#51: Here’s Why Celebrating Yourself Isn’t Selfish — It’s Necessary

When’s the last time you really gave yourself credit, really celebrated yourself? Not just for what you did, but for what you overcame — or how much you’ve grown. 

I used to think that celebrating myself would come after I did something “big enough.” 

But what if celebration isn’t a reward for results — what if it’s actually fuel for the next step? 

Today I’m sharing some of the quiet ways I used to downplay my growth — and how I’m learning to claim my wins without apology. From measuring my life with someone else’s yardstick to nearly missing a milestone moment in this podcast, I’ll show you how The Gap and the Gain changed my perspective — and how it can change yours too. 

3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE 

1️⃣ Celebration isn’t just a nice idea - it’s fuel - for your energy, courage and dreams. 

2️⃣ If you don’t learn to see your own growth — you’ll never celebrate it. And if you don’t celebrate it… you’ll struggle to sustain it. 

3️⃣ It’s the things we think are ordinary that deserve to be celebrated.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

The Gap and The Gain 

DOWNLOAD THE FREE START DREAMING AGAIN GUIDE

Check out all my coaching and course offerings - Coachcarlene.com

MORE FROM ME

Follow me on Instagram: @coach_carlene

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps me reach more dreamers who need these insights. 🎙️ Thanks for tuning in to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast! See you next week!

FOLLOW NOW
Also, if you haven't done so already, follow the podcast. I'm adding episodes every week, and if you're not folllowing, there's a good chance you'll miss out. Follow now!

