When the kids were really little, I once mentioned to their pediatrician that I had to bribe them to take medicine or something that they didn't want to but genuinely needed to do. And probably in trying to assuage my mommy guilt, he gently chided me and said "not bribing, incentivization. You're teaching them what they'll need to learn as grown ups." And it may be semantics, but that made me feel better.
Queen Sass is a fan of sticker charts. Not the actual steps of doing something to earn the stickers (when her brother told her that I wanted them to clean up their toys in the living room, she very nonchalantly responded "go ahead, Brother, you can have my sticker" ::face palm::) but she's a big fan of the prize that is earned once the sticker chart is filled. Clearly we've missed a step in teaching the whole incentivization life lesson and there's some work to be done there, but when she does accomplish something, she's quick to remind us over and over that she was the one that refills the dogs' water bowls all the time and that she's good at giving them belly rubs. So, I guess there's that and I should remember Plato's "Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow." So... soo... slow.
I sometimes feel like I may suffer from the reverse - my parents have long ingrained in us John Wesley's prayer of "Lord, let me not live to be useless" and sometimes feel the need to keep working and doing more to an extreme but not particularly great at seeing any of my own accomplishments. Even when someone else points them out, I tend to downplay them because that affirmation feels so odd and foreign and uncomfortable to me. But a few years ago, I was coached to start tracking my own wins, even the small ones, because it needed to start with me first instead of from outside validation and in the beginning, omg, that felt so weird and self-serving and silly.
But after awhile it started to feel okay to acknowledge things I did, and I was surprised at how much more self-assured I began to feel. Somehow tracking and writing down some of these wins, little and big, didn't feel so arrogant and self-serving but just part of my own evolving and growing. And maybe that seems obvious to other people but it felt groundbreaking to me. It's still a small practice that I'm trying to be consistent about but maybe I can learn to navigate that grace between being useful but not need to be endlessly earning, and recognizing that's enough and I'm enough... And maybe that's the real life lesson in learning to find the big little wins.
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