Why Celebrating Matters: Celebrate Small and Big Wins
How often do you find yourself saying something like, “Well, I mean, not to brag but here’s this amazing thing I did?” How often do you hear someone you love put a disclaimer like that before their own achievement? How often do you pause to recognize and celebrate just how amazing you are, the effort you’re putting forth, and the processes you’re choosing to engage in to make your life the life of your dreams?
If perfectionist, people-pleasing, and codependent thinking are your habitual thought patterns, celebrating yourself and your achievements may be a totally foreign concept, and one you likely apologize for when you do it. I know it sure was for me.
Most of us are not celebrating ourselves enough, if at all.
If we do do it, we feel guilty or weird about it. We judge ourselves or others for doing it, or we write it off with phrases like, “I mean, I don’t mean to sound conceited but,” or, “I mean, it’s not a big deal, but whatever, I just hiked Aconcagua, the highest point in South America, but whatever, no big deal.”
My BFF Becca gave me the most magnificent gift a while ago. It was this tiny palm sized notebook and it said the word victories on the front. When she gave it to me, she said, and I do paraphrase, “You’re so amazing. I want you to know it. And writing down at least one small victory each day will help you to believe it.”
And Becca was right. She’s always right.
Over these years of pausing every day to write down at least one small victory, one celebration, naming it and taking the time to purposefully do it every single day without disclaimers, guilt, or shame, has in fact been life-changing.
And I don’t say that kind of thing lightly.
And it wasn’t that I was opposed to celebrating me. I just honestly never thought to pause to do it.
I can see now that my brain thought it was smarter, safer, better to just keep plowing through life, to keep striving and pushing. And yes, to celebrate others, to throw the best surprise parties, to bake everyone else the best cakes, but it felt weird, uncomfortable, just ugh in my body to pause to celebrate me.
I think that’s because there was this subconscious thought that sounded something like I can’t pause to celebrate me because I need to keep pushing my mind and body to the brink in order to prove my worth.
I was constantly striving, constantly doing, moving and rushing and racing to the next thing without pausing because I was attempting to prove my worth to myself and the world around me.
I’ve found that for so many of us, that underlying story is that if people are focused on us, they’ll see that we’re a fraud.
We’re actually not worth celebrating. They’ll see that we’re lacking and failing and terrible in so many ways, and then they’ll abandon us, and we’ll die cold and alone on a mountain side. And I know now after years of getting coached and doing daily self-coaching that none of those self-flagellating thoughts are true.
And I can see how they’re part and parcel of habitual thought patterns that may be rolling around in your perfect head too. If your childhood brain associated being seen, being authentic, open, vulnerable, with being negated, unheard, dismissed, criticized, or told you’re actually not as amazing or good or successful as you experience yourself to be, that childhood success story of wow, I did a cartwheel, I drew a narwhal, I did whatever it is that makes a kid feel great about themselves, you come to believe those things are actually not that great.
You learned not to pause to celebrate you, or to ask to be celebrated because you’re going to be told you’re not actually awesome.
And that hurts so much more than just not bringing it up in the first place, which to me is just more evidence that our inner children are so brilliant.
And an experience such as this can be one seed, one root cause of perfectionist thought habits. And if these habits are part of your mindset, if you call yourself a perfectionist, then you likely hold yourself to unrealistic standards, expecting yourself to be perfect at everything, to accomplish a bajillion things in a day, and are mean to yourself if you’re not a superhuman.
You may not even see your success because your brain is so focused on what you’re not accomplishing.
And so celebrating is just not on the agenda.
As humans with codependent thought habits, we often have spent a lifetime focused on others and their joy, their achievements, and so it feels understandably weird or uncomfortable, awkward to celebrate our own.
Or just like it was for me, it isn’t even a thing we think to do.
We just keep plugging along in our lives, not even recognizing that we can pause to really celebrate our achievements and our victories because the fear story inside us goes if we take our attention away from managing other people, their wants, their needs, their emotional state, et cetera, then they won’t be pleased with us. They’ll think less of us, they’ll stop validating our worth as humans and wow, no way, nope, not safe, not going to do it.
So we keep our focus on celebrating and caretaking others and reasonably, understandably, don’t pause to celebrate ourselves, which keeps us from recognizing just how amazing we actually are. For humans socialized as women in particular, there’s often this story taught to us that it’s our job to manage the everything for everyone else.
So like in codependency, we don’t pause to truly celebrate ourselves because we’re so busy taking care of everyone and everything else.
Many of us were also taught that it’s bad to be self-centered or selfish and that celebrating ourselves is evidence of that, whether we’re even doing it in our own minds, hearts, or gasp, out loud, it is evidence of selfishness, which once again is very, very, very bad, says the patriarchy and systems that want to keep us down, keep us quiet, keep us feeling small.
Women are also taught by our patriarchal and capitalist systems that celebrating is something we do by engaging something outside of ourselves.
Meaning buying something, drinking alcohol, daring to eat something off the diet plan, like something naughty like a cookie.
But it’s also quick to remind us we should feel guilty about those choices. Now, I’m not demonizing treats, I’m not demonizing alcohol, I’m not demonizing any of those choices. Baby, if you want to have the wine, drink the wine. But I want to encourage you to pause before you tell that lie to yourself that that is celebrating you.
Drinking wine is not celebrating yourself. Buying stuff is not celebrating yourself. Going on a trip, a spa day, a bath, these things are not evidence that you are celebrating yourself.
Celebrating yourself truly, honoring yourself is an inside job, one that happens inside you in your own mind, body, and spirit.
