Welcome everyone. And thank you for being here today for this mastering the art of celebrating self workshop. So my name is Amy Yip and I am a somatic transformation and mental fitness coach.I work with high achieving women to let go of the shoulds quiet their inner critic and build self-confidence so they can be the author of their own life story and part of building confidence is the ability to celebrate yourself. So I'm really excited to be here with you today to help you build your capacity to celebrate your amazingness. And what we will cover today will include what is celebration all about we'll talk through. Why does celebration even matter? And then how can you celebrate yourself each and every day? So I am curious, how did you celebrate yourself today? What did you do today? That was amazing and that you are proud of and you can use the chat and let me know what did you do today? That was amazing that you're proud of. And how did you celebrate that? And then consider this? What do you do when your partner or someone close to you gets a promotion? What do you do when your baby makes their first attempt at standing, what do you do when your niece or nephew scores a point in their first soccer match? What do you do when your pet learns a trick?

And then what do you do when you do something amazing? When you receive an honor award, when you complete a project, when you meet a health goal, when you score points in a league game, when you learn a new skill, what do you do when you do something amazing? And the thing is people don't celebrate themselves enough. Women in particular, don't celebrate themselves enough. And if you're like most people, then you're incredible at celebrating others achievements, regardless of how big or small, we're phenomenal at being their cheerleader, honoring their wins and successes, but we neglect to do the same for ourselves.

I hear all sorts of reasons from people about why they don't celebrate themselves. Celebrating. Feels too self congratulatory, too self serving. Well, it wasn't that big of a deal anyways. If I celebrate now I'll get complacent, it'll hold me back from achieving even more. So, consider what holds you back from celebrating? What do you tell yourself about celebrating and you can put it into chat if you'd like. What do you tell yourself? Maybe it's, I don't deserve to celebrate. Maybe it's, well, I haven't really achieved the ultimate goal yet. We all have so many excuses and reasons for not celebrating ourselves. And all of it is a lie and so becoming aware of what stops you from celebrating. What are the things that you tell yourself? And oftentimes I get a question, well, what's, what's the harm in not celebrating? And you might be thinking, I don't see why it's so bad. I've never celebrated myself. I'm just fine celebrating myself. Seems unnecessary. Seems like a distraction from my motivation to keep doing to keep achieving more and in reality, it has the opposite effect. Right? And to bring this to life, let's go back to that baby analogy. Let's go back to a baby. Learning to get up and to walk. Imagine there's a baby. Maybe it's your own, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a family members, baby and they're learning to walk, they're learning to stand up and walk and imagine if the baby fell.

If it was getting up 1 ft up the other foot up, it wobbles and it falls down. Imagine if you said, why are you so incompetent? Come on. You're already one year old and you can't even stand on your own. You just get up and you wobble and you fall. I'm ashamed of. You don't even bother trying anymore. Just stay down there. Right. Imagine if you did say that, what do you think would happen to the baby's confidence? Do you think the baby would get up to keep trying or would it give up? And what is it really? Like, right, baby gets up one leg, two legs, wobbles falls down. And what did the parents do? The parents run over and say, oh my gosh. Did you see precious little Logan. Logan stood for a second. So precious. You're doing so good, good job, good job, good job. Right. And we celebrate their every attempt. We encourage them at every step, regardless of the outcome. And this in turn, keeps them going, keeps them motivated and keeps them confident. And we need to do that for ourselves too. And so back to the question of, well, what's the harm in not celebrating? Yes, you might never have celebrated and maybe you've achieved a lot in life. But imagine if you did celebrate, where could you be, you might be further along, you might be achieving more and you might be happier and more self-confident doing. So, so what is celebration anyways?

What do you think celebration is? And you can jot it down, you can think about it, you could put it into to the chat, you know, but what is celebration? Celebration is really about recognizing that you are where you are because you've worked hard. Oftentimes we think celebration is just about bragging, proving that you're better than others or giving yourself an excuse to do nothing. That's not what it's about. It's about giving yourself credit because you deserve it. In fact, recognizing yourself doesn't even have to be a public thing.

