I’m an Executive & Transformation Coach guiding leaders in clarifying their vision, clearing obstacles, and making a difference in the world without losing themselves.
Zette Harbour
CPC, ELI-MP, CBHC, NLP practioner
Certified Professional Coach, Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching
Certified Brain Health Coach, Amen University
Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner, Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching
Practitioner Neuro Linguistic Programming, Association for Integrative Psychology
Author of Love Lies Beneath: How reclaiming my Soul through Story became the secret to healing my Heart.
Why You Don’t Celebrate Yourself
You’ll have been given many thoughts about celebrating yourself from family, school, and culture. No doubt, you’ll have witnessed other people boasting about themselves and told yourself that would never be you.
Here are some more thoughts about why you’ll never be ‘that person’…
- You don’t want to seem vain or self-important
- What you accomplished isn’t that big of a deal
- You didn’t do it on your own and don’t want to take credit away from others
- You don’t want to make other people uncomfortable
- It wouldn’t be fair to point out your successes without also acknowledging the times you didn’t succeed
- You don’t think it’s a sign of a good leader to ‘toot your own horn’
These are just some of the stories you’ve been given and accepted as true. That’s not a surprise because early in life, collecting stories is how you figured out who you were and how you wanted to be. Because your ability to create and collect stories is almost always unconscious and automatic, it’s probably never occurred to you to examine all that’s gone into them.
In this case, your belief about celebrating yourself is tangled up with story threads of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. At first glance, you’d likely say that people who celebrate themselves are conceited and think they’re more important than others. In fact, the reverse is true. People who celebrate themselves are the polar opposite of someone who brags and boasts.
Evolved Leaders Celebrate Themselves
Being able to celebrate yourself is a powerful leadership skill as well as a key element to leading with self-love. Celebrating success is a quantum leap beyond the idea of being proud of what you’ve done. That’s because one essential ingredient of celebrating is a sense of gratefulness.
That thread of appreciation is what transforms bragging into celebrating. It sounds simple, yet it can be elusive for someone who hasn’t been initiated. That’s where you come in as a leader. It’s your job to not only celebrate your team but to model celebrating yourself.
When you understand and celebrate yourself, you’re less likely to make the mistake of inappropriate or excessive acknowledgment of your team members. You’ll have done the work of untangling your own stories around appropriate acknowledgment and appreciation. When you’ve created clarity within yourself, you’ll be able to create genuine moments of appreciation for others.
For instance, you’ll understand that when you celebrate yourself or another, you’re not giving praise or reward for a behavior you like. Doing that won’t have a feeling of genuineness and authenticity. And, it reinforces the belief that someone is only valuable for what they do.
True celebration includes the acknowledgment and appreciation of the person for who they are. This is where your own relationship to celebrating yourself plays an important role.
Read these two questions and rate how true they are for you on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is not at all. 10 is 100%, absolutely!
This is like taking your temperature. It’s only helpful if the reading is accurate, so let yourself circle the number that feels most true in this moment.
I’m most successful when I’ve made others happy or done what’s expected.
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10
If I do acknowledge myself, it’s for something I’ve done.
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10
If your rating was above a 5 for either statement, you have some inner clutter and no matter how you behave on the outside, these intrinsic beliefs will be echoed in your actions toward others.
The Value Of Celebrating Yourself
Much like creating healthy soil that naturally makes it possible for a tree to thrive, celebrating yourself creates benefits for everyone in your ecosystem. When you clear what’s in your way of celebrating yourself, you’ll…
- Increase trust
- Improve productivity
- Enhance communication
When you have a personal and clarified experience of what celebrating yourself is, you’ll easily value applying it to your many relationships. And, you’ll be genuine in how you do it.
If you feel resistance to the idea of celebrating yourself, you likely have a tangled story. Those unconscious beliefs can be untangled so you can thrive and become the leader you want to be.
I’m here to help. Reach out for a chat and get your questions answered. Discover how leading with self-love is vital to making your vision of the world a reality.