109. Celebrating Yourself: Why High Achievers Struggle to Do It

Hey Doc —

There’s something I see over and over again when I work with physician moms.

You’ve achieved incredible things. Medical school. Residency. Building a career. Raising children. Holding together entire ecosystems of people who depend on you.

And yet, when I ask you to name something you’re proud of?

Silence.

Or you brush it off.

Or you immediately pivot to the next thing you still need to accomplish.

In this episode, I’m talking about why celebrating yourself can feel surprisingly difficult for high achievers—and why that matters more than most of us realize.

A recent conversation with a very successful business owner reminded me just how common this pattern is. Even after building something objectively impressive, he still struggled to recognize his own success. And honestly? The mindset sounded very familiar.

Many of us were trained to keep pushing, keep achieving, keep delaying satisfaction until the next milestone.

But if you never learn how to recognize your wins now, the next milestone won’t fix it.

In this episode, I’m sharing:

• How constantly chasing the “next thing” can quietly drain your sense of fulfillment
• Why high achievers often struggle to acknowledge their accomplishments
• The connection between celebrating your wins and building real confidence
• Why modeling self-celebration matters for the way our children learn to see themselves
• Practical ways to start recognizing your wins—even if it feels uncomfortable at first

Celebration doesn’t have to mean a party or a big announcement.

Sometimes it’s simply taking a moment to acknowledge what you’ve done and allowing yourself to feel proud.

If you don’t build the habit of recognizing your wins now, you may keep achieving more… and still feel like it’s never enough.

🎧 Press play on this episode of Stethoscopes and Strollers.

And then take a moment to celebrate something you’ve done—big or small.

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Transcript

  Hey Doc, I want to talk to you about celebration celebration of you, the amazing physician and mother and woman and human being that you are,

and how important it is to celebrate yourself. So I talked about this in one of my recent newsletters. and again, if you are not on my email list, you should be, my newsletters are pretty great, and it was in the context of birthdays because February was a month of birthdays for me, and it just led into me talking about the fact that you should celebrate yourself for many reasons. And. I actually talk about celebrating yourself and bragging, which is like a certain subsect of celebrating yourself out loud to the public. So much that I could not remember if I had a podcast episode about this and I had to go back and search through my podcast episodes because I'll tell you, after 108 episodes, I.

Sometimes don't remember what I have talked about in the past, but apparently I have not recorded a specific episode about celebration in particular, and I had an experience recently that made me think about it, so I was like, you know what? Let's do an episode about. celebrating yourself and the importance. So I'm gonna tell you the story, then tell you the top three reasons I think you should be celebrating more. And hopefully at the end of this you'll be like, yeah, I am. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna celebrate myself more. Alright? So my husband and I have started an HVAC business, the general heating and air, and we are starting from the ground up and we are in a community of other home services business owners with the express purpose of getting mentorship and guidance and helping us grow.

and the person in charge actually put us in contact with another. very successful business owner in our area, just so we can see what's possible and see how people do things and, you know, just to get those types of connections and just commiserate with somebody else who started from the ground up like we did.

So we went to see this person, and by all accounts. He is like winning in life. He has a multimillion dollar home services business, and home services is a catchall term for an hvac, plumbing, electrical, like all of that, right? So multimillion dollar business. He's a tall white man with a lovely wife, children, like everything that you need to be successful in the United States of America in 2026 and.

Talking to him. He sounded like many women physicians that I have spoken to where you've achieved so much, but you can't articulate any. Good things about your life or your business, all that comes to mind and all that you talk about is the negative, so. He told us all the things to watch out for the challenges that he had, bad experiences, and my husband was like, okay, well you know, you had all this stuff happen, but you have a successful business.

Like tell me about a time where you looked around. I was like, yeah, I'm really doing this. I'm so proud of everything. And he could not answer. And I had to stop myself from going into coach mode and being like, dude, you need to do something about that. And then he actually articulated that his wife has to tell him sometimes, like, Hey, take a moment.

Look around, celebrate what you've achieved. We've done really well and it just reminded me of so many women physicians that I have spoken to or that I coach who have achieved so much, have so many good things in life. But because it has been ingrained in us that there's always something more because we've spent our entire careers.

