Acknowledge Yourself
Posted on December 26, 2019 by Shraddha Attal, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Most of us base our performance in our day-to-day lives on how we are perceived by others at work and at home. Acknowledge yourself for who you are.
Most women that I have worked with have a pattern of thinking which primarily subscribes to external validation. Most of us base our performance in our day-to-day lives on how we are perceived by others at work and at home.
After a series of questions and conversations, I have realised it is how we are engineered to think and feel. We have been constantly looking for ways and means to fulfill some external conformational marker. It is not a conscious deliberated action. Seeking validation from people around us is more of a structure that we have developed behind everything that we do and say. Social media, obviously feeds this need of validation – from strangers no less!
This is an observation- I am not making any judgment here-yet! However, when this need for validation or acknowledgment does not get fulfilled, we tend to berate our own efforts which fuels discontentment. This is where my concern begins. When we regularly seek acknowledgement for what we say or do from others, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. I am yet to come across a woman who is satisfied with the appreciation she gets from people around her for the efforts she puts in. This dissatisfaction is well justified since external acknowledgment in the form of praise, appreciation or reciprocal action, is rare to come by. This leads to a spiral of disappointment and resentment- basically breeding negativity.
There is something very basic that one needs to do to create flip the spiral to a positive one. Acknowledge yourself. While this sounds very simplistic, it is something we rarely find ourselves doing. This is one of the most common action points for my clients dealing with the most tactical of challenges at work and at home.
We have been built somehow to downplay our achievements. We have also been time and again asked to “not blow our own trumpet”. A sum total of our bringing up, education, experiences and relationships unfortunately, bring us to rely more on external validation than on internal.
I strongly believe each one of us does things to the best of our capability at that given point in time. I also believe that there are often times that we are very good, much better than we anticipated ourselves to be. This is where we need to acknowledge ourselves. What we do, does not necessarily need to be something phenomenally exceptional. It can be an ordinary task done really well. Every single day, we achieve at least one such little goal. This is where we need to acknowledge ourselves.
Believe me, a constant reminder that we are doing our best is therapeutic. It makes a shift within you to think from a perspective where you are focusing on your efforts rather than on the response it deserves from others. It calms your nerves and you accept the fact that you are doing your best without persistently worrying about getting an acknowledgement from others.
This is important to make any positive change in the way you are dealing with challenges. Think about it- we keep on expecting others to be acknowledge us, however we hardly ever do that for ourselves. It’s logically whopped!
So, next time you plan your day well and stick to it, give yourself a pat on the back. Or you create that recipe you have been trying for a while, sing a praise to yourself! Or finish a book, or a presentation you have been putting off, or even learn from a mistake you made, appreciate yourself. You get the drift right? Acknowledge yourself for who you are.
