Hey, and welcome to episode 190 of the Smooth Stones Podcast, where we talk about all things life after baby loss. And one of those things is learning how to celebrate yourself. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. This episode is inspired by my birthday today. I am 44 years old and I love it. I love getting older.

I know in our culture there’s a little bit of emphasis on being young, looking young youth, all of that. But I love it. I love every year that I get to spend on this earth. I love learning, growing. I love evolving, and. Being different. I don’t wanna be like I was when I was 20. I wanna be like I am now. And I wanna look forward to even more growth, more maturity, more fun.

I think I’ve been in a really intense season, um, with my family. If you are new here, I have six living kids and two babies in heaven. And so I spent a huge amount of my life pregnant. Breastfeeding, grieving, just managing things. But my third daughter is now graduating high school next week. So we’ve had a lot of big things to celebrate coming up and, and all of that.

So I am just, like I said, loving the age. I am loving. Um. All that that means. ’cause we know that time is not guaranteed. And so I don’t wanna waste my time wishing I was any other age than what I am. And I really do find it to be an honor and a blessing and a gift to be able to get older. And yeah, it’s just, it’s awesome.

So. Why is it such a problem? Why is it so hard to celebrate yourself? I think this is really important in our step of, if you’re gonna learn how to celebrate yourself first, you gotta learn. Or while we’re doing it, at least we can do two things at the same time. But we do need to look at why is it so hard?

So I would ask yourself this question, why is it hard for you to celebrate yourself? For me, I know that I don’t love being the center of attention. Um, I think I got, and probably all of us got a lot of messaging about humility and about pride. We don’t wanna be conceited, we don’t wanna be arrogant, we don’t wanna be prideful.

And if you’re celebrating yourself, if you’re telling people like, oh my goodness. This cool thing happened or I achieve this, that that’s a little bit prideful or maybe a lot prideful or maybe, you know, people who are constantly talking about their achievements, trying to prove how cool they are. And I think once you get to age 44, you realize a lot of that is coming from insecurity, right?

A lot of people have to overcompensate for their insecurity by. Just trying to prove their worth all the time, you know, or having like the big flashy stuff or whatever it is. And so I think we have this weird relationship with celebrating ourselves in our culture, um, because it can lean into something that we think is negative, right?

We don’t wanna be like that. We also have a lot of times not for many opportunities to celebrate ourselves. I said, was telling you that my daughter’s graduating. Well, you get to graduate from high school one time, and in America and Canada, that’s 12, 13 years of work for like one ceremony where we celebrate you and it’s a huge achievement.

And there might be kind of like small graduations along the way. Oh my gosh, my dog. Hold on. It is thundering and lightning here and uh, my dog just came and scratched on my office door ’cause he’s a little nervous. So he’s back there now you can’t see him. Um, he never does that, but he’s not loving this thunderstorm.

Okay. Where was I? Yeah, our celebrations are few and far between. It might be like. A wedding, a graduation, especially in adulthood, maybe as a child. We do have like these little things and we have birthday parties and we, all of that. But yeah, as an adult we do celebrate birthdays some years more than others.

Right? And it depends on your family, your partner, all the things, uh, whether or not you are celebrated. And then what? Retirement. I think we just don’t learn how to celebrate ourselves all along the way. It’s like we only celebrate big things that society deems are worthy of celebration. So what I want you to open up to is shifting that.

How do we shift that? So figure out what is your story like? What does it mean if you celebrate yourselves? What is worth celebrating that you do,

and how can we make some shifts to be better at celebrating a lot of things and still being true to your values? I. Right. We don’t even necessarily have to like outwardly do it. This might really be inward, but I’m telling you, it is so, so powerful and I have found that when I do it, when my clients do it, when we really celebrate ourselves all along the way, life gets so much easier because the world isn’t always giving us positive reinforcement.

