose and moving toward your goals. The, be totally OK with rewarding yourself for the things you’ve done well. You deserve it!
