While I was working in the corporate world, I was praised for my achievements, I was praised for my skills and I was praised for my aspirations. Some of these praises gave me a feeling of proudness, but for many of them, I was not able to find the same praise for myself and the same proudness within myself.
And I wondered why. Why is it that I view those achievements as “luck”, as “I don’t know how I even ended up here”, or “how I was able to get that job”, or “to get that recognition” or I almost turned around, too shy to accept the recognition for what from an external perspective indeed was quite an achievement?
It took me a while to realize that there is a strong difference between being proud for things that come from deep within you and those that society accepts as success and something you “should be proud of”. Real being proud about yourself and the actions you take, has to come from within, from what we deliberately choose to achieve or to deliberately care for, so that the achievement means something to us and we then have the chance to feel proud about it.
I have a very few poems that I love deeply and that are openly visible in my apartment. One of them is a poem written by Theodor Fontane, a German author and journalist. He wrote a poem (in German) that is quite difficult to beautifully translate into English, but here is a translation about the essence of what he writes about:
The honor of this world cannot give you honor. What truly lifts and sustains you must live within yourself.
If your innermost being lacks the support of genuine pride, whether the world applauds you, is of little use to you.
The fleeting praise, the glory of the day you may grant to the vain; But this be your sanctuary: To be able to stand before yourself.”
His poem is about feeling proud and the essence of what being proud is all about. It is the ability and feeling of “Being able to stand before yourself”.
We can only be proud, when we are able to stand before ourselves, when we are proud about our own action, our own deeds.
Feeling proud is a beautiful compass of our being
We know when we feel proud. Real proudness. Not the faking, fleeting way of feeling some form of accomplishmenet, but the proudness where our smile reaches our eyes, where we feel it in our body and where we deep within know, that this is something we deeply cared about and we achieved it even thought it wasn’t easy. We can be proud about ourselves.
But how often do we run through the world, eager to follow dreams, careers, relationships and more with the goal to get external praise and proudness. “Did you hear that, I won that amazing price”, “My manager was so proud of me today and my achievements”, “I really feel so good today, my friend told me that I am genuine person”. These are all beautiful praises, but how do you feel about them? What do they do to you?
Do they elevate you with proudness or do they let you feel small, shy and in need to push them away? Does this amazing price give you a deep feeling of proudness, as it portrays something you care about? Or is it rather that you followed a path, said yes to a project you thought would be good for your career, and while you put in many hours of work, the final step is not as rewarding as you hoped for, in real, it is quite disappointing and you almost feel like a fraud. There is a word for it, Imposter Syndrom”. It likely also has some deep dive value issues that show up in these moments, but I believe that the feeling of not praising what we have achieved also comes from the simple truth, that what he have achieved is not aligned with what we deeply from within wanted to have achieved.
So how can you be more proud about yourself and your actions?
Follow what you care about. Follow what what is important for you. And put in those hours for the things you believe necessary enough to bring you close to what you want to achieve. When you then achieve what you set yourself to achieve, then you can be real proud about it. It is your achievements, it is your work, it is your aspirations. Nothing more or less. Just the beauty of bringing it to life.
And this can really be anything. You want to change jobs into a field that you always wanted to go to and finally achieve that? You want to be kind and you work on being kind to others and you see how you let go of things that kept you from being kind beforehand? You want to find more time for yourself in your day-to-day and over time you are able to find time for yourself where it is only you and your reading? These are moments to be proud about.
And the more you feel proud in one area of your life, the more you will be able to feel proud in other areas of your life. It has spilling effects and it will be difficult to let go. It is energizing to see what you are capable of and the more you achieve for yourself, the more you will trust yourself to achieve more, and then you build your proudness muscle by building your muscle of working on things you care about that then allow you to feel proudness, deep from within. The world may like it or not, give you praise or not, but what counts is that you, within yourself, know that you can be proud about yourself.