104. Rest Rewind: The Pride Jar
Here is the last episode of my Rest Rewind series where I bring up some of the most impactful episodes from the archive to celebrate the milestone of sharing 100 podcasts and for the final episode, we’re talking about pride. Pride in the small areas as well as the great is so important. It's time to celebrate our prideful moments as we work toward achieving our goals.
Cultivating pride is a journey, sometimes it comes easily and other days it may feel hard. Upon reflection, you may notice areas of your life where you generate lots of pride and areas with less.
This week I introduce an exercise I use called The Pride Jar, which encourages us to identify our areas of pride and reflect, celebrate, and honor our present experience. I share how powerful this practice is and how it has transformed my life, and teach you all about this simple yet transformative activity of cultivating pride.
If you’re not as happy as you want to be, feel like you’ve lost your purpose, or want to have more free time and feel less overwhelmed, I can help. My one-on-one coaching program is about to open up, and it is designed to help women just like you change the way you currently feel in your life. Meeting with me one-on-one every week for 12 weeks will help you trust yourself, feel confident in your decisions, and get your time back without hindering your career. It will change everything. Click here to sign up for the waitlist or join the program now.
If you want to take this work deeper and learn the tools and skills to feel better, all while having my support and guidance each step of the way, I invite you to set up a time to chat with me. Click here to grab a spot on my calendar, and I can’t wait to speak to you!
What You Will Discover:
What the Pride Jar is and how to use it.
How to build off of prideful moments.
Methods to cultivate the skill of being proud so that it becomes natural.
How to identify prideful areas in your life and the importance of looking at the themes.
How to allow emotions to flow through you.
A series of questions to assess your 30-day Pride Jar experience.
Resources:
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out if individual coaching can help you!
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Questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you! Email me at info@mckoolcoaching.com
Join my weekly mailing list to get bonus free resources and coaching opportunities!
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
What is up, you all? Today is the last episode in the Rest Rewind series. I hope you have been listening every single week and practicing implementing the tools I’m giving you or the thought prompts I’m giving you. If this is your first episode you’re jumping in towards the end and that’s okay. We are celebrating the milestone of hitting 100 podcast episodes on the Redefining Rest Podcast.
And starting with the 100th episode through this one each week we have been giving out tools, tasks, thought prompts you can take on your own and implement to feel better, have less stress, create more time and get rest. And this week is no different. Truly it’s funny because this week the episode we’re bringing back from the archives that you all might have missed because it was towards the beginning of starting this podcast, it’s called The Pride Jar. It’s an activity I created.
And the original episode which you’ll hear today I recorded about two years ago. And I just relistened to it and it’s so fascinating to see how far I have grown and I have come since recording this episode. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. In the episode you’re about to hear I describe to you an activity called the pride jar and I really prompt you and encourage you to do it and I truly want you to. And in the episode I share with you, my experience doing the pride jar activity myself two years ago.
And here I am two years later listening to that and I can tell you, all of the transformations I have made and changes since then really, really kicked off and were jump started by doing this pride jar activity. It’s so fascinating when I listen back, some of the things you’ll hear me mention in the episode that came up during the pride jar activity, were feeling proud about getting my to-do’s done and allowing emotions. And truly now my brain has zero drama about getting my to-do’s done.
And really my anxiety has almost zero drama about allowing my anxiety. I have come so far in my pride journey with that. And now one of the things this activity prompts you to do and again, you’ll learn how to do it in the episode, now I don’t have to consciously think about what am I proud of. It’s so natural. At the end of almost every day my brain naturally says what I’m proud of. Me and my partner will be like, “How was your day? What did you do?” I always without even consciously having to think about it say something I’m proud of.
I’m proud of going to that workout class. I’m really proud I got my course completed. I’m really proud I took the afternoon off. Every single day, at least one if not multiple sentences that’s starting with I’m proud of come out of my mouth. And I truly believe it and think it. That is how powerful this activity is. So I really, really want you to listen to this episode with the intent to put this activity into practice because it will change your life. It is so, so important and so valuable. So with that let’s get into it.