And yes, it’s something to share with others so that you can co-create that beautiful experience of celebrating you, celebrating them celebrating you, you can celebrate them, but it’s never about buying stuff. To me, self-care—the bubble bath and the spa day—is lovely really, but true real lasting self-care to me means learning to manage my mind, to trust myself, to honor myself, to live from a place of me first, you second, with love.
And I bring that same mental framework to the act and the art of self- celebration. The stuff is lovely. And the work is really showing up to have your own back and to honor and support yourself. And through that process, applying minimum baseline thinking to it, where we learn to trust ourselves by committing to showing up for us and then actually doing it in a tiny way every day.
Not for the sake of the thing you’ll accomplish, like exercising or drinking water, doing your thought work, but rather for the sake of doing it, for the sake of showing yourself that you can trust you to do it, whatever it is.
Celebrating is how we cultivate a loving relationship with our healthy ego, which is so vital for our wellness in every way.
When you pause, you deepen the experience of seeing yourself, of getting present to yourself in this one perfect moment, and through that process of becoming your own ever-present watcher, you can gain so much awareness over what your brain has been conditioned to think so you can decide if you want to keep those thoughts or not.
When you pause to celebrate you, you release some of that beautiful oxytocin, dopamine, these fantastic, motivating, self-loving neurochemicals that make a gal feel amazing in their life.
And when you pause and feel into your body, really connect with the somatic or bodily experience of celebrating you, you are connecting in with and strengthening a nervous system resource. It’s a glimmer—the nervous system opposite of a trigger.
A way to bring yourself back to being in ventral vagal, that safe, social part of our nervous system where our physiology, our cognition, things are running optimally. And you can experience you as being in ventral vagal with you.
When you pause, you can feel what it feels like in and for your body to say I love me enough to take this one little moment, to give myself a high-five, and to honor me.
And that is beautiful. The more we connect in with our own capacity to be in that safe and social part of the nervous system with ourselves, the more our bodies will believe us that that shift is possible when we are feeling anxious, worried, stressed, hypervigilant, in fight or flight, or shut down in dorsal vagal, sad, challenged to focus, or find the pleasure, joy, and motivation in life.
Prioritizing celebrating ourselves also begins to break through habits like codependency by shifting our focus on to ourselves.
It begins to shift perfectionism by reminding us that done is better than torturing ourselves to get to some imaginary fantasy perfect, and it begins to shift people pleasing as we prioritize our own pleasure and joy.
Remember, if you have ridiculously high standards for yourself, perfectionist thought fantasies are your norm, this may feel silly, trite, not worth it at first, and that’s cool. I’ll encourage it anyway.
When I learned to stop to say, yay, I finished a task, it helped me to realize how much I actually do do in an hour, a day, a week, in a year, which my beauty, is such a vital first step.
A solution for beating yourself up for being human.
And yes, this practice, beyond feeling silly, may also feel terrible and uncomfortable at first and that’s okay. Studies show that not a single person has died from sharing what they’re proud of themselves for, and you are unlikely to be the first to die from self-celebration.
So go forth, my love.
Celebrate away, even if it feels uncomfortable, but also exactly because it feels uncomfortable and we can do hard things in this familia.
We really can. And by doing them over and over, we create new neural grooves in our mind and over time, these things feel less and less uncomfortable as they become our norm.
So what does this practice look like? Well for me, it’s less about the accomplishment and it’s more about the effort, the internal shift. Those little things I would never have previously celebrated because I expected myself to do a superhuman number of things in a day and felt disappointed in myself if I didn’t.
So yes, celebrate checking the thing off your list and celebrate the effort you put into it, for the short term and long term, for future you.
And you truly deserve to celebrate the small moments because it adds up to a life of learning to put yourself first.
Learning to give yourself a high-five. Celebrating you is you moving out of that deep codependent, people-pleasing, perfectionist desire for external validation, as you experience a life that starts with you giving you validation first.
And from there you can share it with whomever will listen, which I highly recommend. And to say it plainly, if someone else thinks you’re bragging, boasting, being self-centered or thinking highly of yourself when you share a celebration, I’ll invite you to go ahead and let them know they’re right. You are. And that’s so amazing.
Because for those of us who are doing this work of learning to radically accept, love, honor, and trust ourselves, to heal from a lifetime of codependent habits, this work is vital. And the added bonus is that when we decide that it’s great to celebrate ourselves and to do it frequently, and that what other people think about us as humans who celebrate ourselves frequently is that we begin to care less and less what others think about us and our celebrations of our own magnificence.
And as you do this work, as you show up in your communities as a person who celebrates themselves, as you share those celebrations with the people you love, you model that self-care for others.
And that’s a beautiful gift to give the people in your world.
No one needs your permission or mine to feel or do anything, and by showing up and modeling self-celebration, we give the people we love permission. We show them it’s okay and it’s valuable to do it.
So your homework, my beautiful darling kittens is this. Each day, I’ll invite you to find one thing, just one little thing to start to celebrate. If you don’t historically floss your teeth every day but you do it today, then yay for you. If you set a healthy boundary then you are amazing. If you publish your book and it hits number one on the New York Times book list then yay, congrats.
If you remembered to eat three times a day or take your meds or your supplements, or if you make a million dollars today then oh my beauty, yay for you. It’s all worth celebrating. The big, the small, all of it. Because you are worth celebrating. No if, ands, buts, writing it off, feeling guilty or ashamed. You are amazing.
Let yourself know and let the people know. Start your next celebratory sentence out with, “To brag, I did x, y, z.” And see how amazing it feels.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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