Sometimes we gotta do it for ourselves, but you know what? We can, and actually I think it’s even more powerful to do it yourself because. People can celebrate you and you can still feel nothing inside, right? You can win the trophy, you can win the prize. You can have that gold medal and still feel terrible inside of you.

And I think if you listen to the stories of people who have done that, who have achieved those dreams. The actuality is they’re still human and they still have a human brain and they still have feelings. And that prize, that celebration doesn’t necessarily fix anything. In fact, sometimes it brings even more problems.

I. I was just listening to a podcast with Simone Biles, who is an amazing gymnast who has won many, many Olympic medals, and she talked about winning her first gold medal at 19 years old. And then it’s like, oh, I’ve worked my whole life for this since I was six years old and now I have it. And now what?

You know now what? Like, yes. It’s amazing. And also, who am I? What do I do now, now that I’ve achieved this thing? What do you have to work towards? So just noticing like, um, all that in a nutshell is it’s not the thing, it’s not the milestone, it’s not the event or the prize. It’s gonna make us feel anything.

We’re still humans with brains. So I’m gonna talk about some different, um, what would I call them? Just different phases of our life, different seasons and things that we can celebrate within them. So the first one I wanna talk about is surviving. Sometimes we’re in survival mode and most of us would think, uh, what’s there to celebrate when I’m in survival mode?

Well, there’s so much to celebrate. I want you to answer that question for yourself. What is there to celebrate when you’re in survival mode? Sometimes it’s literally that you keep breathing, that you take a shower, that you don’t take a shower. Maybe you celebrate, Hey, I didn’t feel like showering and I didn’t, because sometimes we’re just doing it for other people.

We’re doing it ’cause we’re supposed to or whatever. But maybe if you have a day like that and you’re like, you know what, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to shower, I don’t have to prove anything. Sometimes it’s just continuing to live each day without your baby. Sometimes it’s continuing to live when you don’t have the support that you wish you had.

When somebody says something, when you’re super triggered and you feel it and it affects you. Can you celebrate that? I was just talking to a client and explaining how, you know, a lot of times I think there’s so much good nervous system awareness. We try to have nervous system awareness here and with my clients, but I think sometimes as with any tool, what we do is we take it and we twist it.

So we think if I have a nervous system reaction, if I get triggered, if I go into fight, flight, freeze, what I have to do is get rid of that. Calm that down. Deactivate myself. But actually, there’s a lot of power in being triggered. There’s a lot of power in getting mad. There’s a lot of power in getting fired up.

There’s a lot of power in shutting down.

Can you celebrate that? Can you use that for good? Now, if it’s not. The version of yourself that you like and you prefer that you didn’t do that, that’s fine. But I see people all the time who are like, no, I’m not okay with this. I’m super triggered by this. I am super activated by this and I’m gonna do something about it.

Or I can see myself laying in bed after I lost huge amounts of blood after a D&C surgery. Feeling devastated and doing nothing. All I could do was read. I would like read books and I couldn’t do anything, and that was okay. Like I could celebrate it if I chose to. I was surviving. I was literally surviving.

I don’t need to change that. I was regenerating enough blood that I could stand up without feeling like I was gonna faint. I was processing the trauma of what I had just gone through, like physically, medically, emotionally, spiritually,

and I didn’t need to do anything else but survive. That is a superpower. Our nervous system can be a superpower, so we don’t always have to like fight it. Can you allow it? Can you celebrate it?

Lots of questions for you to answer. Okay. The second stage or situation I want you to think about is celebrating yourself when you’re trying. There’s this great quote by Yoda that says, do or do not. There is no try. And I notice myself doing this where I will wanna say, I’m gonna try to do this, this, and this today.

And I catch myself and I say, no, I shouldn’t be trying. I should be doing, but in the trying, there are things to celebrate and you get to decide if you wanna call it trying, if you wanna call it doing. But I think, again, we are so conditioned to only celebrate the finish line, but to get to the finish line, you gotta get your butt out there and practice.