Episode Website

Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:22

Hello. Hello my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm Carlene, I'm your host, and if this is your first time here, welcome to the Distracted Dreamer family. Um, before we dive in today, I've got a quick ask and trust me, I don't like. Asking for anything, but if you love the show and you wanna keep it going, can you do me a favor and take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts? Now I know it can be confusing to leave a review, so here's how you do this. After you're done listening to this episode, what you wanna do is you wanna click the back arrow that's on the top left of, of your screen on your phone, and when you do that, you'll see a list of the episodes that we have on the distracted dreamer. What you do from there is just scroll down until you see the rating and reviews section, and underneath the existing reviews you will see a link that says, write a review. So just click on that link, write a review, and give it five stars. It takes less than a minute to do this, but it really helps me so much, especially with all the new AI search bots that are out there, apparently Apple prioritizes podcasts that have reviews. So all these other podcasts that have all these great reviews, they're getting blasted out there and the distracted dreamer isn't. So reviews really do help real humans like you and me find each other. So I would appreciate it if you would, if you would take a moment to do that. There's also a link in the show notes if that's easier for you. So thank you, thank you, thank you, um, for doing that. And so now let's get into today's episode where we're talking about celebrating. So, so let me ask you this. When's the last time that you really celebrated yourself, not just what you did, but who you're becoming? Now if you're like most of us, you're probably really good at cheering for other people and probably not so good at cheering for yourself. And I've been doing some reflecting, partly because I just celebrated a, a birthday this last weekend. And birthdays, they always stir something in me. They make me pause and take stock, and I have to ask myself, what am I really celebrating? Like, what did I learn this year? Who did I become? But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be your birthday to celebrate how far you've come. You don't need a big party or a milestone, or a reason to celebrate because celebrating yourself, even the tiniest bit, it is one of the most powerful ways to build momentum, to restore your energy and to reconnect to your dreams. And you wanna know what happens when we don't celebrate. We slowly drain the energy that fuels our dreams. You know, we lose motivation and then we start thinking that we're behind, and then sometimes we wonder if any of it even matters. So yeah, this episode is personal and I'm gonna share a few stories from my life. Um, including a big year change that I've talked about previously and a lesson that I keep learning over and over again. But I want you to know this isn't just about me. I'm sharing these stories for you, so maybe you can see yourself in these stories, because if you've been showing up, trying your best and doing the work and still feeling like it's never enough, I want you to know that by the end of this episode. You could be thinking, wait a minute, maybe I do have something to celebrate because I believe that you do. And I wanna start here because there's this book that I've, I've read recently and I'm kind of obsessed with it right now. It's called The Gap in the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. And this is one of the best books I've read in a long time. So I'm gonna put a link to it in the show notes for you. And here's the core idea in the book. It is this, the way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal. Okay? What the heck does that mean? Right? We gotta let that sink in for a minute, because most of us, myself included, we have been measuring. Our success the wrong way. For a long time, we're measuring ourselves against some perfect future version of who we want to be or what someone else has already done. And that way of measuring it will always leave you feeling behind. And that's what they call the gap. Okay? So that's the gap. But when you measure backwards, when you compare yourself to where you were, to where you started, not where you should be, that's the gain. And it changes everything because so many of us are measuring with the wrong tools to begin with, and we think we're behind, but really we're just using the wrong yardstick. You know, one of the things that I talk about often with my coaching clients is the yardstick. You know, the one, the imaginary measuring stick we use to track our progress, and nine times out of 10 we're using someone else's yardstick, their priorities for us, their expectations for us, their timeline. Or worse, we're measuring ourselves by their progress. And then we wonder why do we feel like we're never enough? And that's what I did early on in my life. The yardstick. I was handed it. It was all about responsibility. It was be responsible, make good choices. Work hard. Take the job, it pays the bills, put some money from every paycheck into savings, and do the right thing. And look, those are my values that I still hold close, but that's not all of my values because there's more to life than a yardstick of responsibility. Heck, I was miserable in my first jobs and I know who isn't. But the important thing here that I wanna really highlight is that I felt like it wasn't responsible to change jobs or want something else. I worked corporate jobs for 12 years because that's what I thought I was supposed to do. Like I'm a grown woman, and it never occurred to me to just take the reins of my own life, figure out what I want and make a change. And I suppose part of it was because when I looked at the yardstick, I was successful. I was being responsible. And what I started to realize slowly and painfully at times was that this version of success, it left no room for dreaming or exploring or becoming. So no wonder I was checking all the boxes and still feeling, I don't know, just kind of empty, like something important was really missing. And as I was reading the gap and the gain, this quote hit me hard, and it's this, do you find that no matter how much success you have, you're perpetually dissatisfied. The problem is how you measure. Now this quote hit hard because it names the tension that so many of us feel, but we can't quite explain it. The yard stick that I was using, it was incomplete. It wasn't built to measure the things that made me, me, and until I started rewriting it, until I chose a different way to define success, I was never going to feel like I was enough. But life has a way of giving you moments that test, that new yardstick. And I got all of them at once. I got all of those moments in the span of one year. And that year was 2023. And I've talked about this year before on the podcast, and I'm talking about it from a very different perspective than the way I've talked about it in previous episodes. But let me tell you, if life Hands out transformation years 2023. That was mine. You know, in one year my husband retired. We were selling the home where we raised our three girls in Illinois. We were building a new home in Tennessee. Our middle daughter was getting married. Our youngest graduated from college early, yay. But she was also going through, you know, that big life moment of what's next. And our oldest daughter went through an extremely painful recovery after some surgery, just weeks before I went in for my lumpectomy. Yeah, I had breast cancer and yes, it was a lot. