If your conversations on Thanksgiving were anything like mine, you probably got the question, “So, what’s new?” to which, if you’re like me, you answered something like, “Not much,” or “Oh, you know, same old same old. Work. Yoga. Wine. Parking tickets.” While there are so many reasons why we tend to keep answers like this superficial, one of them might have to do with the fact that listing off all the cool sh** we’ve been up to feels like an overshare.
My teacher Erin recently pointed out that one thing humans generally suck at is celebrating each other (and ourselves). I mean, I know very little about sports, but I do know that we literally have penalties for excessive celebration. The truth is, we have a basic human need to celebrate our accomplishments. Your growth is worthy of acknowledgement- or, dare I say, praise! Let a gal do a celebratory moonwalk across a soccer field every now and then, will ya?
It can be tempting to charge through life at full speed, especially now as we work to close out the year. But, if we can somehow press pause, and take stock of everything we’ve built for ourselves, now is a damn good time for that. We’ve got about thirty more days in 2019; after that, it’s time for vision boarding, goal setting, and attempting Whole 30 again.
We’re socialized to be humble, put our nose to the grindstone and keep pushing ourselves to do more, and do better. Keep climbing. But, if you’re a Words of Affirmation person like me, you might be spending some mental energy wanting recognition, willing your friends and family to note your accomplishments all on their own. This can be tricky, of course, given that people aren’t mind readers. I invite you to try a new approach. Tell them! Tell them explicitly that you have news worth celebrating. Tell them explicitly that it’d mean a lot to you if they were to join in on the excitement. You’ve been to enough Game of Thrones viewing parties & National Margarita Day happy hours to know that people are looking for reasons to celebrate. So why not give them a good one? You!
We’re fixers- our brains naturally default to the areas of growth. And while it can be so easy to reflect on the things we wish we’d done and the things that didn’t work out as we’d hoped, my offering to you is this: Set the self-improvement thing down and come back to it later. What have you been up to that’s worthy of that dance party or moonwalk? Start there, and give yourself the celebration you deserve. That could look like so many things- anything from meditating on all that good juju, to writing down a list of your proudest accomplishments in your journal, to calling your mom/sister/significant other and telling them what you’re proud of, to dancing around your bedroom in your underwear blasting Robyn (or as I call this, Saturday).
Go on. Get down with your bad self.