Celebrate Your Successes

“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey

“Success is never accidental.” — Jack Dorsey

Life is an emotional journey full of ups and downs. However, in today’s very busy and high-pressure world, it seems that our younger generation ends up putting a lot more emphasis on the down times and glosses over the good. Today’s post is about celebrate their successes for long-term happiness and enabling further success.

Last week, my younger son and I were discussing a big win, in my opinion, that he’d had at school. He and a number of his friends have been trying to convince their school to offer a program which requires a meaningful monetary investment. Over the last six months, he had organized a large number of students and had multiple meetings with the administration to convince them to establish that program. Finally, last week, he heard that the program was approved and was able to meet with the new staff member hired by the school to build and run it.

In my book, this is a BIG WIN. It’s very rare that a high-school kid is able to get enough momentum behind an initiative and convince his school to spend money to set it up. When I mentioned that I was impressed and really proud of him for this accomplishment, he responded with “Yeah, it’s nice that it’s happening. But I’m much more focused on making sure it’s a success and that’s going to be hard.” It was clear that he didn’t actually feel that it was a real accomplishment and was already focused on the challenges they will face to make the program a success.

That’s when I went into “Dad” mode. I reminded him that celebrating success is an important part of a happy and successful life. It helps build self confidence and is a great motivator. It’s also a valuable tool to use to cope with difficult times and failure.

Since our conversation, I’ve looked more into the science of celebrations and found that there’s plenty of research which shows that “it is important to our mental health, self-care, happiness and motivation” (Innovative Resources). The article I quoted goes into further detail by saying:

A number of studies have found that [celebrating] brings significant benefits, including improved physical health and better coping strategies. People who take time to reflect on - and celebrate - their successes are generally more optimistic, take better care of themselves and tend to be less stressed. Celebrations increase people's sense of well-being, regardless of socioeconomic factors, education, age or gender.

In positive psychology, the process of savouring - noticing, appreciating and enhancing positive experiences - is often used to increase feelings of self-worth and overall life satisfaction by expanding 'people's thoughts and behaviours, promoting creativity, social connection, personal resources, and resilience'.

Celebrating success doesn't have to only be focused on the big wins in life. There is a lot of value to celebrating the smaller things as a form of motivation. During longer-term projects, I often celebrate key milestones as a way to remind myself that we're on track for overall success for the project. These little wins cumulate over time into a big win - the ongoing celebrations of each little win just help bring that big win closer.

A second big benefit from celebrating success is how it helps one deal with the "down" times in life. There will be many times in life when we fail (or feel like we're failing) and want to give up. Reminding ourselves of the successes we've previously had is a way to help cope with the negative emotions we are going through at that time. I actually keep a mental catalog of my successes as a tool to deal with tough times - during difficult times, I go through in my mind the many successes I've had to date and remind myself that what I'm working on at that point has just as high a likelihood of success as each of them.

One can further extent the benefits from celebrating success by helping other celebrate their successes. Taking the time when a friend, family member or teammate succeeds at something to celebrate with them helps them learn how to celebrate their successes. In addition, as most of us want to be with people who help both make us better human beings and feel better about ourselves, it will help the quantity and quality of your relationships.

This completes today’s post on Celebrating Your Successes. The practical steps you can start taking from today’s post are:

• When you have a “win” in life, take the time to recognize it and give yourself some appreciation: As a human being, we benefit strongly from celebrating success, whether big or small. This is an important skill to develop as part of maximizing your long-term personal happiness, motivation sense of well being
• Build a catalog of your wins and use them to keep yourself motivated in tough times: Life has ups and downs. You will definitely face times of failure or where you want to give up. Use this catalog of wins during those difficult times to keep yourself motivated
• Make an effort to celebrate your friends, teammates and family’s successes as well: Help them also benefit from the impact that celebrating success brings. It will make you a better person and improve the quality of your relationships as you will have a positive impact on others

Thank you again for joining me on my journey to build financial literacy for young adults and their families. Please share any comments or questions that you have in the comments section. If you are interested in reading more of my posts, please access my author page (https://vocal.media/authors/sudhir-sahay) where you can see all the posts I’ve published. Also, if there are any topics you’re interested in my broaching in future posts, please let me know. In addition to the comments section, I can be reached at [email protected]