Describe Something You Did That Made You Proud
A Band 8 model answer for the IELTS Part 2 cue card about an achievement you are proud of, with the language that makes a small win sound significant.
Cue Card
Describe something you did that made you feel proud.
You should say:
- what you did
- when you did it
- how difficult it was
And explain why it made you feel proud.
Most candidates reach for exam results here, and exam results are the hardest version of this card to make interesting. Everyone in the room has passed an exam. The stronger move is an achievement that only makes sense once you explain the starting point.
The answer below is about something objectively minor, which is the point. It spends its two minutes establishing why the small thing was actually hard for this particular person.
Model Answer
Band 8The thing I'm probably most proud of is that I learned to swim at twenty-six. Which sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, I know, but there's a reason it took that long.
I nearly drowned at a lake when I was about nine, and after that I avoided water completely. Not just swimming pools, I mean I wouldn't go on a boat or stand in the sea past my knees. For about fifteen years I'd built a whole set of excuses that let me never confront it. I don't like chlorine, I burn easily, that sort of thing.
What finally changed was that a friend's wedding was on a small island and I had to take a ferry to get there. I spent the whole crossing gripping a rail and pretending to enjoy the view, and I remember thinking that this was going to keep shaping my decisions for the rest of my life unless I did something. So I found an instructor who worked specifically with adults who were frightened, and I booked ten lessons before I could talk myself out of it.
The first three sessions I didn't put my face in the water at all. We just stood in the shallow end and she got me used to being there. It took about four months before I could swim a length, which is embarrassingly slow, and I'm still not a good swimmer in any technical sense. But I was proud because for the first time I'd gone directly at something I'd spent half my life walking around. The swimming itself matters much less to me than knowing I can do that.
Why This Answer Works
- The achievement is small and the answer knows it. Naming that in the first line ("which sounds ridiculous") disarms the examiner and buys attention for the explanation.
- It builds the difficulty before claiming it. The near-drowning, the fifteen years of excuses, and the specific excuses themselves establish the stakes so the final claim lands.
- The detail is unglamorous and therefore believable. Three sessions without putting your face in the water is the kind of thing you cannot invent while standing at a table.
- It separates the achievement from what the achievement meant. The last two sentences do this explicitly, and that reflective turn is what most Band 6 answers are missing.
Key Phrases to Steal
“which sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud”
Self-aware aside. Sounds like real speech and buys a beat of thinking time.
“I'd built a whole set of excuses”
Strong collocation. Better than "I made excuses".
“before I could talk myself out of it”
Idiomatic and precise. Shows control of reflexive structures.
“embarrassingly slow”
Adverb plus adjective pairing that sounds natural rather than studied.
“gone directly at something”
Plain words used figuratively. Less common phrasing without reaching for a thesaurus.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Do you think parents should praise children for everything they do?
No, and I think constant praise probably backfires. If a child is told everything they produce is wonderful, praise stops carrying information and they can't tell the difference between work they rushed and work they cared about. What seems to help more is praising the effort rather than the result, so the child learns that trying hard is the thing under their control. That said, I'd rather see a parent over-praise than under-praise, because the damage from the other direction lasts longer.
Are achievements at work more important than achievements in personal life?
Work achievements are more visible, which isn't the same as more important. They come with titles and salary changes and other people noticing, so they're easy to point at. Personal ones, raising a child who turns out decent or repairing a relationship you nearly lost, tend to have no marker at all. If I look at people I know in their sixties, almost none of them talk about their promotions.
Why do some people find it hard to talk about their own successes?
Culture explains a lot of it. In some places open self-promotion reads as confidence and in others it reads as showing off, so people learn very different default settings. There's also a fear of being caught out, since claiming something publicly invites someone to point out that it wasn't that impressive. I notice people often solve this by attributing the success to luck or to a team, which is safer and sometimes even true.
Now Try It Out Loud
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