Celebrating Your Successes

In our culture, it’s typical to keep setting goals for yourself and striving towards those goals. It’s also fairly standard that once you reach a goal, you set a new one. In our efforts to keep going, keep building, and keep improving ourselves, we often neglect the importance of celebrating our successes.

Celebrating your success can take a lot of different forms. It could simply be pausing from the commotion of day-to-day life for a moment to pat yourself on the back. You might buy yourself the new pair of shoes you’ve been wanting. On the more momentous occasions, we often see celebration with food. There’s a form of celebration for every level of success and it’s all up to you how you want to mark the occasion.

Whether you realize it or not, your day is full of successes. Got up and out of bed this morning even though the air temperature was a lot cooler than unde
eath the covers? SUCCESS! Went to the gym for 30 minutes? SUCCESS! Remembered to pick up your dry cleaning? Yet another success! These may seem like small, trivial things but they’re successes regardless.

When you start seeing each project completed, each action taken, as a success, it helps brighten your perspective on life. If it’s been “one of those days,” you can still look back and tick off things you’ve done today- your successes. This small mindset shift is used in positive psychology to train your brain to think more positively. And when you think more positive thoughts, you get more positive results!

Think about it, if your thoughts sounded something like, “Today’s been so awful. It was dark and cloudy and rainy this morning. The dog was barking the whole morning. I got stuck in traffic…” Do you think those thoughts are going to lead you through the entrance to the gym? Or do you think maybe those thoughts are going to lead you to the entrance of the nearest ice cream shop?

The first step:
Take out a piece of paper and write down everything you’ve accomplished today. Remember: it doesn’t matter how small. If you got it done, write it down. Look it over and celebrate!