Well, hello there, fancy meeting you here. I am so happy you’re joining me. I know, I say that every week, but I truly do feel it every week. I'm so grateful. So excited you are all finding this so helpful. And that is my ultimate goal. And I feel like we're friends. Is that weird? I hope we are.
So this episode is going to be short and sweet, I hope. Last week we talked about the feeling of pride. I shared what we're socialized to think about the feeling of pride, what the feeling of pride actually is and why you should create the feeling of pride in yourself more often. This week I'm sharing an activity that you can do to generate, to start to generate more pride in yourself. I call this tool the pride jar. And it's a tool that allows you and your brain to start building the skill of generating pride in yourself and the feeling of pride or being proud of yourself.
When our brains have been thinking, we can only feel proud when we accomplish something big, it's hard to go straight to believing we can feel proud of going for a 10 minute walk at lunch. When our brains have been believing, we can't feel proud unless other people think we did something worthy, it's a far jump to start believing we can feel proud of ourselves even if our family disapproves of a decision we make. We have to build the skills of thinking thoughts that generate pride, believing we can feel pride about anything and allowing the feeling of pride to exist.
This activity will help you do that. I'm going to explain the activity first. It's very, very simple. And then I'm going to share my reflections from when I did this myself recently. So the steps. Get a jar, just an empty and clean Mason jar, peanut butter jar, salsa jar, anything. In fact, you could get any sort of vessel, a mug, any sort of vessel that you can put small pieces of paper in. And what I like to do is take a piece of paper and write ‘pride jar’ in large block letters and tape it on the outside of the jar.
And once you have your jar, put it somewhere where you'll see it very easily every day and not skip over it. And for me, that was my desk where I worked every day. And then each day, write down one thing you're proud of, one thing you're proud of, of yourself, what you did, what you didn't do, what you said, how you showed up. And put it on paper and put it in the jar. Tear off some scrap paper, write it down, fold it, put it into the jar. And do this for 30 days, 30 notes about pride, being proud of yourself.
So let's talk a little bit about the 30 days. You do not have to do it all at the same time every day. Meaning you don't have to do it every single morning. Maybe one day you do it at night. Maybe one day you do it in the morning. Maybe one day you do it right after you noticed you were proud of yourself. If you forget one day, that's okay. Think back to the day that you forgot and decide what you were proud of that day. It's not about perfection. You're going to forget some days.
You're not going to do it all at the same time every day and that's okay. And how I know this, is that this all happened to me too. It's about progress. For some of you, doing this for the first week is going to be the most challenging part of this activity. Because you have denied yourself the privilege of being proud of yourself for so long, especially for any reason, like any reason to be proud of yourself.
Your brain is going to think you can't do it. You don't have anything to be proud of. It's stupid. It's not important. And any other thought your brain has to get you not to do it. Don't listen to your brain. I repeat, don't listen. Those thoughts can be there but take the action and do the activity anyway. For some of you, there will be certain days that are the most challenging. Days that went like shit, days you felt like shit, days you were really mean to yourself, days that just seemed like everything went wrong. But I promise you, there is something on that day to find that you were proud of, proud of yourself for.
And lastly, it doesn't have to be a huge accomplishment that you're proud of, which I actually recommend that your goal is to find small things to be proud of. And you don't have to feel over the moon excited. You haven't built that skill to feel pride to that capacity. It can be writing down, I'm proud of myself for following through on this exact activity when I really didn't want to. It can be, I'm proud of myself for brushing my teeth this morning even if you do that every morning. It can be, I'm proud of myself for taking my dog on her walk, even when I did not want to, anything.
So at the end of the 30 days, I want you to pull out all the notes and read them. And I'm going to share some general questions now that you can ask yourself as you go through. And at the end I'll share some more specific questions you can ask, to build up your reflections. But how has your experience of pride changed? How has it gotten easier or harder? Are there themes in which you allow yourself to be proud and areas which you had a harder time with? How are you feeling, reading all the things you said you were proud of over the course of 30 days?
