Redefine Your Wins & Celebrate Your Success
It’s that time of the year when so many of us reflect on how our year went — whether personally, professionally, or both. Looking back on an entire year can be overwhelming, especially if you haven’t taken time throughout the year to notice your achievements – or failures – as they’ve happened.
With that much to review, you could find yourself quickly checking the boxes for the goals you achieved without much thought about what made you successful. More likely? You are ruminating about all the things you didn’t accomplish. Beating yourself up, blaming others, or chalking it up to some circumstance. I’ve got a beef with all of this. Mainly that we (humans) tend to skip over our wins all the time, hardly giving them a thought. We go, “Yeah, that’s cool. Next?” Not just at the end of the year while we’re reflecting but all damn year.
When we fail to achieve something we spend a lot of time picking apart every single action we took or didn’t take, the circumstances, etc. trying to figure out how to be better. We spend far greater amounts of time fixated on what went wrong than looking at what went right. What if instead of constantly berating ourselves for our missteps we actually looked at the steps we took to succeed? Donald O. Clifton, a grandfather of positive psychology, once said, and I’m paraphrasing, what would happen if we fixated on what is right with us instead of trying to fix what is wrong? This could also positively impact the way we see missing a goal as a failure and not in a good way.
Now, let me explain why we tend to skip over the good stuff and go straight for the dirt. Our brains have about 50,000 thoughts a day and 80 to 85% are negative. We’re wired to figure out what went wrong to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So it makes sense that our brain doesn’t automatically start cheering for success and focuses on the failures instead.
It’s incredibly important to retrain our brains to not only celebrate our successes but revel in them. Pick those apart and obsess over them the same way we do the failures. It’s not about being arrogant. It’s about understanding what we did right and experiencing that experience of celebration. Knowing ourselves as somebody who has succeeded and understanding how, not only makes future success replicable but builds our self-confidence and self-trust (just to name a couple) and fuels future endeavors.
When we have a win, take a moment to reflect on it, assess it, and acknowledge it. I mean, how good does it feel when someone else acknowledges our accomplishments? Sure, maybe we get all awkward taking the compliment or whatever, but it feels good, right? To be recognized?
We need to learn to acknowledge ourselves. To give ourselves our own pat on the back, to take ourselves out to lunch, to treat ourselves to something nice, to get up and throw a dance party, or pretend to have scored a touchdown… I mean, whatever celebration looks like.
What does celebrating look like to you? Do you know? Discover that and then do it every time you experience a win. Start getting comfortable with celebration because, honestly, it’s a part of the path to greater success.
Let’s also start to widen that scope of what winning or success means, though, yeah? A lot of the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year tend to be S.M.A.R.T. ones. Now I’ve got a whole perspective on S.M.A.R.T. goals but I’ll save that for another time. (The short version is I think they’re stupid.)
One of the things about these kinds of goals is that they have to be specific and measurable. Specific and measurable translates into figures or numbers, something trackable and calculable. How much revenue did we make? How many speaking gigs did we book? What were our sales figures like? What percentage of our internet traffic came from marketing? How many new names did we add to our email list? Etc.
Now, I’m not saying that these don’t count. They do. That’s not the problem. My issue with it is that in only reviewing our quantifiable goals we can forget, ignore, or not even consider all the other non-number-related achievements we’ve had for the year. If we aren’t considering them, we can’t celebrate them. No celebration? No acknowledgment. Not to mention it makes success seem pretty black and white. You either reached said figure or didn’t; you either succeeded at this goal or you failed. But both success and failure are more nuanced than this.
Success isn’t just about accomplishing some number no more than failure is about not reaching it. Success can include the positive way we approached something or the way we showed up to a task. It can include the quality of our interactions with others, the way we acknowledged someone else’s contribution, or the way we received recognition. Our wins aren’t only plotted on a graph or charted in a report.
Wins include challenges that we overcame, the things we learned about ourselves, the new skills we developed, a new problem we recognized, new habits we formed, new (or prior) relationships we deepened, and even the times we felt enjoyment. Success is ours to define and it doesn’t have to be limited to what we can measure and count.
How we show up, how we engage in the world, how we overcome challenges and deepen and develop ourselves, and our relationships all have an effect on what we do and don’t achieve. So why shouldn’t all of it be reviewed? All of it be looked at? All of it be celebrated? Quite frankly, it’s probably because of the things that can’t be measured or counted that the quantifiable things were achieved (or not). You know the steps we took, the actions we performed, the ways we approached…all the things I was saying earlier that we need to review because they led to success, to begin with.
And, failure? Failure is a mistake. It’s a learning moment. It’s growth. We’ve given the word “failure” a bad rap. People now think failing at something makes them a failure. Full stop. That’s not the case. Failing at something simply means we didn’t achieve what we set out to achieve.
So during this reflective part of the year, I’m challenging you to evaluate how you accomplished your goals, redefine what success looks like, what failure actually means, and truly identify how much you achieved because it’s likely WAY more than you think. Most importantly, I’m challenging you to celebrate your wins. Take time to actually write down what you’re going to do to celebrate the incredible amount you’ve accomplished this year.
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