Celebrating Your Wins: Why It’s Important and 7 Ways You Can Do that Every Day
Let’s face it, we’re all awesome people who do awesome things on the regular. So why does it feel so difficult to recognize that and celebrate it? Even if it does become a habit and we’re often hitting the target on our goals, we should be regularly celebrating our wins! Just like you have no problem complimenting others on their achievements, we’re going to get you to a place where you make celebrating your wins a daily habit, and understand why that’s important! Keep reading to find out the importance of and 7 ways you can start celebrating your wins on the daily!
What Does it Mean to Celebrate Our Wins?
Seemingly self explanatory, celebrating our wins means taking the time to pat ourselves on the back for achieving something. Whether it’s a large goal we’ve set out for ourselves or a small task we weren’t sure we had in the bag, celebrating our wins means recognizing our triumphant moment and taking time to give ourselves credit!
Size Doesn’t Matter
Like I said, whether it’s you completing something seemingly mundane (ie. making yourself a healthy meal, going to the gym, tending to your budget, etc.) or something larger scale, you should be celebrating regardless. Appreciating your willingness and dedication to working on bettering yourself and achieving your goals is always something that should be recognized!
Why Celebrating Our wins is So Important
What Happens to our Brains
When we start to celebrate our wins regularly, two things happen to our brains! When we praise ourselves for achieving our goals, no matter the size, we activate the reward centre in our brain. This releases dopamine in the brain, which makes us feel good – in turn, makes us want to do the same thing again to get the same effect (source).
The second thing that happens is that when you repeatedly celebrate your wins, you start to train your brain to search for positives. This creates the habit of rewarding yourself, and your brain will be heightened to seeing positive things in your everyday life! (source)
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What Happens to our Goals
When you’re at a sporting event do you only cheer when they win? When you’re at a concert do you only clap after it’s over? NO! You cheer the whole dang time. You get loud, motivational and emotionally invested. So why don’t you treat the journey to achieving your goals the same way?
Celebrating wins along the way helps us stay motivated and on track to achieving our goals. Much like what happens to our brains, when we activate the reward circuits in our brain, we encourage ourselves to go further and seek out more accomplishment. This in turn helps us to achieve our goals more easily!
The Last Big Why
Why shouldn’t you be celebrating your wins? Why are you depriving yourself of the love, celebration and praise you deserve? The truth is, you’re likely working very hard to achieve these goals, and aren’t giving yourself enough credit. Think about all of the times you’ve complimented someone for something seemingly small, and start to do the same thing towards yourself. You owe yourself the love and praise you easily shower on other people!
7 Ways You Can Make Celebrating Your Wins a Part of Your Day
Now that we know why it’s so important to be celebrating our wins, we can start to make it a daily habit! Here are 7 easy ways you can make celebrating your wins a daily habit:
1. Acknowledge Your Wins
The first step to celebrating your wins is acknowledging them! Take inventory of the tasks you’re doing throughout the day, and acknowledge your wins as they’re happening! Remember, the size of the win doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re achieving and completing tasks that will get you closer to being a better version of yourself, and get you that much closer to achieving that big goal!
2. Write Them Down
Not only is it important to acknowledge your wins, but writing them down does you an even greater world of good! Writing down your wins is a great way to build further confidence, track your wins, and create a law of attraction effect on your goals (the more you win, the more you write down and acknowledge, the more you receive)! (source)
3. Pay Attention to Feelings
How do you feel when you accomplish something? Do you feel excited? Proud? Hungry for more? Tap into those feelings and use them to harness more energy towards achieving your goals. If you don’t seem to be feeling as elated as you thought you would, maybe there’s something about that particular goal that doesn’t excite you, it may be time to change that goal!
4. Practice Gratitude
Practicing gratitude is the act of being appreciative for the things that you already have, so why not appreciate how far you’ve come in each of your goals? Taking the time to appreciate and be grateful for your wins cultivates a positive mindset, which in turn allows more great things to come to you. Cultivate the atmosphere you want to live in – if you want amazing things to happen to you, allow yourself to praise and be accepting of these amazing things.
5. Reward Yourself
You don’t need to wait until you’ve completed the end goal to reward yourself, you can start doing that along the way! Whether it’s a monetary/materialistic reward or something you do for yourself (ie. afternoon off, bubble bath, massage, favourite meal etc.), make a point of giving yourself small rewards along the way so that you give yourself the recognition you deserve, and have the motivation to keep going! Remember, there’s nothing wrong with rewarding yourself!
6. Share It
Pick a designated friend or loved one to share your goal updates with! If you have someone who’s working towards something similar, you can trade triumphs and continue to motivate each other! Sharing your wins is a great way to recognize yourself and your accomplishments, as well as allow others to do the same!
7. Be Excited
Yeah that thing you did? YOU did that. You deserve all of the credit in the world. There’s absolutely no reason why you’re not deserving of the praise and credit that comes from achieving a small win or goal. Your brain favours finding the negative in everything – as a problem to fix. Rewrite that narrative as you get into the habit of getting excited about your goals, and getting excited every time you get one step closer to achieving them!
Recap: Celebrating Your Wins
Celebrating your wins is the act of acknowledging your achievements and goal progression, no matter the size of the progress! It’s important to celebrate our wins because it allows us to draw attention to the positive brain changes that happen when we celebrate our wins – which make us more likely to want to achieve more of our goals!
Some of the ways you can practice celebrating your wins daily include acknowledging them, writing them down, practicing gratitude, rewarding yourself, assessing your feelings, getting excited and telling someone!
What are some of the ways you celebrate your own wins? What keeps you motivated and on track when it comes to achieving your goals? Let me know in the comments!