This activity, this tool will help your brain develop the skill of being proud. So my experience, many months ago I did this exact activity, the only difference is I did it for 60 days. And I did it for that long because through coaching I’ve already learned how to generate so much pride in myself. So for me, I wanted to level that up and do it for two months. I highly recommend that all of you start with 30 days because that is going to be a challenge in and of itself for your brain that you’re going to be working through.
And I assigned several of my clients similar activities. Their results are amazing. They get so much out of it, it’s so fascinating. And I find that when I do it for myself too and you’re going to find that. And for me, just like it will be for you, it wasn’t easy every day. Some days I didn’t feel like it. Some days I forgot. Some days I truly thought I had nothing to be proud of, but also just like you’re going to experience, some days I was excited to write something. Some days I had more than one thing to write. Other days I couldn’t wait to put my comment in the jar.
Life is 50/50, it’s going to be the same thing with this activity. Here are the reflections and themes around my results from doing this activity. And what I did was I pulled out all my notes, I read them and then I put them in piles. So what were the common themes? If I noted a few different days, I had similar things I was proud of, they'd all go in a pile. And then I would see, okay, what's the theme for each pile and how many days did I feel proud about that?
And so I could see in which order in one area where I felt the most proud of, the most often, I should say, and other areas where I felt proud, but maybe not as many days, not as often. So the number one topic, life area it generated pride in, the most days I generated pride in was getting my work and to-do’s done. Sometimes I wrote I was proud of not doing something and recognizing [inaudible]. Other times I wrote I was proud of doing something even when I didn’t want to and I did it anyways.
Some days I wrote I was proud of getting everything done and other days I wrote I was proud of getting one out of five things done. I felt proud of getting something done I had been putting off for months. I also felt proud of doing something even when it took me way longer than expected. And part of my brain was really frustrated with that. I still found pride in that I stuck it out. For me this was a huge win. Three years ago this would have been my last area, honestly it probably wouldn’t have even made it on the list. I’ve made so much progress here and I still have more to work on.
The second was allowing feelings. I had a lot of days where I felt proud of myself specifically for allowing my anxiety, which anxiety is one of my main feelings, my go-to. I've had anxiety and experienced it my whole life. So this wasn't necessarily a surprise to me because I've seen my relationship with my anxiety improve so much. But what's exciting about it is what I saw is, I am more comfortable with my anxiety. I accept it more. I don't resist it. I don't make it mean I'm a terrible person and something's wrong with me. I'm okay with it. And that was great to see.
The third one was a surprise. It was being honest. Some days I wrote comments about being proud of myself for being honest with people, whether my partner about something bothering me or with my clients about what I saw going on with them, being really clear and direct on something they really needed to address.
And I was surprised because, not that I don't find myself an honest person, I definitely am an honest person, but because I don't often acknowledge some conversations are hard and having them anyways because I love myself and I love the other person, that is something to be proud of. So I was so glad to see that I'm acknowledging that.
The fourth was doing my daily self-coaching. The fifth was achieving some of my goals I had. And the sixth was allowing other people to have their feelings. Just a quick note on allowing other people to have their feelings. What this was for me, was not reacting to family or my partner or friends' emotions, not trying to fix their emotions, not getting upset at them for having emotions. It was just letting them have their experience, holding space for that.
Here are some other reflections I took away after seeing my results when I asked myself some more detailed pronging reflection questions. And when you do this part, I really encourage you to write it down. So I wrote down these questions that I'll share with you at the end, and then my answers. And I just really reflected on paper.
So what I noticed specifically related to pride in my getting my to-do list done and achieving goals was well, one, we often think we need to reserve our pride for when we achieve our goals. But in my experience and what I've learned, and this is reflected in my pride jar results, is that in order to get our goals, get to them, to achieve them, we actually have to allow ourselves to feel way more pride and pride more often along the way, in our daily actions we take to get to our goals.
