Celebrating Yourself

Being able to appreciate and celebrate successes can have a huge positive impact on our sense of worth. Finding ways to celebrate yourself is a big part of that. Here we are going to look at how we celebrate ourselves so we know what options we like and also see if we can identify some new ones.

Please write a list of ways you, or family or friends have celebrated themselves. Include what you liked about that style. These can be big things like throwing a party or small things like pausing to watch a sunset. Partly it is just things you can do to enjoy the moment but we want to remember that celebrating ourself can be about rewarding our hard work or choices that helped us get something we want.

Examples:

-My friend always has coffee in the morning on weekends to celebrate that they are off work.

-After graduation my cousin had a small party with her friends.

-When my aunt finished her craft project she presented it to us all and we clapped and cheered.

-I treated myself to my favorite dinner last week after sticking to my goal of tidying the living room every day for a week straight.

-My kids and I all yelled, "Wohoo!" and danced a little after we finished the dishes.

List examples of how I have celebrated or how I have seen others celebrate something:

Are there any people in your life who are really good at celebrating themselves? Might you want to ask them about it?

Are there any things that are coming up in the near future that I want to celebrate? What way might I choose?

How would you want the celebration to feel? Happy, relaxed, peaceful, loud and boisterous?

Changing our focus

Please go back and read over what you wrote. Notice the positive feelings as they are there. You can keep or get rid of the writing, totally your choice. Now please write a bit about your favorite type of weather. What do you enjoy about it? What parts do you appreciate the most? Does your travel or commute change very much during that weather? How long until you expect to get to enjoy your favorite weather again? Did you always enjoy it or did it change with age?

Remember, the point of changing our focus after the original writing is to shift to something that might feel neutral or easy to focus on. That practice is really good to have so we can do it more in life when things come up that can be stressful.