CPB S2E2: Counting Your Contributions

Counting your contributions – your wins – can have a huge impact on your emotional resilience, your confidence, and your sense of self worth. Show yourself some self-compassion and spend a few minutes each day writing down a win, something you’re proud of, that you accomplished or achieved today. No matter how small. Do it for you!

Referenced in this episode: 

• Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy | Sheryl Sandberg [affiliate link]
• Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude
• Subscribe to our newsletter

Transcript

Hello and welcome. This is Dianne Whitford from Coffee Grit and Inspiration, and this is the weekly Coffee Break podcast. Welcome to the show! Hi, everybody! Welcome to Season two episode two. This week, we’re going to talk a little bit about wins. Journaling or counting, counting our contributions or our wins. Before I get into that, though, I just want to let everybody know there is no video this week. I could not. I just I couldn’t even. I couldn’t even. Just getting the podcast done this week was a win for me. So no video. But just another reminder that if you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet, you can do so at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/subscription. 

So, with the holidays approaching, in fact, our next episode is going to fall on Christmas Day. So I’m going to pre-record it because I’m not going to be recording a podcast on Christmas. Hopefully, you guys aren’t listening on Christmas and you wait till the day after, but it’s still going to be out there in case you are. 

Anyway, with the holidays approaching, it can be super stressful. You know? There’s lots of things that go on at holidays. You have family members that you’re interacting with that maybe you don’t interact with all the time. It causes a lot of anxiety. You gotta travel places. You gotta go places. Maybe there’s some financial worries or you’re having a hard time with presents or finding who’s doing what or whatever. There’s just a lot of reasons why the holidays and all that surrounding time, maybe even the entire end of the year can be super stressful. It’s easy for us to feel overwhelmed or deficient or like we’re not enough. We’re not able to get all this stuff done or not able to meet everyone’s expectations. Or we’re just not able to do it, you know, for whatever reason.

So we talked a lot about gratitude. A couple months ago, we did a theme on the blog around journaling and talked a lot about gratitude and how gratitude having a daily habit, or a habit of gratitude, an attitude of gratitude, if you will, can actually improve your health, and it can make a big difference both emotionally and physically for you when you pay attention to the things that you’re thankful for. And gratitude is being thankful for stuff that happens to you, right? So you’ve received something. You’ve gotten a gift. You’ve received some grace. You’ve, you know, were lucky. Something like that. Something that’s happened to you. And it is really, really important to acknowledge those things and be grateful for those things.

Counting your wins is a little bit different because that is counting the things that you did. You know, really journaling and thinking about – it doesn’t have to be a journal. That’s just – a wins journal is kind of how I think about it. But if we’re counting at least counting our contributions, counting the things that we did well that can have a similar boost. It can build confidence. We start to maybe when we’re feeling self doubt, or we’re not sure if we can do something. We can look back at all the things that we wrote down that we did do well. We can remember that even on days when it’s a challenge to get out of bed, that we did. When it’s a challenge to feed the kids cause we’re sick or we’re tired or we’re sick and tired and we don’t want to…that we did. 

For me, it could be something as simple as I held my temper in a meeting instead of blowing up. Or I remembered someone’s birthday or there was just some little thing that I managed to do that maybe isn’t a big, huge win. But it was something that I was able to accomplish that day. I was able to do that day.

So the reason this came up for me is because I’m reading a book called Option B. And it’s by Sheryl Sandberg, who, you may know from the book called Lean In. She’s also the chief operating officer for Facebook. And she wrote the book Lean in, and then a few years later she lost her husband, and this book, Option B, is about that tragedy and that trauma, how it affected her and how she recovered from it. And so for me, the book, it talks a lot about, it’s really about resilience, and emotional resilience and how do you recover from stuff like that. And so that’s probably gonna be our next theme in the blog. But one of the things that she talks about in that book is there was a period of time after her husband died where, you know, she she just had no motivation to do anything. She was really struggling. She had two kids to take care of. Didn’t know how she was even gonna make it through the day. Some days she couldn’t even get up off the floor. And she started documenting her wins.  

Just writing down one thing every day. That was one thing that she did well. And sometimes it was even, “I made it through a meeting. I made it through an entire meeting” or “I made a good contribution in a meeting”. “I didn’t forget someone’s name”. “I got up this morning”. You know, those kinds of things. And I think when we think about wins, a lot of times we think about big wins. You know, we landed this big account or I don’t know, I’m not in sales, but some big accomplishment or big thing. And that’s what we feel like celebrating. And I think we lose sight sometimes that a big win, or a big goal, achieving a big goal is really just a series of small things that had to happen in order to get that big thing. And so when you’re when you’re thinking about your wins, they could be small things that are leading you to that big goal. And those big goals maybe, are kind of rare. And so choosing a small win to celebrate every day gives us an opportunity to celebrate all those milestones along the way to that big win.  

So some of the reasons why this may be helpful for you. And it’s something that I did that I did it for a little while, but not real intentionally, and I’m gonna start doing it again. But what I think we will get out of something like this is increased confidence. So we’ll see that, you know, when that voice in your head is telling you, “you’re no good. You’re no good at this. You’re no good at that” or or, you know, some of the negative self talk that we tend to to do to ourselves. Looking at your wins can almost refute that, right? So when you think I’m no good at this, you can think of reasons why that’s not true. And you write it down so that you remember the next time that you think that thing you’ve got this proof that that’s not true.  