Pride in my to-do list and getting work done was number one in these results. Meaning of all the days I did this activity, the most days I noted being proud in an area was getting things done, adjusting my to-do list, following through, compared to achieving my goals, which was number five. This is because in order to keep momentum on my goals, in order to keep working on them, to get to them, I have to feel proud of the work I'm putting in there because there are going to be days I don't want to do it.
There are going to be days where I think I'm not good enough or I'll never get there. And if I'm not proud of the consistent action I'm taking every day, I'm not going to move myself towards that goal. That's why I think it's so amazing that pride in my to-do list and doing those things came up first. And I am, of course, glad I was proud of my accomplishments and getting to my goals. But the only reason I can feel proud and even get there is because I have felt proud of myself along the way.
So the bigger goals I set, the more pride I want to create in the actions I'm taking to get there, in the small things like replying to emails, following my calendar, doing my self-coaching, all of those things.
The next reflection I had was around feeling pride in yourself in a specific area where you also have other maybe negative thoughts about that area and still have some work to do. So again, this was with my to-do list. Even though that was number one for me, my brain constantly criticizes how much I'm doing, what I am doing, what I'm not doing, I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that, all the time weekly. And a lot of times I allow that to be there. It's just noise and I move forward.
Sometimes I coach on it and sometimes I get caught up in it. And so this really was, yeah, it's the number one place I generate pride. But I still have a lot of mental drama and I'm still mean to myself a lot of the time. They can both exist. I can have a lot of thoughts that create pride and I can still have my old thought patterns that create judgment and shame. There can be a space where you acknowledge and are proud of how far you've come and what you're doing. And notice your brain is still programmed against that and that's part of the process and that's okay.
And my last reflection is I love that allowing feelings has become so high on my list, number two because I see the value in that. For me being proud of allowing feelings means I allow more feelings which means instead of holding on, resisting and bottling things up I allow them to flow through me in a healthy way. That allows me to keep moving through life to my goals. The more I’m able to allow my anxiety and accept it and not resist it, the more I’m able to allow my joy and not resist it and not judge it, the more capacity I have for all emotions.
So to end, I want to share some of the other more detailed questions I asked myself that got to me these reflections I shared with you today so you can ask yourself at the end of your 30 days of this activity. The questions were, of the areas that landed on your list or that didn’t, where do you want to feel more proud? What were you surprised by on your list? What areas are you still really hard on yourself for even if you feel pride in that area sometimes or even a lot?
What did you notice about the process? What was the most challenging? How was this tool useful? What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about your brain? How did it feel to create pride for yourself and feel it? What would be different if you generated more pride regularly? How can you take this practice forward?
So that’s what I have for you today. If you implement this tool and try this 30 day challenge out I would love, love to hear how it went for you. So after 30 days let me know. Send me a direct message on Instagram or email me. Thanks for tuning in, can’t wait to hear what you generate with your pride jar. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
What is up, you all? Today is the last episode in the Rest Rewind series. I hope you have been listening every single week and practicing implementing the tools I’m giving you or the thought prompts I’m giving you. If this is your first episode you’re jumping in towards the end and that’s okay. We are celebrating the milestone of hitting 100 podcast episodes on the Redefining Rest Podcast.
And starting with the 100th episode through this one each week we have been giving out tools, tasks, thought prompts you can take on your own and implement to feel better, have less stress, create more time and get rest. And this week is no different. Truly it’s funny because this week the episode we’re bringing back from the archives that you all might have missed because it was towards the beginning of starting this podcast, it’s called The Pride Jar. It’s an activity I created.
And the original episode which you’ll hear today I recorded about two years ago. And I just relistened to it and it’s so fascinating to see how far I have grown and I have come since recording this episode. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. In the episode you’re about to hear I describe to you an activity called the pride jar and I really prompt you and encourage you to do it and I truly want you to. And in the episode I share with you, my experience doing the pride jar activity myself two years ago.
