I’m proud of you.
I’ve been thinking about what it means when I say to my students “I’m proud of you.” A colleague recently traveled a long distance to hear a former student of hers appear as a soloist with an orchestra. She said to me, “I’m proud of her.”
It seems to me that, at least superficially, this is a most peculiar and elitist expression. Would she have traveled a long distance to sit in the audience next to the former student while the person who won the competition played instead? This may not even be an appropriate question, since I’m not privy to the circumstance of the performance. And for the purposes of this post, it doesn’t matter. What the remark did is get me thinking about what I mean by “pride.”
Pride in the conventional sense is normally taken to mean a feeling that stems from a justified sense of self esteem, or a reasonable and justifiable feeling of one’s position (see “pride.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002). The whole citation is a bit of an eye opener, e.g., one large religious group considers “Pride” to be a sin worthy of eternal torment…). The emphasis is on the “justifiability” of the pride; I’ve made a success as a flute student, I’ve won this concerto competition or this performance contract, so I am worthy of pride. That’s just not satisfactory, to me. At first, I was not sure why.
Others would claim that this is not how “pride” is intended; we respect and admire a student’s accomplishments the way we admire the competitors in Special Olympics, or the stumbling progress of a toddler: not because of their accomplishments in an absolute sense, but because what that we suppose their efforts tell us about their character, their determination, and all that. It’s patronizing. Not that patronizing a child or someone you for whom you serve as a caregiver is a bad thing. Everyone needs a sense of unearned, unconditional regard. That’s still not what I mean by the word when I address it to my students.
I want to re-define pride. Pride is what you feel when you go, by your own efforts, from nothing to something. It arises when you set yourself a task – literally, any task – work at that task, and reach the goal the task set for you. That and nothing more.
When I say to you, my student, “I am proud of you,” what I mean is “you applied yourself to the goals you set, and you reached them, and I admire you for that.” This means that the feeling is meaningful because it is earned, because it reflects actual accomplishment, not mere participation. The more often you reach your goals, and the harder you work at them, the prouder I am. The important thing is that you reach for them – not how lofty they are in other people’s eyes.