Celebrate Your Wins
Celebrate Your Wins – All of Them
Amidst all the holiday cheer, I’ve got exciting news of my own: my Italian greyhound, Pearl, has completed her training and is going to sit for her exam enabling her to become a therapy dog. Once she does, you can request for her to join us for appointments – even through telehealth. If you’re curious, she’s less than 10 lbs, hypoallergenic and regularly bathed for sensitivity to patients (or their family members) with allergies.
Pearl’s success is a perfect example of the kind of celebration I want to talk about this month: Not the holiday festivities that are rushing upon us, but the microwins that we tend to downplay every day. Pearl – who has a disability caused by peripheral lymphedema (a genetic disease that causes her back right leg to look deformed – but doesn’t cause her any pain) – has worked so hard to go through her training, and our family has put in a major effort to help her get there.
This celebration of Pearl is symbolic of what I want to encourage for each of you this month: celebrate things in progress.
We often withhold celebrations along the way, waiting until the grand finale before we consider giving ourselves a pat on the back. (And then, let’s be honest, when we get there, sometimes we don’t savor our success as much as we promised to.)
Instead, we deserve to recognize and honor the hard work we put in on a regular basis – and so I’m celebrating Pearl now, because regardless of the outcome, she’s done an amazing job. When we celebrate, we release dopamine and experience the rush of good feelings that provides a genuine sense of uplift: a breath of fresh air during a season when feelings of inadequacy can sneak up and overwhelm us.
I invite you to practice celebrating now, as we turn the corner into December, so that when we get hit with “New Years Resolution” time, we’ve got a good foundation, so we don’t feel tempted to fall into the “pick yourself apart” mentality that shows up in our culture every January.
For Individuals:
Celebrate any and every aspect of your life
Put on your mom hat, your spouse hat, or your professional hat. Celebrate being a fantastic friend or community member. Appreciate the way you handled a tough phone call or listened carefully to your child’s story.
Don’t ‘just’ yourself
Watch out for when you minimize or dismiss your wins, as you practice developing this celebration mindset. When you catch yourself saying you “just” threw together dinner, try to reframe: I cared for my family today by providing them with dinner. Or if you feel like you were “just doing your job,” reframe: I’m so great at what I do, I make it seem easy.
Skip the comparisons
Another obstacle to navigate when working on self-celebration is when comparisons start to creep in, favorable or unfavorable. That judgmental attitude tends to take our brains into fight-or-flight, sweeping away the positive hormone state of the celebration. So when you feel it taking over, remember to keep your eyes on your own paper. This is about what you did well, not what someone else did better (or worse!).
Pick whatever method feels best
You can journal your wins, post them on the refrigerator, or share them with your best friend on your daily catch-up call. As long as you get the wins out of your head on a regular basis, how you do it doesn’t matter.
For couples:
Thanksgiving is just a few days behind us, so let’s carry forth the seasonal gratitude with our partners as we head into the holidays. Gratitude has been a popular topic for about a decade now, with studies showing its benefits for our individual well being and our social bonds – including our romantic partnerships.
There are so many ways to practice gratitude as a couple. For this month, I suggest you bring your partner into your self-celebrations in some way. You can choose to:
listen to the other person share their wins and validate them (no critiques, just listening!)
add your own perspective of things you want to celebrate about the other person (leave them celebration ‘notes’ on the fridge, the bathroom mirror or in their lunch box)
build a love map with them, where each person individually writes down what they think the other person is celebrating, and then you compare your answers to see how well you know each other.
Consider doing this regularly as part of an evening routine, so that your rituals nourish you as a couple as you head into this busy season.
This is my last post for 2022, so I want to wish everyone a restful holiday season, and thank you for spending this time with me this year. I’ll look forward to seeing everyone in January where I’ll dive deeper into fertility counseling by Sharon Covington.
Looking ahead:
There will be lots to celebrate in 2023, including a new updated edition of my book, Employed Motherhood.
For January, I've booked a trip to New Mexico, both North and South, where I'll be offering in-person options the week of January 23rd, so please reach out if you want to connect for a session or other learning opportunities.
And please, feel free to book your session with Pearl if you’d like to experience the therapeutic benefits of my sweet girl.