Rachel’s Room🛋️Celebrating Small Wins

Hi, Cadre fam. Happy Wednesday. I am very happy to be here. I'm repping my new Cadre gear. I am still coming down from cloud nine after the Cadre wellness summit. I just got back last night. It was just like an incredible event. And, yeah, I'm very, very grateful to have been so if you attended, so glad I got to meet you. If you didn't attend, that's okay, because all of the juicy stuff that we did at the summit includes things that all of us talk about on this app, so you're in the right place if you're new here.

My name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer, a mental health advocate. I've been in therapy for 19 years now for a variety of different mental health diagnoses, and my mission is to destigmatize hard to talk about topics and make people feel less alone. By sharing my story, I talk about all different kinds of things, including eating disorder, recovery, suicidal depression, recovering from divorce, sexual trauma, anxiety, panic attacks. And when I go live, what I really like to do most is just talk to you about things that I'm presently working on, whether in therapy or things that are coming up for me, and just have some conversation around coping.

If there's anything that you want me to talk about in these lives, any tools you need, support you need, I'm so happy to take requests. So, as always, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you would like me to talk about. So today I'm going to be talking about celebrating small wins, which feels relevant for me because. So I was so at this Cadre summit, I was one of the speakers, and I was really, really overwhelmed, really anxious. I don't typically like public speaking. I get a lot of anxiety about.

I get anxiety about my anxiety. And so. And I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best, do the best in most areas of my life. So one of the ways I like to cope with that, both before and after, something that I notice I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself for, or feels like something important. So maybe it's like a work deadline or a first date or a family event, like anything that feels. That feels important to me. And then vicariously, I put pressure on myself for.

I like to upfront think about what is one thing that if it happened, I could say I succeeded, rather than saying, like, all of these things need to happen in order for me to call it a success. How can I pull that back and say, if this one small thing happens, I'm going to call it a win, and everything else is bonus. So for this event, I told myself, if I show up and I do the talk, I've won. That's my win. So by holding onto that, I was able to think about that being that would be how I defined my success, which helped me kind of relieve the pressure of, like, what if people hate it?

What if people don't like me? What if I mess up? What if I say the wrong thing? You know, all the, like, the what ifs of what could go wrong. I was able to reduce anxiety about that because I wouldn't be succeeding as long as I showed up and I did it without quantifying or qualifying how I did it, that would be a win. So then after I did the talk, everything else just felt like bonus. It was like, oh, I did it. I showed up, I already won. And then everything else was like, just added juice, added extras, added cherries.

So that's how I kind of like to prepare for things that I put pressure on myself for in order to pull back the pressure that I put on myself. Thanks, Rachel. Yes, I did do it. Yahoo. I did it. And then after I do something that feels important or difficult, I think it's really important for us to celebrate. I think something that was really difficult for me for a very, very long time was celebrating my wins, celebrating things that I was proud of, celebrating things that went well in my life. It always felt very self serving to me to talk about my accomplishments or to be proud of myself.

I was taught to be very humble, and if you do something well, you just keep going. Thanks, Abby. Proud of you, too. And I learned that by not allowing myself to celebrate my wins, I also found that I was very willful to celebrate other people's wins. And so I think that there's so much value in celebrating one another. And in order to celebrate one another, we have to be comfortable celebrating ourselves. We have to be comfortable receiving celebration. So for my personal self and my own practice of getting comfortable with receiving positive feedback, receiving, hi, Luke.

Love you. Receiving celebration. Whether it's for my birthday or for graduating school or for whatever it is, I have to learn how to feel okay and comfortable with celebrating myself. So I always like to do personal self reflection. Reflection. After I do anything hard, important, valuable, and ask myself, like, where do I feel like I had some small wins? And again, rather than attaching to the most giant or perfect or top, top, top win, I focus on small wins. So again, reflecting back on the experience, I can go like, a small win for me is that I showed up.

A small win for me is that I did a little bit of breathing before I went up into the talk. A small win for me is that I spoke to someone that I was nervous to talk to. So just finding little, small things about the experience that are just about noticing all these tiny, little, small wins, rather than having it to be attached to this big, huge thing of, like, I did the best in the possible world. And here's how I know. Like, if we keep, if we always reflect on things in terms of how we celebrate in this really, really big way, then we keep ourselves in this head state of I always have to make huge waves in order to accomplish something.

And oftentimes it's those small things. Yes, Rachel, the little things make up the big things. Exactly. The little things are what add up until in career, that sense of bigger, bigger win. And then we allow ourselves to start noticing the small things, too. So then I'm training my brain throughout the day to go, ooh, small win, I, you know, I got a smile from a neighbor or ooh, small win, I finished my emails before 09:00. Or ooh, small win, I folded my laundry. And then we start to, like, accumulate these small wins, which is really akin to gratitude in a lot of ways.

And, and that creates a bigger sense of joy throughout our day and satisfaction rather than waiting for something really, really great to happen and not really acknowledging those smaller things. So that's my small tip of the day. It's about celebrating small wins. Next week is. Next week is thanksgiving. I will be going live next Wednesday. I'm hoping to talk about coping with. Coping with the holidays. So if you have sort of some things that might feel relevant. I know a lot of times with the holidays, things like boundaries come up, things like food come up, things like just navigating interpersonal relationships and family members.

So if there's anything specific that feels like you want extra support with, let me know in the comments. And I would love to provide whatever support I can sending you all a big Wednesday hug. And I cannot wait to see you next week here in Rachel's room. Buh bye, feelings. Okay, wait. Before I say goodbye, Rachel's saying feelings. Wait, wait. Let's pause because I see this before I'm ending. Rachel, can you elaborate on what you mean by feelings over the holidays? Missing your dad. Ooh. Okay, so, like, grief around the holidays and that bringing up people that are missing.

Is that what you mean? Okay, being around family and not measuring up. Yeah. Hang on. Let me write this down. These are all really, really important topics. The holidays bring up a lot for people. And oftentimes I think that we're kind of. It just takes us by surprise a lot of times. So these are really. These are really good things to talk about. Rachel. I'm going to write these down, and I will find a way to bring those in next week. m.. PST. Until then, big hugs. I don't know what this move was.

Big circle hug, sending you lots of love. And I hope you find pockets of rest. Enjoy today, and I will see you next week.