36. Why we should be more proud of ourselves (and how to do it)

Lots of people struggle to feel proud of themselves, even when on paper they look really successful. In this episode, I talk about why this is, why it can cause problems and how to develop a habit of being more proud of yourself. 

Find the transcript at www.thephdlifecoach.com/podcast

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 36 of the PhD Life coach. First of all, I want to address last week's podcast. So last week was probably the most personal podcast that I've released so far. I was talking about the story of me doing my PhD, and quite a few of you have reached out to me to say how much you appreciated hearing the way that it was a lot of circumstantial stuff that made it easier for me to finish more quickly and how that made you feel better about the fact that things were taking longer for you when you didn't have that stuff in place.

I'm really glad to hear that many of you found that useful. I have also heard people say as well though, that it made them feel a bit sad because it made them think about how their experience could have been different and how they wished it had been a bit more like that.

I just wanted to say that's okay. It's okay to feel sad that things could have been different. Often when we do coaching, people think that we're going to make all the negative thoughts go away and that we're going to focus on positive things, focus on being happy all the time and all of these things and that is absolutely not the intention of coaching. 

What I would encourage you to do instead is give some space for that sadness and disappointment. Maybe some of you're in an academic career looking back at your PhD experience or looking at your current academic experience and thinking it's not like that. It's okay to be sad and disappointed about that. 

We can choose in time to focus on different thoughts, other thoughts that you think are true, if you find that feeling sad and disappointed about it is preventing you from moving on and appreciating the things you do have, but we don't have to make it go away straight away. Let's accept the emotions that come up. Sit with them a while. And then figure out where do we want to go from here? Knowing that the situation is as it is, what thoughts do you want to have? What thoughts do you want to spend more time focusing on? And how can we move forwards from there? And the first thing I'm going to recommend, and the topic of this episode, is thinking about ways that you can feel proud of yourself.

I tried really hard in last week's episode to make it clear that even though I was saying that there was a whole bunch of circumstances that made my PhD be a lot easier than it is for a lot of people, that I was still proud of the work that I'd done, and I was still proud of the effort that I'd put in.

And as I coach people, the more it strikes me that people really struggle with taking pride in themselves. I often ask people after they've had an achievement or something, have you taken a moment to be proud of yourself?

The answer is almost always no. And when I ask people what are they proud of about themselves, they usually have an answer, but they usually also make it clear that they haven't thought about this very much and that nobody's asked them that in a really long time.

So in this episode, we're going to think about why it's understandable that you might struggle to take pride in yourself at the moment. Why not taking pride in the things that we do can cause problems and some tips for how you can start incorporating more of this in your life.

So why don't we do this anyway? Well, I think the first thing is we're told from a really, really young age not to boast that we shouldn't be bigheaded. We shouldn't tell other people what we are good at or they won't want to spend time with us or people won't like us. 

And so I think sometimes it is simply that we don't want other people to think that we're arrogant and overconfident or not as good as we think we are. That's what we fear, isn't it? That we'll be proud of ourselves and somebody else will be like, yeah, you are not that good.

Often it's really about managing the thoughts of others and the expectations of others. And that's not something we should beat ourselves up about. You know, we're socialized into this environment where we're told, particularly if we identify and present as female or if we are a part of other minorities, ethnic minorities, for example. Society really tells us not to be above our station, not to make ourselves selves seem bigheaded and it's not surprising that we've internalized some of that.

I also see, particularly in high achieving people like you lot, a belief that it's cause you've beaten yourself up that you've achieved what you've achieved. So often people that are doing PhDs or are further along in their academic careers believe that if they start being proud of what they've done, then somehow they'll take their foot off the gas. They won't push on to achieve things anymore because they'll be sitting around being proud and complacent. 

I also have clients tell me that because they know what happened under the surface, that they don't feel they deserve to be proud. So this is people who have achieved something but they only handed in at the last minute, or they've achieved something, but they did forget to say some of the things that they intended to say. You know, there's always those little caveats underneath that mean “Yeah, but I'm not really proud cuz actually this is the true story”. Have you heard yourself telling yourself that? It's something I hear a lot from my clients. 

There's also a bit of a belief that by saying that you are good at something, you are saying that you are better than others. That in some way, you being proud of something you've achieved puts down other people. So we sort of tell ourselves that we can't be proud of something because in some way that's being negative to other people. 

The final reason that I see is that we know we still weren't the best we could be. I can't be proud of that because it only got published in that journal and not this other journal that I wanted it to be. I can't be proud of that because it was okay, but I want it to be a bit smoother next time. I'm not going to be proud of that because I still haven't got the next promotion or whatever it is. So we see the next steps that we haven't achieved yet and think that that's a reason not to be proud of what we've done so far.

