Take Time to Celebrate Success

How did things go last week? Which do you recall more, the successes or the challenges? There were successes, actually many of them. Did you take the the time to enjoy the success or were there too many pending challenges to take time to reflect?

If you are like many of us, the busyness of everyday crowds out our time to reflect on our accomplishments. We are busy in our multi-tasking mindset, trying to manage numerous things at the same time with little extra time. It seems that the only celebration is in the form of relief that something has come off the list of things that need to be done. Accomplishing something just gives us more opportunity to work on the other things demanding our attention.

When we take the time to reflect and consider our accomplishments, we most always find that we are winning. Who would have guessed it? It sure doesn’t feel that way. There are so many things demanding our attention that we do not even realize that we are winning in our battle for success. Most of the things we attempted worked and if we are focused on the right things, actually moved us ahead. We did the work, but didn’t take the time to appreciate the success and enjoy the satisfaction. Yet, achieving satisfaction is one of our biggest drivers toward undertaking an activity in the first place.

Satisfaction is the net reward of success. It is the great feeling that we get when we accomplish something that aligns with our values. It is the big reason we set out to accomplish something in the first place. Work without satisfaction is just a job. Work that provides satisfaction is success. We need to recognize our success to continue to motivate ourselves to achieve more. Not recognizing our success is like winning the game but not looking at the final score on the scoreboard. We have earned the opportunity for the satisfaction, we need to be sure to enjoy it.

The true impact of our celebration is to reinforce our learning. The things we learn from each experience are probably more important than the thing we accomplished. Our learnings go with us forever and the thing we accomplished we leave behind. Taking time to celebrate our success allows us to tie what we learned to our positive emotion of satisfaction and make it available to us as a positive tool for use in the future.

So let’s celebrate! Woo Hoo, we did it! Good for us! When we reflect on last week there were a lot of things that went our way and were accomplished. Large and small, the things we did worked. We held our own in a meeting, everybody got to school on time, we made progress on a big project, we even found time to cut the grass. A lot of things went well thanks to us.

It is important that we reflect on the accomplishments that were important to us. Of course we want to please other people, but if at the root of our activity we are not pleased with ourselves, we will not achieve satisfaction. Don’t be afraid to privately pat ourselves on the back. We deserve it. We do not need to be overly boastful, but we deserve the recognition for the things we accomplished.

We should also offer others the opportunity to celebrate with us. It may surprise us to find that others noticed our accomplishments and are excited for us as well. Who knew they even noticed! We are all pretty busy and just like us, they sometimes just do not have the opportunity to express appreciation.

How about it! When we take time to look at the scoreboard we are actually winning and we have a fan club! How cool is that!

So let’s take a look at some of the things we can do to make sure we celebrate our success. Here are 4 tips that we can use everyday:

1) Write down the success. – Jot down a quick note about the thing accomplished. A post-it-note, or note in our tablet or even a note in our calendar can be a scoreboard for us.

2) Share the accomplishment. – Be sure to let others around us know of our accomplishment so they can celebrate with us. They are our fan club, give them something to cheer about.

3) Take time to reflect. – Set aside a few minutes to flip back through the notes and reflect on the accomplishment. Take a moment to enjoy the score.

4) Celebrate everyday. – We are winning everyday! Enjoy the accomplishment in real-time and bask in the satisfaction. We have earned it.

We have a lot to celebrate. Everyday we do more things right than wrong and we are actually winning the game of success. Take the time to enjoy the satisfaction, it will help maintain our perspective, energize us for growth and build our learning. Go ahead, celebrate, we have earned it!

Thanks,

Skip Gilbert