Do you ever find yourself in a situation where someone compliments you and you minimize or deflect it? I remember when I graduated from law school my aunt, a woman who had gone to business school at night while fighting breast cancer and raising two children under the age of five alone after divorcing an alcoholic, advised me not to minimize it. Take the moment. Acknowledge your accomplishment. Pat yourself on the back for the effort and work and sacrifice.

I saw something online recently that struck me. A woman received a compliment and immediately starting minimizing the accomplishment and downplaying her contribution and the other person said, “I’m going to give you your flowers, you can decide whether to water them or not” and that just hit home for me.

We are so busy minimizing our accomplishments and downplaying the effort we’ve put in, that we don’t celebrate the successes that come from them. We are often taught to make things look effortless. We see so much entertainment about “how does she do it?” because we are working to make every effort seem effortless. But when we do big things and have big successes, we should be able to give and take accolades.

Tooting your own horn is not such a terrible thing. We all have days where we just suck. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to and you’re struggling to keep it together in every new activity or task. And then sometimes we have days where the magic works. We manage to put all the puzzle pieces together in a beautiful way and the things that were supposed to happen just do in a seamless and easy manner. Celebrate those days. Take those wins.

We all know not every day is going to be filled with wins. Don’t minimize the good moments because you’re so busy moving on to the next thing. Take a minute. Appreciate the outcome of your time and energy. And sure, delve back into battle and stave off the next crisis, but take a moment to pat yourself on the back and recognize the success.

Water your flowers.