Trying to achieve the next thing and feeling like we've never arrived and for all of the different reasons, cannot celebrate themselves. Cannot state one positive thing that they have accomplished, that they're proud of. And I was like, wow, look at this man and I obviously, I don't know this man very well, but I'm not surprised.

By that I think it is a symptom of society. It is a symptom of this society and conditioning and the humility, culture why was still feeling like he was grinding and feeling like he still hasn't arrived like I cannot tell you how many times I have been in a coaching session. And one of my clients just said something offhand that I thought was freaking amazing. And I was like, well, hold on. Let's celebrate that. And it was like they couldn't It was like physically impossible. They could not articulate the words. They immediately brushed it off, downplay, it,  it may sound like a simple thing, but it is a skill, the ability to celebrate one's itself,

and I think it's something that we need to start practicing. And I'm gonna tell you why. So these are my top three reasons, not exhaustive by any means, but the first one I feel like is the most obvious one. If you are going through the motions, if you are constantly focused on. The next thing on the next achievement, which coming up as a physician is all we do.

It's like, okay, I have to get into medical school and then I have to pass step one, then I have to do well on the clerkships. Then I have to match, and then I have to do re and then I have to get the job, and then I have to do fellowship and then, and then, and then. And everything is just to push through to get to a point where we feel we have arrived, never stopping to truly celebrate, to truly appreciate how hard we have worked and what it means to have gone through this process and come out on the other side.

If you continue to go through your life that way, your career that way, there will be like this hole, like this emptiness feeling like, is this it? Everything will just pass you by and when you look back, you'll be just like this guy that we met and cannot think of a single thing that was worth truly celebrating.

Outside of maybe being a mother, which there's not nothing wrong with celebrating motherhood and celebrating the type of mother you are and your kids and stuff, but it is important for the same reason you celebrate your children.

When they do something great, when they start walking, all that little shit that they do, that we celebrate but, we wouldn't celebrate the big things we have. Achieved. So turning that celebration back on ourselves is important so we can feel like we have a life that we are proud to have lived.

So that you don't feel stuck and in a rut it can help with feelings of burnout because

if nothing is going well, there's nothing for you to look forward to at this job. That's just gonna make everything worse. So truly taking stock of the truly amazing things that we have done, that we do every single day, and celebrating them in whatever way. You feel comfortable with and the bragging part of it where you tell other people about it and you say it loud and proud, that's the next level.

It's not necessary, but it can sometimes be a way to very quickly train you to get into this habit. And it's something that I use with. Almost all of my clients because we are so bad at celebrating our accomplishments

the other big reason that I have my clients celebrate themselves and brag is because it does build confidence. Because if you are in a rut, if you have gone through your life not acknowledging any achievements as anything, great. Always looking forward to the next thing. You start telling yourself stories about yourself. None of this is a big deal. I can't do anything. Right. I am a failure. All you remember are the mistakes that you may have made and all of that affects your confidence. All of that makes you smaller in your own story. But if you take time to celebrate every time you do something, every time you achieve something, every time a patient gives you.

A gift you celebrate that. You start to build confidence and move through the world differently because you don't celebrate people who ain't shit. You celebrate great people, right? You celebrate great things. So if you're celebrating yourself, you are training your brain. To be like, oh, well I'm great ' cause this is what you do.

You celebrate great things and great people. So it naturally builds confidence. And the more confident you are, the less you that you'll take from other people. The more likely you are to negotiate your salary, the more likely you are to stand up to your mother-in-law. The more likely you are to advocate for hiring a nanny when your husband doesn't want to because you are confident and you are confident in what you believe and what you think because you have taken the time to build yourself up in your mind.

And you're not blowing smoke up your own ass. You're celebrating things that you're actually doing. So it's all true and it's all justified. And the last reason for you to celebrate yourself is because it teaches your children how to celebrate themselves and have them. Grow up with the confidence that we are now trying to build.

Have them grow up with this great habit, having them skip the unlearning that we are now doing and just live a happier, more fulfilled life. Because if that guy who has a multimillion dollar company can't celebrate himself, it is not the money, but we always talk about generational wealth, and that's usually dollars and cents and you know what we can pass on to them.