And here I am two years later listening to that and I can tell you, all of the transformations I have made and changes since then really, really kicked off and were jump started by doing this pride jar activity. It’s so fascinating when I listen back, some of the things you’ll hear me mention in the episode that came up during the pride jar activity, were feeling proud about getting my to-do’s done and allowing emotions. And truly now my brain has zero drama about getting my to-do’s done.
And really my anxiety has almost zero drama about allowing my anxiety. I have come so far in my pride journey with that. And now one of the things this activity prompts you to do and again, you’ll learn how to do it in the episode, now I don’t have to consciously think about what am I proud of. It’s so natural. At the end of almost every day my brain naturally says what I’m proud of. Me and my partner will be like, “How was your day? What did you do?” I always without even consciously having to think about it say something I’m proud of.
I’m proud of going to that workout class. I’m really proud I got my course completed. I’m really proud I took the afternoon off. Every single day, at least one if not multiple sentences that’s starting with I’m proud of come out of my mouth. And I truly believe it and think it. That is how powerful this activity is. So I really, really want you to listen to this episode with the intent to put this activity into practice because it will change your life. It is so, so important and so valuable. So with that let’s get into it.
Well, hello there, fancy meeting you here. I am so happy you’re joining me. I know, I say that every week, but I truly do feel it every week. I'm so grateful. So excited you are all finding this so helpful. And that is my ultimate goal. And I feel like we're friends. Is that weird? I hope we are.
So this episode is going to be short and sweet, I hope. Last week we talked about the feeling of pride. I shared what we're socialized to think about the feeling of pride, what the feeling of pride actually is and why you should create the feeling of pride in yourself more often. This week I'm sharing an activity that you can do to generate, to start to generate more pride in yourself. I call this tool the pride jar. And it's a tool that allows you and your brain to start building the skill of generating pride in yourself and the feeling of pride or being proud of yourself.
When our brains have been thinking, we can only feel proud when we accomplish something big, it's hard to go straight to believing we can feel proud of going for a 10 minute walk at lunch. When our brains have been believing, we can't feel proud unless other people think we did something worthy, it's a far jump to start believing we can feel proud of ourselves even if our family disapproves of a decision we make. We have to build the skills of thinking thoughts that generate pride, believing we can feel pride about anything and allowing the feeling of pride to exist.
This activity will help you do that. I'm going to explain the activity first. It's very, very simple. And then I'm going to share my reflections from when I did this myself recently. So the steps. Get a jar, just an empty and clean Mason jar, peanut butter jar, salsa jar, anything. In fact, you could get any sort of vessel, a mug, any sort of vessel that you can put small pieces of paper in. And what I like to do is take a piece of paper and write ‘pride jar’ in large block letters and tape it on the outside of the jar.
And once you have your jar, put it somewhere where you'll see it very easily every day and not skip over it. And for me, that was my desk where I worked every day. And then each day, write down one thing you're proud of, one thing you're proud of, of yourself, what you did, what you didn't do, what you said, how you showed up. And put it on paper and put it in the jar. Tear off some scrap paper, write it down, fold it, put it into the jar. And do this for 30 days, 30 notes about pride, being proud of yourself.
So let's talk a little bit about the 30 days. You do not have to do it all at the same time every day. Meaning you don't have to do it every single morning. Maybe one day you do it at night. Maybe one day you do it in the morning. Maybe one day you do it right after you noticed you were proud of yourself. If you forget one day, that's okay. Think back to the day that you forgot and decide what you were proud of that day. It's not about perfection. You're going to forget some days.
You're not going to do it all at the same time every day and that's okay. And how I know this, is that this all happened to me too. It's about progress. For some of you, doing this for the first week is going to be the most challenging part of this activity. Because you have denied yourself the privilege of being proud of yourself for so long, especially for any reason, like any reason to be proud of yourself.