You gotta get to the field, you gotta get to the track you gotta like put your shoes on. You know what I’m saying? So in the trying, you are doing things of value. Things that matter. You are becoming the person you want to be and so can you celebrate that? Maybe right now you’re trying to believe that there’s hope for life after loss.

You’re listening to this podcast and you’re saying, Amy, I know you keep telling me there’s hope and I’m trying, but I’m not seeing it. Can you celebrate that? Can you celebrate even opening up to a possibility? Even letting yourself dream and sort of get started? It’s supposed to be messy. You’re supposed to send in 50 manuscripts before your book gets published.

You’re supposed to like all of it is worth it, and I want you to. Really celebrate the trying, because there is so much power in that, what is happening with my hair? Okay. Um, keep trying, celebrate effort. I think that’s something that’s big in parenting right now. Again, before probably when we were kids, it was like you celebrated the accomplishment and then we decided to start celebrating effort.

Because that’s what’s important. And even in a spiritual sense, I think many of us have grown up in, maybe it’s the Judeo-Christian idea of like, you have to be perfect if you wanna get into heaven, and we’re kind of always falling short or we’re always failing and we’re maybe broken. There’s something inherently wrong with us that we’re just not good enough.

But the thing is we just keep trying and we keep going and we keep believing,

and that is something to be celebrated. The third thing I wanna talk about is achieving. I. We can celebrate achievements, but I would encourage you not to just have it be the traditional ones, like a high school graduation. I want you to find things that you can celebrate yourself for achieving. When I work with my clients at least once a week, we talk about our wins.

What are our wins? Now, they may fall into any of these categories, but again, these are all kind of, it’s not. You know, they all flow together. They all overlap. It’s fine when you are achieving things. It could be, I got out of bed today, or I didn’t hit snooze today. Or it could be like I did the dishes.

I smiled and nodded when somebody said something ridiculously insensitive at work. Whatever it is. You get to decide what the achievement is, but I want you to celebrate it. And if you do have things that you’re achieving, can you share them? Can you acknowledge them? Can you let other people see you? I think we have this huge fear of being seen even though we’re in this kind of social media world.

Where we are constantly taking pictures and posting and sharing, but can you let people see your achievements?

Can you celebrate your own achievements instead of downplaying them? I don’t think I. That it benefits us or society or the people around us to downplay our achievements. And it happens all the time. Uh, sometimes I’ll say, well, I have this really small business, and that’s me, like diminishing my accomplishments because my business is what it is and I am the one putting a label on it.

I’m deciding if it’s small, I’m comparing it to other people maybe, or comparing it to what it could be or whatever it is. But I notice that sometimes in myself when I’m, people say, oh, what do you do? Or whatever, I’ll say, oh, I have, you know, this podcast. And um, I have a small business and I have a lot of things that I’m doing.

But maybe I don’t, um, share it as confidently as I could do. So that’s something that I have been working on since I became a coach and since I started my business, because in my culture and where I live, um, it’s a lot of stay at home moms, which I am also a stay at home mom, and I have a lot of cool things that I’m doing.

So you get to decide. Right. Do you get to be proud of your achievements, whether or not you’re making a million dollars, or whether or not it’s this or that, or looks cool online or is perfect, but you get to decide what’s an achievement for you and celebrate it. The fourth category is celebrating your fails.

Failing means you’re trying. I will put it as simply as that. Like I said before, you are supposed to be rejected. You are supposed to not do it right. You are supposed to fall down a hundred times before you learn to walk and then fall down some more. As you’re learning to run and to jump and to all of the things that we need to do,

we actually want to fail. I encourage you to try to fail. There was this really cool, uh, experiment where somebody tried to get a hundred nos, and it’s a video on YouTube. I think I’ve talked about it before, but he went to get a hundred nos because he wanted to stop being afraid of failing, and so he started going into.