But this is, this is a legacy. This is the wealth that they need, the ability to celebrate themselves, to enjoy their lives, to be confident, and to curate their own confidence. This is what we need to be teaching them because if we don't actively teach them, they will default to our setting, to the setting of this guy of, well, you know, it's not that big a deal. once I do the X, Y, Z, then then I'll celebrate that delayed gratification that we are so good at, too good at. Delayed everything. Delay the celebration until, until what?

If you had 2 million in the bank, then you have reason to celebrate because things would be easier. This man's company was at 8 million and he still was not celebrating and he was profitable. It wasn't just that he had a company that had revenue of $8 million, they were also making a profit and he said they had always been profitable.

That is impressive. And he still couldn't find things to celebrate. So when you find yourself saying, you know, I'm just gonna grind. I'm not super happy right now, but if I just get to this number in the bank, if I get this job, if I have this third child, if we lived in this house.

Then things would get better and I would celebrate and I would, I would have something to celebrate.

That's a story you're telling yourself because if you don't get in the habit now, the money actually isn't gonna change anything. The job isn't gonna change anything. The house isn't gonna change anything. It is a habit, a habit that many of us were taught not to do because we have a culture of humility.

We value it for many different reasons, especially as women.

But it is important and just like I ended my newsletter with, which is like a fourth reason, but it's like an overarching reason, female self celebration is the cure for the patriarchy. Because when you think about who is threatened by a woman celebrating her accomplishments, celebrating herself, bragging about herself, who does that hurt?

The people that benefit from her being small,



So I want to encourage you to celebrate your wins. Celebrate the accomplishments in your life. Celebrate when somebody tells you something nice. Celebrate. Celebrate it all. And even though it is a core of my coaching, it is something I try to practice often.

I still have to put systems in place to celebrate. So I'm not recording this episode and telling you these things from a place of, oh yeah, I got this. I Fall back to the default of just pushing through and focusing on the next thing. During the launch of this business, it'll be extremely easy for me to get lost in all of the hardships. In all of the scams and the wasted money and the arguments and all of the things that come with starting a business from the ground up with your husband, right?

It would be very easy to say Nothing is going right. This is extremely hard. I just can't wait until we hire. Somebody else to do the marketing until we hire another technician. Until, until, until, it'll be extremely easy. And because I know that, because I truly believe what I am telling you right now, doc, and because I know from my clients, from my colleagues how this can go when you are in the trenches and you just have to keep your eye on the thing that the hard work will create, and that thing is in the future. You just have to get through right now because I know that I created a calendar in my project management software where every time something good happens, I go in there and I put a note and it's called the general heating and air Milestones, and I put it like a little celebration emoji there, and every time.

We hit something when we got the truck. I went in there, put that we got the truck

when an article came out where I did an interview for an online magazine. I put that in there when the Facebook page had enough followers so that I could get my own special URLI went and put it in there on the date so that I can go back and see that even during this very stressful process, good things happened.

There were things to celebrate, and we were doing a good job. We were doing something amazing, something that many, many people cannot do, many people try to do, and, failed. many people just didn't even bother to try because it was so hard. So I will not forget because I have this reminder

and I know the importance of doing it. So I put this system in place. So this is not just like, oh yeah, celebrate yourself and that's it. Put things in place. Make it a habit. Make it a habit because it is that important. Okay, doc, don't end up like this guy making all this money and still can't find a reason to celebrate.

I'm telling you, start now, because if you wait, you'll be waiting forever. So I want to take a minute to celebrate you that you are still here listening to this podcast. And you're gonna share with another doc who needs to celebrate her accomplishments.

So let me know what you are celebrating, big or small. Let me know if there was something that you would've usually let pass you by. But because of this episode, you are like, you know what? I'm gonna celebrate. And this also just, by the way, doesn't have to be some big elaborate thing where you have a party or you go out to dinner, or it doesn't have to be any of that.

It could just be an intentional moment with yourself to reflect and to feel proud, and to not negate the amazingness of the accomplishment, which I feel like is something that can be done so easily. You start taking yourself down a few notches before somebody else does. To truly sit in it and celebrate.

You could journal, you could dance, you could call somebody and tell them. You can post it on social media. It could be as public or as private as you'd like. Once it is intentional and genuine, that's all it has to be. So I celebrate you. For listening to this episode and for all of the amazing things that I know that you have done and will continue to do, and I will see you on the next episode of Stethoscopes and Strollers.