Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Vol 5, Iss 1: Recognizing & Celebrating Wins
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Hi friends, happy new year! Our new year was pretty mellow. Did all our cleaning on the 31st and made black-eyed peas and honey cornbread muffins. Stayed up until midnight to do all my rituals/superstitions and then slept in on the first. On the 1st we made waffles and bacon, kicked back, and relaxed. I didn’t even bother to start working on my goals until the 2nd, as I just really wanted to ease into the new year. Using a planner has, for once, been great so far. It doesn’t feel like a chore this year and I’m actually finding it helpful. It has really helped to focus on functionality and not be so concerned with it looking a certain way.
I took the rest of this week off work (from my day job) and it’s been great. I’m doing my best to schedule rest and not run myself into the ground trying to do 10,000 things. I did start the piano lessons on Yousician and it feels good. I also wrote a bunch of mail the other day and I am cautiously optimistic about this year.
Today I want to talk about something that I have actively begun to work on as I like to share things as I am figuring them out. It helps me to see people in process so I figure, maybe it helps some of you as well. I certainly don’t have everything figured out and I think something that has always irked me about the self-help genre is that people often have the air of knowing all the answers and that’s a red flag to me. I don’t have all the answers, but I try to share what has worked for me and what is in process.
A few weeks ago, Reductress published this post and this accompanying image on Instagram:
Ouch! And also, incredibly relatable for me. I am notorious for downplaying my achievements and my therapist has seen this pattern and has been calling me out on it. I told her I built our podcast website in a weekend and then moved on like I had just said, “I drank a glass of water” and she forced me to stop and go back, noting that it can take people months to do something I did in a weekend. I immediately mentioned all kinds of qualifiers, like I had learned how to build websites from scratch in grad school and also that the site isn’t necessarily full of bells and whistles. This was… not the right response but it is my typical response.
I did the same thing when I shared with her that I sang at the Hollywood Bowl a few times. I started to add qualifiers like oh, one of my professors was the Assistant Conductor and I only sang as part of a chorus and I happened to be in L.A. already and I studied musical theatre and so on. I don’t know why I do this but I know I’m not alone. I will achieve something and I will assume that it’s because it was easy or I was lucky and in the right place at the right time with the right credentials. I know that I’m competent at the things I do so I wouldn’t call it imposter syndrome and for longtime readers, you know how I feel about the idea of imposter syndrome anyway. I have a habit of thinking that if something feels easy for me, then it’s easy for everyone and therefore it’s nothing of note. It doesn’t help that I have absurdly high standards and expectations of myself and I suspect that’s a major part of the problem.
To put it simply, I have a hard time recognizing wins and I’m trying to be better at doing that. One of the strategies I’m trying to implement in helping me develop this muscle is acknowledging the reactions of people I trust when I tell them I did something. Since I can’t recognize the wins for myself, I’m outsourcing it and it’s on me to believe people.
The other strategy is to celebrate my wins. When this newsletter hit 200 issues last year, my therapist said, “Congratulations! How will you celebrate?” I was stunned because celebrating hadn’t crossed my mind because I never do it. I “celebrate” by writing more newsletter issues, of course. This is also not the right answer so I’m working on what celebrating my wins looks like. Will it be the same thing each time? Will it be dependent on what I do? This is still a work in progress. I’m trying to think of things that are sustainable and also don’t feel like yet another thing I have to add to my to-do list. It should be celebratory, not a chore. I’m also trying to find something celebratory which is not capitalism.
Related: a huge thank you to the folks who have listened to the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast as well as the folks who have taken the time to give us good ratings. We really had no idea how many folks would want to listen to our silliness and we have had at least 50 downloads of each episode and given that we have no frame of reference, this seems like a lot! I’m counting it as a win and so we need to decide how to celebrate it.
As always, I am open to ideas and open to hearing how you celebrate your own wins.
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