Businesses and places and, and all these things, and just asking outlandish things. And the funny part was once he tried, was like trying to get a no. He kept getting yeses. People were super cool to help him and to support him and to try to make things happen. And it was really, really interesting what he learned.

But when you fail on purpose, you learn so much. You learn way more from the fails than you do from the wins. But we are not taught this. We have a serious, like perfectionism culture, and so you fail. Teach your living kids to fail. Allow your partner to fail. Allow your coworkers to fail because it means you’re doing something and there’s nothing wrong with it.

I’m thinking about, let’s see, people who climb Mount Everest and can’t quite get to the summit, that’s a failure, you know, in many people’s eyes. I didn’t get to the summit, but look at what you did. I. Look at what you did in failing. Spent probably months or years of your life preparing and practicing and climbing and hiking, and you made it higher than most mountains in the whole world.

You failed in some degree by some accounts, but what were all the wins along the way? My goodness, we are so hard on ourselves. I see this in Grievers a lot when they. I feel like they failed because they were doing really good and then they had a really bad day. Or they got triggered or they cried in the shower.

Celebrate it. Celebrate it. And number five is celebrate your progress. When we can look back. See how far we’ve come. It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s not supposed to be linear, so don’t get caught up in this being linear, but celebrate progress. So maybe it’s one day I cry in the shower and I feel terrible and it drags me down for days and I’m just stuck and I am berating myself.

And then. You start listening to this podcast, you start being kinder to yourself. You start having a little more hope, and you find yourself crying in the shower again,

but you don’t beat yourself up for it. Oh my gosh. That is the best. Like I could cry when I think about my clients, who I.

They have just been so hard on themselves for so long and they’re so practiced at it, and when I tell them just to stop, what a difference it makes to grieve without punishing yourself for it.

That is progress. The thing that’s happening is still happening. It’s the same, but you are becoming different. The way you relate to your grief is different. The way you relate to your family members, your friends, the different goals you have is different. That is beautiful. Celebrate it. Even the tiniest things, the more we celebrate.

The easier it is to continue doing that, to continue loving and caring for yourself and your progress. Even awareness, I think this is a huge one that we skip over is if you’re aware. I think what happens is first we’re unaware. We’re unaware. We don’t even know about our brains. We don’t know about our nervous system.

We don’t know that our thoughts create our feelings. We don’t know any of this. We’re just like blaming the world and everything outside of us for how we feel. Well, once we learn that it’s actually a lot on us, it’s a lot about our thoughts that are creating our feelings, that are creating our actions, that are creating our results.

We can sometimes turn it around and say, oh my goodness, I should be better. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. I should be able to control that. I should be able to change that overnight. And sometimes you can, but a lot of times you can’t. A lot of times it takes a journey, right? To go from where you are to where you want to be.

There might be a hundred steps in between. Celebrate each step because that is what we’re here for. It is about the journey. It is about becoming. It is about learning to celebrate everything, celebrate progress, and redefine what progress is. Again, we are not in a, in this linear, perfect graph.

You might continue to make the same mistakes over and over, but if you’re shifting how you talk to yourself, if you’re shifting how you react, if you’re shifting, how long it takes you, you to recover from making a mistake, so huge. It’s a really beautiful thing. Okay, so. Celebrate when we’re in survival mode.

Celebrate when you’re trying, celebrate when you’re achieving. Celebrate when you’re failing and celebrate progress. This will be such a beautiful gift to yourself and to everyone around you, because I’m telling you, when you can model this to your kids, to your family, to your partner, to your coworkers, to like society at large, the people you run into.

There’s so many ripple effects because everyone around you, they might not know this, but you can show them, and that is worth celebrating too. So how do we celebrate? Let’s wrap it up here. How do we celebrate? Acknowledge it. Say it out loud. Say, you know, I was really tired today, but I did X, Y, Z.

Say it. Note it, write it down, post about it, talk about it. Put it in your journal. Maybe there’s these beautiful journals that just have like these few lines a day things just like you could get a journal where you just celebrate yourself. That would be a beautiful thing.

