Connect with Your Successes

We often think we have to downplay our successes to avoid hurting people’s feelings or to avoid jealousy, or sometimes we were taught to not stand out too much, but as a result we never feel emotionally connected to our accomplishments and we don’t let ourselves fully enjoy them...

This might happen because you were raised to feel like you shouldn't draw attention to yourself or you learned that your friends would feel insecure if you did well in life. While it's good to feel empathy and concern for people, it's not healthy to not allow yourself to connect with your own happiness as a result. Downplaying your successes in your own head hinders your ability to connect with confidence and to feel proud of what you've done. It stops the positive self-talk from happening.

You have to decide to let yourself feel proud of the things you do. You don’t have to tell people if you don't want to.  You don't have to associate feeling proud with bragging or being "obnoxious".  However, you DO have to find a way to feel the happy feelings on your own. And you do have to give yourself permission to feel proud inside. Giving yourself permission means really sitting there, feeling happy about what you've done, feeling relieved, feeling like you made progress and did something you set out to do. Really sit with those feelings. For as long as you can. You would be surprised if you knew how hard this is for most people to do. Practice the feelings you want to feel so that you can feel them more often.

How many of you have trouble feeling proud of yourself or what you’ve done in life? Practice these feelings so you can connect with the happy moments in life more when they show up.