Authentic Pride Patterns

Jason's signature coaching exercise: identify three to four moments of genuine personal pride, then mine them for the patterns underneath. What made each moment hard? What drove persistence? What skill emerged? The patterns that surface become a personal playbook — the client's unique way of making things happen in the world. He uses this in his two-hour intro sessions and has refined it across hundreds of client conversations.

The exercise is grounded in psychologist Jessica Tracy's research on the emotion of pride, which Jason absorbed from her book Take Pride and a Hidden Brain episode. The framework appears in newsletter #224 "Uncovering Your Patterns" (2024-10-27) and is referenced throughout his coaching practice.

The Research: Two Kinds of Pride

Jessica Tracy's distinction between two kinds of pride is the conceptual foundation:

🏆 Hubristic pride — feeds your ego. Makes you focused on being better than others. Increases the desire to control, manipulate, and dominate. 💙 Authentic pride — feeds your heart. Makes you more creative, empathetic, and intrinsically motivated.

The surface expression looks similar ("I'm proud of that"). The internal machinery is different. Hubristic pride is relational and comparative — it needs someone to be better than. Authentic pride is grounded in actual accomplishment aligned with personal values — it doesn't require an audience.

For the coaching exercise, only authentic pride works. Hubristic pride points you toward performances, not patterns.

The Exercise

The prompt is deceptively simple:

Identify three to four moments of authentic pride in your life.

The qualifier matters. Jason tells clients to focus less on resume highlights and more on eulogy virtues — experiences that give a genuine sense of personal pride and satisfaction when reflected on privately, whatever they might be. Not the shiniest achievement. The most meaningful one.

Examples that clients have brought:

• Starting a scrappy nonprofit in college while balancing a demanding course load
• Transforming decades-old health habits at 45 to be around when their son grew up
• Keeping every single team member employed during the pandemic by having everyone agree to salary reductions

None of these are resume trophies. They're personal. And they're specific.

The Digging Questions

Once a client has named a moment, Jason asks a series of excavating questions:

• What was the hardest part?
• What made you push through when things got tough?
• Why does this particular achievement make you proud?
• What exactly did you do to make it work?

The goal is to move past the narrative summary ("I started a nonprofit") into the operating-system details ("I kept cold-calling even after 30 rejections because I'd promised my co-founder we'd have 10 donors by month-end"). The patterns live in the mechanics, not the story.

What Patterns Actually Look Like

After three or four moments worked this way, convergent themes emerge. Examples Jason cites:

• Incredible tolerance for well-considered but still risky bets that others wouldn't dare consider
• Building bridges between people or ideas that nobody else thought to connect
• Lighting up when figuring things out from scratch — treating every obstacle as a puzzle
• Deep listening and radical empathy as the engine of all past wins
• Bringing order to chaos
• Questioning conventional wisdom right before a breakthrough

These aren't personality traits from a Myers-Briggs test. They're operating patterns — repeatable, identifiable ways the person has gotten things done across very different contexts.

The Strategic Move

What makes the exercise transformative is the aspirational-to-actual pivot.

Founders and executives arrive with a story about who they're supposed to be. Visionary leader. Charismatic CEO. Strategic thinker. Data-driven operator. The story is inherited from books, podcasts, their VC, their board, the archetypes the culture sells.

The pride patterns surface who they actually are when they've won. And it's often different from the aspirational identity — sometimes dramatically.

Jason's recurring example: a founder whose pride moments all involved deep listening and radical empathy. They'd been trying to cosplay as a "visionary leader" because that's what the fundraising culture rewarded. Once they stopped performing and leaned into their actual pattern — building through understanding — their company took off in ways they never expected.

This is the coaching move: stop trying to be what success looks like from the outside. Build from the patterns that have actually produced authentic pride in your own life.

Why This Isn't Strengths-Finding

Superficially, this resembles strengths-based coaching (CliftonStrengths, VIA, etc.). But Jason's exercise differs in important ways:

• It's grounded in emotion, not self-report. Pride is a physiological signal. Clients aren't answering trait questions — they're noticing which memories produce a specific feeling.
• It's narrative, not categorical. The patterns don't have to fit a pre-defined vocabulary. They can be weirdly specific ("I win when there's a rule I quietly refuse to follow").
• It reveals, it doesn't label. There's no report at the end. The patterns are a working draft the client carries into their decisions.

Where This Fits in Jason's Practice

This exercise sits inside his two-hour intro session — the discovery call that precedes any coaching engagement. Two hours is unusually long for an intro, and it's deliberate. The pride exercise needs space to unfold; you can't rush the digging.

The patterns uncovered in that session often become the thematic backbone of the engagement. Every subsequent decision the client faces can be evaluated against: Does this play to my actual pattern, or am I drifting back to the aspirational identity?

It also connects directly to Jason's outlier-identity work. Your unique pattern is your outlier advantage. The exercise is a way of stopping the client from trying to be legible and starting to own what they actually do well.

You Can Do It Yourself

Jason closes the newsletter with an open invitation: you don't need a coach for this. Set aside quiet time, name three or four accomplishments that produce genuine, private pride, and dig into each one with the four questions. The PS of the newsletter adds:

It can be easy to pick the things that look the shiniest or most impressive. But the real value of this activity is when you truly dig deep and find the "smaller" more intimate moments that spark that pride for you.

The smaller, more intimate moments are where the real patterns live.

Related Topics

• coaching-philosophy — The broader philosophy this exercise sits inside
• client-feedback-and-patterns — What clients value most: contextual memory, pattern recognition
• coaching-offerings — The two-hour intro session structure
• outlier-identity — Pattern = unique advantage, not weakness
• mental-models — Pride psychology (Tracy's research) as a mental model
• personal-philosophy — Building from what actually works