If  you think any of those things - totally normal, this is the society that we've been socialized into, it's the messages we hear all the time, and no one teaches us how to be proud of ourselves. So if you are feeling like, “yeah, I, I think all of these things or some of these things,” then welcome to the world. These are things that my clients are saying all the time, and it's something that I have heard myself say too. 

If you are not saying these things, I also want you to keep listening. So I've got a really interesting piece of feedback on a workshop I did recently where we were talking about how to write when you're struggling to write. And so I had made an assumption that people who were at a workshop called How to Write When You're Struggling to Write, were struggling to write. And so I really focused the workshop on what are you struggling with? How can we overcome those things? And really working from that perspective and this person in their really useful feedback said, “for those of us who weren't struggling to write at the moment, it felt like there wasn't anything for us, and it would've been really useful to hear more about how we can take the things that we do well and do it more.”

I think it's such an important point. Some of you might remember that I did a podcast episode with Professor Jenn Cumming back in December time about reviewing your year in a strengths-based way. I'm a real proponent of building on your strengths. It wasn't something that I had built into that workshop because of who I thought the target audience was, but I am going to be in future because I think it's such an important point.

In this context, I could make the assumption that you've only clicked on this podcast because you struggle to feel proud of yourself, but I know there's some of you who just listen to this every week regardless. So if actually you do find it easy to be proud of yourself all the way through, I want you to be thinking, why? What am I thinking that makes it okay for me to be proud of myself? How can I do that more? How can I make the most of those strengths? 

So, those are all the reasons I can think of why people don't do it already, but why is it a problem? Why does it matter whether we're proud of ourselves or not? Well, the first thing is, that when we're never proud of ourselves, we never reached the good bit. I have seen throughout my career, people always saying that they're going to be happy when they get to the next stage, and then they get to the next stage and immediately think of the next thing. 

I have had clients who have come to me because they want to get promoted, they want to get grants. They get those promotions, they get their grants, and in the next session they are literally like, “right next grant, next promotion, let's go.” And I say, “well, hang on. Are we going to take a minute to think about the fact that you've achieved the thing that you wanted to achieve?”

It usually hasn't crossed their mind that there's any purpose in doing so. The problem is, what it means is we never reach that point where everything feels good. We don't create it for ourselves. We never reach that point. So let's start creating that bit where we feel good more often all the way through this process.

The other thing I've seen is people being really reliant on external praise. When we never praise ourselves, when we're never proud of ourselves, we become really reliant on other people telling us we're good. And that can lead to people pleasing. It can lead to getting far too many qualifications. It can lead to to valuing the opinions of people that we don't necessarily even value the opinion of that much, but we want to please them because we want to get praised. 

If we can figure out how to be proud of ourselves, then we don't need to have quite as much external validation, and suddenly we're so much more in control of the things we do and the goals we try and achieve. 

When we're not proud of ourselves, we also accept unacceptable things from other people. So if we think we are not good at what we do, we accept it when other people tell us that. If we think we haven't done enough, we take on unreasonable workloads. 

When we also lack pride in ourselves and in our achievements and efforts, we also don't reinforce behaviors that we want to reinforce. So imagine you've just finished a hard day's work, one of those days where you get loads of stuff done and you know things are good. You could, and my clients often do, end those days going, “yeah, but I still didn't do that other thing. Okay, yeah. But now I need to do that every day.” And just generally sort of underplaying what they did.

It's far less natural and far less sort of habitual to end the day going “I am so pleased that even though that was feeling tough, I got on with it. I'm so pleased that I focused in on that thing that's really important instead of getting distracted by emails and stuff, I think I made some really good choices today.”

We end up in this situation or at the end of the day, even when we've had really good days, we don't get positive reinforcement. There's no sort of incentive to have those good days again, other than this sort of added pressure to ourselves where we've like upped our maximal performance. We've made it so that now we have to that every day in order to succeed.

And we know with children, if you want a child to repeat behaviour, you're going to give them attention. You're going to give them praise for it. And that's not telling them they're the best thing in the world, aren't they wonderful little Billy, whatever. I don't mean that, but if we want kids to tidy their bedrooms, we thank them when they tidy their bedrooms, we tell them that we appreciate it. We can do the same thing to ourselves to incentivize ourselves to take the same behaviors again in the future.

When we don't praise ourselves, we also just end up with a complete imbalance between the negative and positive voices in our head. If I asked you, what was the last time that you criticized yourself? What was the last time you felt like you should do more than you have or that you weren't good enough? I would take a bet that it was pretty recently.

We've done sessions before about how you can start to modify that voice in your head. But one way that's useful is instead of trying to make the negative thoughts go away, or alongside trying to reduce some of those, we can just pile in more good thoughts.

