I've been observing for awhile now my tendency to minimize my success, downplay it........and to maximize/exaggerate any of my perceived failures.

I already know from experience that I can brood, that I can shine a spotlight on my supposed failings. But because I haven't been as skilled at focusing on the good stuff, I've been practicing. Working on slowing down my automatic assumptions, on figuratively underlining anything that encourages my self esteem.

I participate in an intriguing site www.ourmedia.org (It is an alpha site and is having glitches tonight, so can't grab exact urls). I am slowly learning how the site works and also about various issues of creating media such as videos, music, podcasts, stories and more.

Ourmedia periodically chooses guest moderators who highlight a few picks of their favorite media on the home page. I recently discovered that my poem "Lucy of The Yellow" was picked.

Now, when I saw that, first I was sure that someone else had written a poem that just by chance had that name. Nope, further investigation showed it was mine. Then I heard myself babble in my head about how this wasn't such a big deal, they had to choose something, now everyone will see how I'm not that swift of a writer, and besides it is just one inferior poem and probably their fingers slipped while they were keyboarding and really they meant something else.



Fortunately I managed to slow all that down and contemplate. It is actually kinda cool that my poem was chosen. I get to enjoy.

So I am celebrating with chocolate chip cookies this evening and by sharing this story. I'd love to hear from other folks how they work to amp their deserved self esteem up one cookie at a time.

Sarah