mechanism

Pride is the authorship signal: something worked and you were the cause. It is the counterweight to shame and it is chronically under-logged — most people record failures in detail and successes as luck. Without the record, the internal model of what you are capable of stops updating.

not to confuse with

good: no authorship attached, just fine · satisfied: it was enough, not that you did it · grateful: the credit goes outward · excited: aimed at what is coming, not at what is done

in the body

chest opens, spine straightens, a small smile that arrives before the thought

feel it

Let it land without the immediate «yes, but». The reflex to diminish it is what keeps the self-model outdated. Thirty seconds of holding it is the point.

what to do

Lock the authorship: name exactly what you did — the decision, the hours, the thing you risked. «It worked out» does not update anything; «I kept going after the third failure» does.

don't

do not attribute it entirely to luck or to others · do not immediately raise the bar and start the next thing · do not wait for someone else to confirm it

if you do nothing

The evidence goes unrecorded and the internal model stays where it was: capable of little, lucky occasionally. Then the next hard thing gets approached from that model rather than from what you have actually done.

after

the specific action logged is what feeds confidence later, not the feeling · if pride is hard to hold for thirty seconds, that is worth noticing on its own

your track

5 episodes · median 6 → 7 · most frequent source: shipped things · best tool: name what YOU did ✓4

keys

0–9 set the scale · enter = next step · d = tool done · esc = close dialogs

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