It can also help you identify what makes you feel good. What things happen, what things do you do that make you feel good. Especially when you’re documenting,  or you’re writing down your wins, if you can write down why it’s a win and how it made you feel to achieve that win, doing that every day and then reviewing it and reflecting back on it can help grow your self awareness. It helps you understand a little bit more about yourself. What brings you fulfillment? What brings you joy? What makes you happy? If you’re not good at spending time thinking about those things, journaling your wins can really help with that.

It can also show you the progress against your goals. Like I mentioned, you know, you got these big, huge, long term goals that are going to take years and, you know, months and months and years and years to accomplish. There’s all kinds of little things that are happening between now and then that are putting you along that path, and if you’re documenting what those things are, it helps you to see your progress. So we all know that, you know, you don’t decide on a goal today, and then two years from now, it just happens by itself. There’s all kinds of little things that go into making that happen. And so maybe you pick a goal that you’re working on or a personal development item that you’re working on or something like that. And you document what win did you have today that put you towards put you further along that thing? So if you’re working on saying no, you know, for example, like instead of just immediately agreeing to do whatever everybody asked you to do and then not ever having anything for yourself, you’re working on saying no. So maybe your daily win is a time when you were able to do that. You know, maybe you’re feeling depressed. Maybe you’re feeling anxious. And so one of your daily wins might be that you had a moment where you didn’t feel anxious or you had a moment when you didn’t feel depressed or you laughed at someone’s joke or you got out of bed. Those kinds of things, they don’t have to be big, huge, earthshaking wins. They can just be little small things.

And I think the fact that they are small, it can help show you that even on really, really terrible, no good, very bad days, there is usually something. And if we’re deliberately and intentionally looking for one thing, one thing that went well or one thing that I did today that I’m proud of myself for. If we’re deliberately looking for that one thing, it can show that even on those no good, terrible, very bad days that there is something, there is something that went okay that went well that we’re proud of. 

So doing it is super easy. If you keep a journal, if you already keep a journal, you could set aside a page, maybe do a page a month or do one page, do several pages where you write down one win for every day of the year. Maybe you, you know, if you’re doing bullet journaling, maybe you have it as part of your monthly set up or your weekly setup. Or however you do that. If you don’t journal, then maybe you could just keep a notebook by your bed. Do it for five minutes. I mean, doesn’t take very long. Five minutes before you go to bed every night. Or maybe just even keep a note on your phone. Just write down something on your phone. Just jot it down. It doesn’t take very long. It’s just remembering to do it and make it a habit. So whether it’s a journal or a notebook by your bed or a note on your phone, it doesn’t really matter. The part that matters is making it a habit. So doing it often enough, maybe set a reminder on your phone something along those lines to just take a minute at the end of every day and document your daily win.

One thing as you’re doing that, is see if you can tie that daily win to one of your goals. If you can’t, that’s okay. But see if you can tie your daily win to one of your goals so that you can see the progress against something that you’re working on and you can see that you’re still moving forward. You’re still doing stuff against that goal. The other thing. I mentioned it earlier. I’ll say it again, is to document that it’s a win and why. Why it’s a win for you, why it was a big deal for you, why it was something that was important to you. I think that will also help in understanding more about what makes you feel good, what makes you happy. And then those are the things that you can work on doing more of.

And then think about like maybe after you’ve been doing it two months, three months, six months, one year. You’re gonna have a whole lot of things written down of things that you did well and things that you’re proud of and that is a powerful tool. It’s a powerful tool when you’re feeling moments of self doubt and you, you know, just feeling worthless. I feel that way sometimes. I feel deficient, a lot where I’m doing something that I’m not used to doing, I’m doing something that I don’t think I’m going to be good at, or I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone, I’m in over my head, you know, those kinds of things. I’m looking forward to having something that I can look back on to show that I still am good at stuff. There’s things that I’ve accomplished and, you know, maybe at the end of the year, you look back over everything that you accomplished that year. And maybe there’s some big wins in there, maybe there’s just a bunch of small wins. It doesn’t matter. It’s things that you took the time to congratulate yourself for.

This is also a really good exercise in self compassion. Like if you think about a friend, if you have a friend that’s struggling, you know that maybe they’re feeling some of the same things that you might feel from time to time. They’re worthless, or they’re not sure if they’re accomplishing anything. Wouldn’t you take a minute and just remind them of something that they did well or or something that, you know? You would show them appreciation. “Hey, that was a good point you made in that meeting today. Appreciate that.” Or, you know, “you supported me and and I really appreciated that” or something along those lines. You would say that to your friend and self compassion is being as kind yourself as you are to other people. So why not extend that same kindness to yourself about something that you did well and appreciate yourself for it? If there’s nothing wrong with that and it just will help you. It might feel weird, but it will benefit you and make you feel better in the long run.

So that’s really all I have today. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. Again, we’ll see you next week or talk to you next week anyway. But I hope everyone has a wonderful, wonderful holiday. I hope you have lots of wins to document, lots of grateful things, gratitude things to be grateful for. And take care of yourself, take care of your people and have a wonderful rest of the year. Bye now.