Your brain is going to think you can't do it. You don't have anything to be proud of. It's stupid. It's not important. And any other thought your brain has to get you not to do it. Don't listen to your brain. I repeat, don't listen. Those thoughts can be there but take the action and do the activity anyway. For some of you, there will be certain days that are the most challenging. Days that went like shit, days you felt like shit, days you were really mean to yourself, days that just seemed like everything went wrong. But I promise you, there is something on that day to find that you were proud of, proud of yourself for.
And lastly, it doesn't have to be a huge accomplishment that you're proud of, which I actually recommend that your goal is to find small things to be proud of. And you don't have to feel over the moon excited. You haven't built that skill to feel pride to that capacity. It can be writing down, I'm proud of myself for following through on this exact activity when I really didn't want to. It can be, I'm proud of myself for brushing my teeth this morning even if you do that every morning. It can be, I'm proud of myself for taking my dog on her walk, even when I did not want to, anything.
So at the end of the 30 days, I want you to pull out all the notes and read them. And I'm going to share some general questions now that you can ask yourself as you go through. And at the end I'll share some more specific questions you can ask, to build up your reflections. But how has your experience of pride changed? How has it gotten easier or harder? Are there themes in which you allow yourself to be proud and areas which you had a harder time with? How are you feeling, reading all the things you said you were proud of over the course of 30 days?
This activity, this tool will help your brain develop the skill of being proud. So my experience, many months ago I did this exact activity, the only difference is I did it for 60 days. And I did it for that long because through coaching I’ve already learned how to generate so much pride in myself. So for me, I wanted to level that up and do it for two months. I highly recommend that all of you start with 30 days because that is going to be a challenge in and of itself for your brain that you’re going to be working through.
And I assigned several of my clients similar activities. Their results are amazing. They get so much out of it, it’s so fascinating. And I find that when I do it for myself too and you’re going to find that. And for me, just like it will be for you, it wasn’t easy every day. Some days I didn’t feel like it. Some days I forgot. Some days I truly thought I had nothing to be proud of, but also just like you’re going to experience, some days I was excited to write something. Some days I had more than one thing to write. Other days I couldn’t wait to put my comment in the jar.
Life is 50/50, it’s going to be the same thing with this activity. Here are the reflections and themes around my results from doing this activity. And what I did was I pulled out all my notes, I read them and then I put them in piles. So what were the common themes? If I noted a few different days, I had similar things I was proud of, they'd all go in a pile. And then I would see, okay, what's the theme for each pile and how many days did I feel proud about that?
And so I could see in which order in one area where I felt the most proud of, the most often, I should say, and other areas where I felt proud, but maybe not as many days, not as often. So the number one topic, life area it generated pride in, the most days I generated pride in was getting my work and to-do’s done. Sometimes I wrote I was proud of not doing something and recognizing [inaudible]. Other times I wrote I was proud of doing something even when I didn’t want to and I did it anyways.
Some days I wrote I was proud of getting everything done and other days I wrote I was proud of getting one out of five things done. I felt proud of getting something done I had been putting off for months. I also felt proud of doing something even when it took me way longer than expected. And part of my brain was really frustrated with that. I still found pride in that I stuck it out. For me this was a huge win. Three years ago this would have been my last area, honestly it probably wouldn’t have even made it on the list. I’ve made so much progress here and I still have more to work on.
The second was allowing feelings. I had a lot of days where I felt proud of myself specifically for allowing my anxiety, which anxiety is one of my main feelings, my go-to. I've had anxiety and experienced it my whole life. So this wasn't necessarily a surprise to me because I've seen my relationship with my anxiety improve so much. But what's exciting about it is what I saw is, I am more comfortable with my anxiety. I accept it more. I don't resist it. I don't make it mean I'm a terrible person and something's wrong with me. I'm okay with it. And that was great to see.
The third one was a surprise. It was being honest. Some days I wrote comments about being proud of myself for being honest with people, whether my partner about something bothering me or with my clients about what I saw going on with them, being really clear and direct on something they really needed to address.