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, have, we had this many major life transitions since we got married back in 1995, and yet through, through all of it, I didn't feel overwhelmed in the way you might expect. And instead of freaking out that my husband was already retired earlier than we'd planned, I found myself thinking, my gosh, we've made it. This is what we dreamed about. And instead of resenting the daily trips to radiation, you know what? I just added them to my to-do list. I focused on what I could control. And you know, the wild part is I wasn't even scared. My biggest fear was that I'd lose my hair and ruin my daughter's wedding pictures. I know vanity, but it, it, it's a thing. But, and, and that's just where my mind went, getting through it in time for the good stuff. That's all I wanted to do. There was so much good stuff, like a couple bad things. It wasn't going to be what I focused on. And you know what I did? I got through and the wedding pictures are beautiful. The memories, they're magical. And unless I told you, you'd never know what I was going through. So looking back, I realized that 2023 wasn't the year that everything fell apart. It was the year that I finally started measuring my life by the gain, because in the gain, everything in life happens for you not to you. I'm gonna say that again in the gain, everything in life happens for you, not to you. And that's what I wanna celebrate the perspective that I chose because there was so much more to be grateful for than not, and that's the joy that I claimed. Now, speaking of perspective, I almost missed another moment. We're celebrating because, uh, I was too busy measuring it against someone else's success. In fact, a lot of other people's success. So let me tell you what happened when this podcast hit 50 episodes. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, I waited years to start it because I was comparing myself to all the other podcasts out there. I thought I wouldn't measure up. I was afraid of how I'd sound or of getting mean comments. And I made up all this stuff that kept me stuck. So when we hit 50 episodes last week, I had that little celebration moment where I was like, oh, yay me. And then I went right into gap mode. Mm-hmm. And I was like, curling. It's just 50 episodes, gotta grip. Other people have hundreds or thousands, you're not crushing it like they are and you should be further along. Ugh. But then I remembered this quote from the gap in the game that says, the way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal. So I looked back to the version of me who was afraid to hit record. Mm-hmm. To the person who thought that she didn't have anything new to say. And to the dreamer in me who let fear delay this project for years, and I thought 50 episodes, that's not small. That's a gain, that's a milestone. That's evidence that I became someone new. I'm a podcaster now, and maybe you have something like that too. Something you've done or built or kept showing up for and you've convinced yourself. It's not big enough to count. It's not big enough to celebrate friend. It counts you count. Let's stop pretending that what you do is mundane. It is not. It counts because here's the thing, when we don't recognize our own growth or our own courage, we miss the miracle of how far we've come. And that's exactly what almost happened to me with this podcast. And I almost missed all of this because I was too busy keeping score of what wasn't happening fast enough. Does that sound familiar to you at all? Um, maybe you're frustrated that your business isn't full-time yet. But I'm telling you, you started, you're still showing up. You're still in it. That's a gain. Maybe you finally ended a friendship that no longer felt safe, and now you're second guessing if you were too much. But that boundary, that was brave. That was you honoring yourself. That's a gain. Or maybe you said no to something that was out of alignment with your values and now you're wondering if you missed an opportunity. But I wanna tell you that no, it created space for the yes, that's coming and something is coming and that's a gain. Or maybe you started speaking up more. Even if your voice still shakes, that's a gain and maybe you're still healing from something hard. And you think because you're not over it yet, that you're not making progress, but you're in it, you're doing the work. Yes, you are. And that's a gain too. And maybe you've been getting outta bed and showing up for your life on days when you'd rather not. And that kind of feels like a miracle. And you might think that that's ordinary, but it's not. It's a gain. Now, I don't know. Everything feels so. Dark and heavy right now in the world. And this is one way that we can bring more light in. And I believe it starts with learning to see our own light and to celebrate it instead of dim it. So here's what I want to ask you. What wonderful thing in your life are you treating? Like it's ordinary? What are you dimming? What are you ready to stop apologizing for? And start celebrating instead. Maybe it's something that no one clapped for. Maybe it's just some quiet progress, some inner work or a decision that you made, or a habit that you changed, or a fear that you faced. What's your gain? Because if you don't learn to see your own growth, you'll never celebrate it, and if you don't celebrate it. You'll struggle to sustain it because you can't keep pouring into your dreams if you're constantly telling yourself that you're not doing enough celebration. It isn't just a nice idea. It's fuel celebrating. It fuels your energy. It fuels your courage. It fuels your next step. So here's to finally celebrating what's actually there. Here's to how far you've come and here's to the person that you're becoming that still has so much more ahead. And if this episode spoke to you, would you share it with someone else who needs to hear it? And thank you so much for being here with me today. I can't wait to welcome you into our next conversation. Bye for now.

Carlene 17:52

Oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.