I Found Joy Where I Least Expected It

BY ELEANORA MORRISON

I’ve been working on some self-awareness lately. I’m taking full ownership of the fact that no matter how many blessings I’ve been given in my life or how many goals I work hard to achieve, the never-ending inner-monologue of babble swirling around in my brain tells me I’m never enough.

I try not to pay it mind, because everyone I talk to about this, regardless of how much they’ve accomplished, confirms that this programming appears to be an unfortunate universal truth. If this voice is always going to be there, how do I hack it? My husband and I were reflecting on this a few weeks ago. As two ambitious and driven people, we realized this:

It is far too easy to focus on pushing forward to the next project, task, or accomplishment that’s in front of us without taking a beat to acknowledge the small wins we experience along the way.

We decided to start 2022 with a practice of writing down as many wins we could think of that we earned in 2021, both individually and together. Really, this was a gratitude practice. What we found was affirming.

When you take the time to celebrate your efforts and let yourself feel gratitude for the steps along the way toward your accomplishments and new chapters, your perspective starts to shift to see more joy in each day.

After that exercise, we made a pact to commit to doing this every new year’s eve from here on out, and to finding ways to build celebrating weekly wins into our routines together. We didn’t realize how much our happiness could depend on this. So far, it’s been working, and it’s helping us to shift the script from I have to do this to I get to do this.

–Eleanora Morrison, Chief Editor

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