So it can be really hard to practice and learn to stop criticizing yourself, but it can be easier to consciously add in more positive, to add in more praise, to add in more pride, more self congratulations and those sorts of feelings and those sorts of thoughts, so that at least when we're criticizing ourselves, we are all also nice to ourselves as well. In due course, we'll try and work on bringing more compassion into the critical voice, but let's add the positive stuff at least in the meantime. 

Hopefully you can see, and hopefully I've convinced you that it would be brilliant if we could all start to give ourselves a little bit more pride in ourselves, a little bit more pride in the efforts that we take and the things that we achieve.

But how do we do it? How do we do it when that feels uncomfortable to lots of you, when it doesn't feel habitual? Well, as usual, there's a bunch of approaches that you can take. These won't necessarily come naturally immediately, but as usual, we get to just practice them. We get to introduce them a little bit, try it out, see how it feels.

The first one is for people who are really uncomfortable with this feeling of pride. That's still part of your sort of inner beliefs are that being proud of something is somehow comparing yourself and saying, you're better to other people. We can recognize those beliefs and yeah, I can argue against them, but sometimes we just go, okay, yeah, I believe that. Let's go in easier route. Let's rename this.

Sometimes when we see that we have a kind of longstanding belief that we just don't like the word pride, we can try and change that over a period of time with coaching or therapy or whatever it is. Or we could just call this something else. So one thing I'd like to offer is that you could call this giving yourself credit for what you do.

If feeling proud of yourself feels like it's too far away, Okay! Let's give ourselves credit for what we do instead, and let's conceptualize it as giving ourselves credit. You could pick a different way of describing it if you want to, but it's a lot easier to try and change our behaviour if there's not something about the particular word or concept that gives us real resistance or gives us the ick. It's just easier. Let's change it. We're giving ourselves credit for what we do. 

I want you to also remind yourself why we want to be proud, and I've just gone through all the reasons. Come up with your own as well. Come up with why it's important for you. Some of you might want to set a good example to your kids or to your students. There's a whole load of different reasons why this is important to you - try and remember those when you're trying to build this habit.

When you're trying to think about what to be proud of, really try and focus in on the process. Often we think we can only be proud when we've achieved something. People sometimes have a brief glimmer of pride when they submit a paper or when they get good comments on their draft or they do a presentation and it goes out well, all of those things. But those are very outcome focused and we know that sometimes it's better to focus on the process because that's the bit that's really in our control.

So when you're thinking about things to be proud of, see if you can be proud of the effort you put into things. Be proud of the thoughts that you chose to think in order to get something done. The fact you did something that you thought was difficult, the fact that you agreed to take on something that you thought was scary. These are the sorts of process things that you can explicitly say to yourself and say out loud if it helps. 

I am really proud that I did this thing that scares me. I'm really proud that today I felt like procrastinating and I got on with it.

Or you can even be even less perfectionist about it. This is one I use a lot. I am really proud that when I was procrastinating today, I noticed what I was doing and I got myself gently back on track. And I'm going to do an episode soon about managing procrastination. But we don't have to have perfect days to be able to find little bits of the process where we can feel proud of ourselves.

That enables us to identify small things, which is sometimes easier to feel pride about. It means that we have control over it because there's always small things, but it also means we don't have to wait till the end. We get to be proud on the way. Often we want to achieve these goals in order to feel proud. 

If we want to feel proud, let's feel proud as we go along so that we can enjoy that sensation all the way. And then let's just achieve the goals because they're important goals, to see if we can as a fun challenge, rather than as something that's going to confirm whether we should be proud of ourselves or not.

So try and remind yourself to be proud of things as you go along.

Focusing on the grey area. So we've talked about all or nothing thinking in recent episodes. It's something that comes up an awful lot, where we think we've had a good day or a bad day, we achieved it or we didn't achieve it. When you are looking to praise yourself, you're looking to try and develop more sense of pride in yourself, let's look in the grey. Let's look at the little bits that did go well in a presentation that you felt was a bit of a flop. Let's look for the parts of an interview you did well when you didn't get the job. Let's try and pick out the bits that we're proud of, even amongst something that doesn't particularly feel like a win.

And again, as usual, this is not a “just look at the sunny side of the life” situation. We want to analyze why we didn't do as well as we wanted to. We're going to think about those things. We're going to think about those things but first, we're going to be proud of the bits of grey that we did achieve in amongst the other bits that we struggled with.

The other thing I want to say is, don't discount the things you find easy. This is something that I used to do a lot, so I'm somebody who finds it quite easy to talk, to present, to teach, all of those sorts of things. I also find it reasonably easy to write and that meant for a really long time, I didn't take much pride in any of that stuff.