It can be as private as you like because it truly is about you celebrating you. It's an act of self love, self acknowledgement and celebration is also a tool to help you be more grateful for your life. When we celebrate, we remember all the good that is in our life. So why does celebration matter now that you know what celebration is? Why do you think it matters? Celebration matters because it keeps you motivated. It's easy to identify areas where we feel like we're falling short and let's face it. We're never where we feel like we should be right? And the thing is if you're constantly dwelling on all of your shortcomings or how far you still have to go, how motivated would you be? It's usually these thoughts that hold us back and if I'm constantly dwelling on what is wrong and where I've fallen short, I might just give up because my focus is on. Well, how's this even worth it? You know, I've put in all this time, not even there, but when you celebrate yourself, when you give your attention to and celebrate the little victories, you're essentially reminding yourself I'm on the right path, right?

It's almost like a project plan, a project plan where you have the big goal at the end and you have the little milestones along the way and you're basically celebrating all the little milestones. Recognizing that yes, I'm making progress to this thing that feels very far away.

And it keeps you motivated. Celebrating also matters because it builds your confidence, right? If you are constantly focused on obstacles and how hard things are or your past failures, you might feel defeated, powerless. But if you celebrated all the victories and if you remember the baby analogy, right?

If we celebrate all the little steps towards getting up and walking, then we stay confident and we keep trying and you might be thinking, but I don't, I don't wanna come off as arrogant. Oftentimes, confidence is confused with arrogance, but I promise you there are two different things.

Confidence is knowing and believing in what you do well and what you don't, it's about being able to step into that truth and arrogance. On the other hand, is a way to cover your shortcomings. So they are very different, right? Celebrating matters because it actually builds your confidence and celebration also matters because it gives you more meaning and joy. We're often so busy doing so busy achieving that. We miss out on life. We're so focused on that final goal, that final destination, we don't enjoy the journey to get there. And so celebrating yourself gives you that moment to pause to breathe. And when you celebrate and savor in that moment, it nurtures a sense of greater meaning. It enables you to appreciate the small things that bring you joy, the things that make life worth it. Celebration also helps with your overall well being. People who celebrate. And a lot of studies have shown this people who celebrate, have improved physical health, have better coping strategies are more optimistic. Take better care of themselves, tend to be less stressed, right? And so celebration increases people's overall sense of well being, regardless of socio-economic factors, education, age or gender. So, why wouldn't you want to celebrate yourself? Right. And remember in this life, if you don't celebrate yourself, nobody else will.

And so if I've done a good job of persuading you that celebrating yourself matters, I hope that maybe you're thinking, oh, ok. Yeah, I should celebrate more, but it's so time consuming and expensive in bubble baths, you know, fancy dinners, nice bottles of champagne. They cost too much and we can certainly celebrate in those ways. But there's another way. And so let's break down how we can celebrate with greater intentionality. And it's in three easy steps that we can do each and every single day. And those three steps are, the first step is to pause. The second step is to reflect and the third step is to make a physical action to celebrate. And so let's start with pausing. As lau said, nature does not hurry yet. Everything is accomplished. So the next time you find yourself running up a mountain, looking for a new mountain to climb, going, going, going, you know, find that moment to pause. In fact, it's beneficial to take intentional pauses throughout our days. And how can you do that? What's a way to take intentional pauses? You could settle on an alarm for every hour or every two hours or you can say, you know what, every time I go to the bathroom, I'm gonna pause and, and, and take a moment. Right. Use certain times and signals to pause and celebrate. The second step is reflection, reflecting on what you want to celebrate. And the question to ask yourself is what is worth celebrating here. For most of us, we think of some things then automatically jump to.

Oh, but it wasn't a deal. Oh, I don't want to boast about that. Oh, but what if it, it's too early to celebrate? What if it ends up failing? Then, you know, I celebrate it for no reason. And if those thoughts come up when you're thinking about what to celebrate, that's your saboteur speaking, your inner critic trying to keep you small. So I invite you to reframe the question here to how might I celebrate? How might I celebrate? Even if it seems silly or small?