Treat yourself. Now, I was also just coaching a client on this. They were like, how do I kind of give myself rewards that aren’t sugar? Because that’s a lot what we’ve learned, right? Like every special occasion we have to have sugar, we have to have treats, we have to have candy. Um. Even in school, even at the dentist, I think it’s funny that the dentist will give the kids suckers for like coming in for a checkup and it’s just funny to me,

the doctor, everything is that. It’s that easy. Dopamine hit. So a lot of times we’re saying, how do I celebrate myself? Number one, can I celebrate myself without a prize? We’re very conditioned to want a prize. Uh, and I would offer that you can, the feeling you get. The self-love, the self-compassion that is the prize in and of itself, or the absence of self-loathing, right?

Not being mean to yourself. That’s a prize. But you also can give yourself a food prize if you want., You really can do anything you want externally. But I would say be creative, right? It doesn’t have to be chocolate, it doesn’t have to be a bath, a bubble bath or whatever. Um, a while back I did an episode on doing more of what lights you up, and so that can be your prize also.

That can be the way you celebrate yourself. If you love to paint and you have a win, what if you give yourself permission to have like an extra hour? In the studio or whatever it is, right? Give yourself that permission. That can be a beautiful way to reward yourself and to celebrate and acknowledge yourself or look at breaking norms.

A lot of times we think people need to give us flowers. What if you just buy yourself flowers? Uh, I know someone who. They kind of figured this out. They were like, I love fresh flowers. I’ve talked to the people in my life. They know how much I love fresh flowers, but I’m kind of waiting, you know, waiting for an anniversary, waiting for a birthday, waiting for a special occasion.

But what if every day is special? What if it’s worth having flowers? And maybe that’s not in everyone’s budget to like buy yourself flowers. I think this, this person I know she had like. Organize a thing. So like every week she like automatically delivers some flowers to her, but make it work for you.

Maybe you just get yourself some really, really cute fake plants. There are some killer fake plants out there, um, and they’re really low maintenance and they last forever. Just get yourself something that you like to look at, but it does not have to be money. That’s the other thing. We always think it’s sugar or we have to buy something.

. Those are easy dopamine hits, but you don’t have to do that. Just what lights you up. And you also get to decide when do I celebrate? Uh, do I do it every day? Do I do a small thing every day? Do I wait? Do I make a big goal like a year later and push towards it and then celebrate? Then you get to decide there aren’t any rules.

I believe that the more we celebrate each little thing along the way, the better it is because it’s not true that the big prize, the way out there prize, is gonna make you feel what you wanna feel if you haven’t practiced celebrating yourself all along the way, right? You won’t feel like you deserve it.

It’s gonna feel hollow. I’m sure we’ve all experienced that when you thought, when this happens, I’ll feel this way, and then it doesn’t. It’s because we’ve got to look inside first and we’ve got to practice this. We’ve got to make this a practice in our lives. So I want you to celebrate yourself. I want you right now as we’re finishing up, just take a moment, take a deep breath, and just say, what’s something I could celebrate myself for?

Big or small, it could be I brushed my teeth today.

Whatever it is,

keep practicing this and I would encourage you if you’re really struggling to see anything worth celebrating right now. Come and talk to me. I will teach you how to do this in my coaching program. This is a big thing that we do, being kinder to ourselves, being more loving towards ourselves, being more proud of ourselves.

’cause being proud is something we don’t like in our society. But I’m telling you, when you are proud of yourself, when you can celebrate yourself in your grief, in your life. Things get a whole lot easier and a whole lot better, and a whole lot more fun. So let’s do it. You can go in the show notes, send me an email.

Uh, let’s get you set up in one of my programs. I would love, love, love to talk to you and we can start with a free session where we just get to chat and see what’s going on for you. So, uh, thank you so much for being here. I’m celebrating you. For listening, for taking the time to help yourself. I love you and I will see you next time.