I wasn't particularly proud that I was a good teacher, because I found it quite easy. I didn't feel particularly proud that I'd written things because I found it quite easy. And so, because I hadn't struggled, because I hadn't found it hard, I didn't really feel like something to be proud of. But over the years I've realized that I want to reinforce those things too.

I am proud that I'm a good teacher and I am proud that I can write fluently and easily. And just because I find it easy, it doesn't mean that I don't get to be proud of it. So don't discount the things you find easy and try and generate pride. Give yourself credit for those as well. 

So when should you do these, you know, how do we develop this as a habit? It can be really useful to think about regular times that you might want to do this. So at the end of the day, you could get in the habit of writing down a few things that you're proud of that day.

I talked a little bit about this in one of my previous podcasts about why I don't think you should have a to-do list and you should have a done list instead. You could check that one out for more details, but you can build it into a bit of a routine like that. 

You can start the day thinking about what you're proud of from yesterday to kind of set yourself in that, “oh yeah, I'm quite good” sort of mode so you can try and get into these sorts of regular routines.

Another approach is that when you hear yourself criticizing yourself, you get in the habit of offering something you are proud of as a response. Say you hear yourself saying, “oh, I'm not very good”, you say, “yeah. But I'm really proud that I did this today”. So you can start thinking about these sorts of tactics.

Sometimes writing them down can help. Set yourself the challenge that you have to come up with something different every day. So you're trying to come up with as many different things that you are proud of as you can. There are all these different sorts of practices, depending on what you think works for you and there's not a right answer as to how to do this. 

It's just trying to make it more regular and feel more true for you. And that true element is crucial. So when you are saying things you're proud of, try and avoid saying things you don't believe. I'm so proud that I did this. Are you though or are you not?

If you’re genuinely not, that's okay. Don't worry. If you're genuinely not proud yet, find the smaller things that you are proud of. Find little things to give yourself credit for. So try and make sure that they feel true for you. 

Another way you can try and generate this is whenever somebody says something nice to you, about you, you can practice just saying thank you. Often what I see when I give people compliments, when I see other people get compliments from others, is that people's immediate responses to play it down. 

“Oh, well, no, no. I was lucky. Really? Oh, no, no. There was just no other candidates. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. You know, whatever.” You don't have to do that. You can just say thank you. So one way to practice being proud of yourself and giving yourself credit is at least not minimizing when other people are proud of you or give you credit. Just saying, “yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you telling me that.” And getting in the habit of it that way. 

Another way you can do it is generating pride in others and looking for the small things they're doing that you can tell them that you are proud of. Because then we get in this habit. Partly it's just gorgeous. Tell somebody like, I was really impressed with how much effort you put into that. I was really impressed with how, even though you could tell you were nervous, you went and did it anyway. 

It feels really nice to say these things, but it also gives us practice of looking for the small things that we're impressed with, with other people, so that when we're then thinking about it for ourselves, we're a little bit more in the habit of looking for those sorts of things. Sometimes it's easier to see it in other people, and then we get to translate it back ourselves. 

The final tip on that is you can just go ridiculous too. So I think I've said in previous episode one things I struggle with is like getting stuff done around the house and that sort of thing, and I find it super useful to give myself ridiculous praise for tiny things. So one of the ways I've got used to this is being like, “I made my bed this morning. Check me out people. That's amazing.” And it's ludicrous but there's something about the fact that you are acknowledging that it's ludicrous and you are congratulating yourself ridiculously for small things, that gets over the kind of like, “oh, this is awkward.” Like, of course it’s awkward. We're being ridiculous. We're giving ourselves ton of praise because we put something in the dishwasher instead of down on the side. But it just gets us in the habit of thinking about these things. 

So it has to be real. We have to practice, and it's okay if it feels a bit uncomfortable and weird along the way.

To finish, if you are really struggling with this, one thing you can do is borrow pride from somebody else. I am proud of every single one of you because you are working or studying in a sector that's under enormous pressure at the moment, where there's a whole ton of stuff going on with the strikes and the new REF and all of these pressures that are happening.

You are working and studying in that environment. You're doing something that's really important. You are listening to podcasts to figure out how you can be more effective, how you can give more to your studies and more to your work. I am super proud of every one of you, so if you don't feel proud of yourself just yet, borrow a little bit of my pride in you while you practice, and that'll tide you over until you develop some pride of your own.

I hope you have found today useful. Do let me know anything you've taken from it. I'd also really appreciate it if you could take the time to rate and review, so in places like Apple and Spotify and YouTube, the ratings and reviews and subscribers and all that stuff really makes a big difference.

Please follow the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube, all of that stuff. Any five star ratings you want to give me would be amazing. Any comments. Tell your colleagues. Tell your friends. The listenership is already going up, I'm really, really pleased with who people I'm reaching, but I would love to help more people who are struggling in academia. Anything you can do to help with that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening and see you next week.