As a matter of fact, consider, how might I start finding a moment to pause and celebrate something each and every day? Even the small things, right? Even what I call failures because failures come with gifts that we can celebrate. Perhaps you can reflect on what is it that I learned? How did I grow? And one of the things that I used to celebrate? Was allowing myself to rest. And it sounds silly, but it was actually really hard for me to do because I am a, a recovering hyper achiever. So any time that I was sick, I would feel guilty if I took a nap during the day. And so what did I do? One time? I was sick, I went and I took a nap and when I awoke, I celebrated that I let myself take a nap. Right? And so it might seem silly for some people to say, why are you celebrating that you took a nap? And the thing is, it was hard for me. And so when you're reflecting on, well, what can I celebrate? It could be something that seems small, that seems silly and it's still worthy of celebrating. So we did step one which is pause. We did step two, which is reflect. And now step three is taking a physical action to celebrate. And in order to do this, we're going to take physical action. So if you're in a space where you can move about and stand, you can certainly do that.

If not, you could do this seated also. Now, oftentimes when we think our daily wins are not a big deal, what do we do? We, we might think about it like, oh yeah, OK. I did that thing. Moving on to the next thing, right? It's just this brief moment that we think about it, but we don't actually spend the time to celebrate. And so what I want to do here is to actually take a physical action. So I invite you to take your favorite arm and raise that arm up and I'm gonna raise my arm up here and now just pat yourself on the back and I call this the self backpack. Ok. So that's one thing that you could do. The second thing that you could do, you could raise the same arm or you could raise another arm and you put that arm up and now you go high five, high five, you did. Amazing. Good job, right? So I call that the, the high five. You can also, if you're standing, you could jump in high five if you're able to, which is a lot more fun. And that's my, my favorite thing to do. You can also put both arms up and now just hug yourself. You did. Amazing, great job. Yeah, that's the self hug. And the last thing that I'll, I'll teach you because I want you to imagine curtains in front of you opening and as you do as the curtains are opening have both arms up and the curtains are opening and you say yes, I know.

I'm amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Take a bow, right? And you can go your local grocery store, they have those doors that the sliding doors that open. So when you're going to buy yourself a treat to celebrate or whatever it is that uh you wanna get there to celebrate as the doors are open, you walk into your Trader Joe's or your safeway or whatever store and say yes, I know. I'm amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Right now. How are these different than typical ways that we think to celebrate? One? They're free. Two. They, they take a few seconds to do three. It's a physical action and it actually changes the, the chemical makeup, the chemistry in your body in that moment. Right? I'm sure many of you are laughing as your high fi being and as your yourself and you're, you're doing this wave and that's the point because as you're doing that, it is almost nearly impossible for you to be jumping and high fiving and for your inner critic to be saying, but it's not a big deal.

Why are you even celebrating? Right. And so that's the, what we're trying to get to is the physical movement to reinforce the positiveness. All right. And so the three steps again is, and well, let's do it all together right now. Let's pause and then let's reflect. What did you do so far today? That was amazing that you're proud of. And if you can't think of anything to celebrate, think some more right there, there's a lot of things to celebrate anniversaries transitions. First, small goals, the fact that you're here and now step three, pick one of your favorite actions and do a good job. Good job on being here, good job on, on getting outside for the walk today. Awesome stuff. Right. And so you can put in the chat. How did you feel? What did you notice as you're doing this? And you know, the thing is we are great at being mean to ourselves. We are great at shaming ourselves, making ourselves feel worse. We're really great at that. But what can we be better at? We can all be better at loving ourselves. We can celebrate ourselves better, right? Let's stop waiting for an excuse to celebrate and feel good because as Oprah says, the more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate. And so what can you start celebrating today? Right. And I, I'm reading the chats, my spirits were lifted, a smile appeared and that makes me very happy. So, you know, my invitation to you, keep celebrating.

You know, I have a nine rules for remarkable woman workbook on my website. And please do if you have any questions, connect with me, you can reach out on linkedin or send me an email and I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have and enjoy the rest of this conference. Thank you.