Soften Saturday: A Trip Down the Stairs

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This week’s Soften Saturday is a guest post from my friend Tina, who writes at It’s A Journey…from Princesshood to Beyond. I met Tina a few years back at the gym, where she straight up said to me one day, “I wanna know your story. What’s your deal? How’d you get here?” I’m guessing she eyed a fellow traveler, another gal who battled with body image, that damned scale and food. Her writing is always thought provoking and encouraging and has the same to-the point style as her approach to me that day at the gym. I hope Tina will be a frequent contributor to Soften Saturday, I know you’re gonna find yourself saying, “Yes!” and “Exactly!” when you read what she writes. –Johnna

Today a friend of mine posted a video of her little son going down the stairs with a caption of “this is why it takes forever to go down a flight of stairs these days.” It was adorable. He took a step. He looked at her, and he applauded himself and squealed “YAY!” And he had a look of pure JOY each time. Every. Stair. It was awesome.

And it inspired me.

Why do we have to praise ourselves only when we achieve super human feats? You know what I mean? We all have end goals. We all want to achieve great things, but what if along the journey we were all just happy because we did something small. What if we were happy because we accomplished SOMETHING in our day. I think we all need a few more pats on the back.

Yay me! I made it through today without eating crap! Yahoo! I got up today and got going, even though I was feeling cruddy and wanted to lay around! WOO HOO! I parallel parked my car in the appropriate number of turns! I’M AWESOME RIGHT NOW! Why do I have to wait until I do something HUGE??

You know we do it for our children all the time. We praise them for all the little things they do. It builds them up. It helps them develop self esteem and pride. It’s good for them.

We all operate better with positive reinforcement. So let’s work on giving ourselves a little more praise, and maybe we too will find the joy that little man found in going down the stairs…one step at a time.

You can read more from Tina here. And leave a little love for her here in the comments because we all thrive on a bit of positive reinforcement, from the outside and the inside.

About Soften Saturdays: Soften Saturdays features posts from me and others I admire on the topics of healthy body image, healthy living, being kind to ourselves and more. Saturday is an especially great day to think about being soft with ourselves!

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