And I was surprised because, not that I don't find myself an honest person, I definitely am an honest person, but because I don't often acknowledge some conversations are hard and having them anyways because I love myself and I love the other person, that is something to be proud of. So I was so glad to see that I'm acknowledging that.
The fourth was doing my daily self-coaching. The fifth was achieving some of my goals I had. And the sixth was allowing other people to have their feelings. Just a quick note on allowing other people to have their feelings. What this was for me, was not reacting to family or my partner or friends' emotions, not trying to fix their emotions, not getting upset at them for having emotions. It was just letting them have their experience, holding space for that.
Here are some other reflections I took away after seeing my results when I asked myself some more detailed pronging reflection questions. And when you do this part, I really encourage you to write it down. So I wrote down these questions that I'll share with you at the end, and then my answers. And I just really reflected on paper.
So what I noticed specifically related to pride in my getting my to-do list done and achieving goals was well, one, we often think we need to reserve our pride for when we achieve our goals. But in my experience and what I've learned, and this is reflected in my pride jar results, is that in order to get our goals, get to them, to achieve them, we actually have to allow ourselves to feel way more pride and pride more often along the way, in our daily actions we take to get to our goals.
Pride in my to-do list and getting work done was number one in these results. Meaning of all the days I did this activity, the most days I noted being proud in an area was getting things done, adjusting my to-do list, following through, compared to achieving my goals, which was number five. This is because in order to keep momentum on my goals, in order to keep working on them, to get to them, I have to feel proud of the work I'm putting in there because there are going to be days I don't want to do it.
There are going to be days where I think I'm not good enough or I'll never get there. And if I'm not proud of the consistent action I'm taking every day, I'm not going to move myself towards that goal. That's why I think it's so amazing that pride in my to-do list and doing those things came up first. And I am, of course, glad I was proud of my accomplishments and getting to my goals. But the only reason I can feel proud and even get there is because I have felt proud of myself along the way.
So the bigger goals I set, the more pride I want to create in the actions I'm taking to get there, in the small things like replying to emails, following my calendar, doing my self-coaching, all of those things.
The next reflection I had was around feeling pride in yourself in a specific area where you also have other maybe negative thoughts about that area and still have some work to do. So again, this was with my to-do list. Even though that was number one for me, my brain constantly criticizes how much I'm doing, what I am doing, what I'm not doing, I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that, all the time weekly. And a lot of times I allow that to be there. It's just noise and I move forward.
Sometimes I coach on it and sometimes I get caught up in it. And so this really was, yeah, it's the number one place I generate pride. But I still have a lot of mental drama and I'm still mean to myself a lot of the time. They can both exist. I can have a lot of thoughts that create pride and I can still have my old thought patterns that create judgment and shame. There can be a space where you acknowledge and are proud of how far you've come and what you're doing. And notice your brain is still programmed against that and that's part of the process and that's okay.
And my last reflection is I love that allowing feelings has become so high on my list, number two because I see the value in that. For me being proud of allowing feelings means I allow more feelings which means instead of holding on, resisting and bottling things up I allow them to flow through me in a healthy way. That allows me to keep moving through life to my goals. The more I’m able to allow my anxiety and accept it and not resist it, the more I’m able to allow my joy and not resist it and not judge it, the more capacity I have for all emotions.
So to end, I want to share some of the other more detailed questions I asked myself that got to me these reflections I shared with you today so you can ask yourself at the end of your 30 days of this activity. The questions were, of the areas that landed on your list or that didn’t, where do you want to feel more proud? What were you surprised by on your list? What areas are you still really hard on yourself for even if you feel pride in that area sometimes or even a lot?
What did you notice about the process? What was the most challenging? How was this tool useful? What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about your brain? How did it feel to create pride for yourself and feel it? What would be different if you generated more pride regularly? How can you take this practice forward?
So that’s what I have for you today. If you implement this tool and try this 30 day challenge out I would love, love to hear how it went for you. So after 30 days let me know. Send me a direct message on Instagram or email me. Thanks for tuning in, can’t wait to hear what you generate with your pride jar. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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