Tired of Winning

Every coaching session I do starts the same. “Tell me about your wins,” I say. “What are we celebrating this week?”

I do this for two main reasons. First, because we are not trained to see our successes, only our failures. Second, because the more we practice seeing wins, the more we see them.

Let’s unpack that first one a little more.

After the win portion of our call, we dig into the meat of the session. Poking at the edges of an issue, working through a life transition, peeling back layers of expectations and stories, trying on solutions, looking for opportunities.  

During this part, my client is telling me about their life — the moves they've made, the challenges they've gotten through, the things they've built — and I'm sitting there genuinely moved, and they're talking about it like it's nothing.

Or even less than nothing. Shame.

One client — I’ll call her Maya — described moving overseas at 21 with her now husband, a car, and two suitcases. No house, no job, no plan. They slept on an air mattress in a rough neighborhood in a big American city —  neither one of them from there. Neither one of them with family there. And built a life — first a new city, a nicer apartment, then a house. A business, and another. A kid, and another. A full complete life in a country that wasn't theirs. 

When I told her that was remarkable, she said "It's just life. It's just what happened. It wasn't something I did."

That's the thing. We narrate our own accomplishments in the passive or even ashamed voice. Things happen to us. We got through it. It worked out somehow. It’s kind of embarrassing. I should have done it differently. Someone else did it better. 

The winning disappears from the story and with it, the evidence that we are someone who can do hard things.

Another client, we’ll call her Alina, moved across the country alone. Built a community from scratch in NYC — a city that doesn't make that easy. She taught herself to knit during the pandemic. Landed multiple jobs in her field. Made art and traveled. Fostered lifelong friendships. Built apps and code and widgets that are far beyond my technical understanding.

When Alina lists her accomplishments, those aren't on the list. Those are just her life. What she counts instead are the things she didn't finish, the jobs she lost, the drugs she took, the messy apartment, the times she fell short of the person she thought she was supposed to be by now.

This isn't modesty. It's something more than that. It’s punishment. The wins get absorbed into the story as passing facts or passive blips. While the losses stay vivid and specific and personal. The losses become information about who you are — and who you are not. The wins get thrown in the luck bucket. Just life moving forward the way life does.

So what does it take to actually see your accomplishments for the wins they are?

Usually, it takes someone else holding the mirror.

Not in an empty cheerleading way. Not a list of affirmations or a pep talk. Just someone reflecting back what they actually observe. You moved yourself to a new country. You got through addiction. You built something. You started a family. You did that. 

What I've noticed is that the first response to the mirror is almost always deflection. Yes, but. Or a pivot to everything that went wrong in the same period. Or a reframe that gives the credit to someone else, to timing, to luck. The accomplishment gets minimized before it can land.

Once we started poking at the edges of her accomplishments, Libby (also not her real name) started to let the light in. "I have done a lot more than I give myself credit for and I did a lot of it at a very young age. I go to conferences and it's all a bunch of old men. And I am proud that I've had three kids and I've been stressed to the max, but I'm kind of doing a lot of things."

And that, my friends, is the work. Not forcing the recognition, but slowing down long enough to let it become real. To be yours again. To sit with the evidence of your own capability instead of rushing past it toward the next thing you haven't done yet.

And here’s the patriarchy-at-work angle — spoiler, there is always a patriarchal angle. We women are really damn good at dismissing our accomplishments. In a world that has told us to stay small, humble, nice, we don’t know how to make room for winning.

You cannot build self-trust on a foundation you keep refusing to acknowledge. The stories we tell about ourselves are made of moments we've chosen to remember and moments we've chosen to let go. 

The story that everything you have achieved is pure luck is just as real as the story that you are a badass who makes things happen in your life. Both are true. Which one do you want to believe? 

So the next time someone asks you to tell them your wins — and I hope someone does — try something different. Don't deflect. Don't qualify. Don't hand the credit to luck or timing or someone else.

Just say the thing. You did that. You won.