You're going to be. Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Many of us put a lot of pressure on ourselves to achieve and if we don't live up to these expectations, we're so hard on ourselves. We have an incredible tendency to compare ourselves to other people.

And if we don't live up to these imaginary lines of success that we've created in our heads, then we suffer. But in this podcast, I want to share an alternative,

something else we can do instead of suffering, and it's a lesson we can all learn from my six-year-old daughter.

Last week at her school for a kindergarten class, they had an award ceremony for kids reading books throughout the year.

We've been at this school for several years, and my son has won the medal of a year

because when they're younger, they automatically get to win the metals but when they get older then they break it up in gold, silver, and bronze.

But for some reason, this year they decided to have the kindergartners be competitive too.

What a world we live in.

Now my daughter loves to read.

She may be in kindergarten, but she loves books.

She takes after her mom and dad. How the school

decided this year to give out gold medals for kindergartners what's to divide

them up into how many books they read based upon sheets of paper they turned in. It wasn't based

upon what they read, it was based upon sheets of paper. Now my wife and I, unfortunately,

just weren't aware of this and we didn't hand in all the papers throughout the year.

In the past, every kindergartner just got a gold medal, but this year, as I said, they changed the rules. My daughter definitely read way more than enough to get a gold medal,

but the paperwork hadn't been handed in by my wife and I.

So I arrived at the medal ceremony to watch my daughter get her medal.

And what they do is they call up the kids first who won a bronze medal.

My daughter was part of this group, and there weren't very many of them.

Apparently the other parents had caught on to this competition and my wife and I just hadn't.

So when she went up there to get her bronze medal, there were only a few kids who got

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