Your Own Personal Cheerleader
Look at you, you amazing thing, you. I saw what you did. More importantly, you saw what you did.
Can you imagine if this were your internal voice? Telling you what an incredible creature you are? Not waiting for external validation, but accepting your own praise?
That’s what I wish for all women.
And that’s why I think we should all have a little cheerleader with us. She’d remind us to acknowledge our successes and celebrate our courage. Eventually, I’d want the symbol to disappear once we’ve built our badass acknowledgment muscle.
She wouldn’t be there to fake positivity.
She would be a reminder not to outsource our validation.
Every time we accomplish something, finish a difficult task, complete a challenging project, make a call we’ve resisted, tackled the action item we’d been neglecting or procrastinating on, we could pick her up and say to ourselves, “nicely done.”
This could be for everyday things just as much as the bigger projects and activities.
Things like sending the email. Going to the dentist. Asking for more money. Having the difficult conversation. Going to the workout you wanted to skip. Hitting publish.
The regular everyday things matter just as much as the bigger projects and activities.
She’d also be there as we are debating how to start something or struggling through it.
Many of us learned how to encourage everyone else before we ever learned how to encourage ourselves.
Girls are taught to be everyone else’s cheerleaders. We cheer for the boys’ teams. Women are paid poorly to cheer for men’s sports. We learn how to believe in other people, instill confidence when theirs is faltering, and make sure they know someone is on their side.
Who does that for us?
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As an athlete, I know the power of positive and encouraging words. When I was exhausted, frustrated, wondering if I could go on, if success was even possible, I would have loved to know someone was on the sidelines believing I could do it, especially when I wasn’t sure myself.
As a former cheerleader, I understand how to be the voice of encouragement. As an athlete and a woman who has rarely been on the receiving end of that, I would really have appreciated it.
As I think through this, it’s not just for after the work is done, she represents the encouragement we all wish we had. She represents the cheerleader in all of us who has spent a lifetime believing in everyone else.
Now it’s her turn to cheer for us.
Before we begin, she says, “You’ve got this.”
While we are struggling, she says, “Keep going. It’s worth it.”
And when it’s done, she says, “See, I knew you could do it, you amazing creature, you. Yes, you!”
P.S. I came up with this idea during a coaching call the other day and am exploring ways to create her. My husband asked if she should talk. I’m not sure she needs someone else’s voice. That feels a little too much like external validation. I think her job is simply to remind us to hear our own.
About the Author
Terri Hanson Mead is the multi-award-winning author of Piloting Your Life, a Stanford Continuing Studies instructor, speaker, entrepreneur, commercially rated helicopter pilot, and Managing Partner of Solutions2Projects, LLC.
Through her writing, speaking, coaching, retreats, and adventures around the world, Terri helps women navigate reinvention and intentionally design lives aligned with who they are now — not who they were expected to be.
Based in Redwood City, California, Terri is the mother of two college graduates and has been married to her husband, Zeke, for more than 30 years. Together, they share their travels, adventures, and observations about navigating modern midlife through Zeke & Terri Adventures.
In her spare time, Terri plays tennis, explores museums and gardens, enjoys a great glass of champagne, and flies helicopters around the San Francisco Bay Area, especially under the Golden Gate Bridge.
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