Do you celebrate even your small accomplishments?
When you accomplish something, how do you acknowledge that? Even to yourself?
Do you want to be more motivated and get more things done?
These are the typical scenarios:
1) You say absolutely nothing. You just move on to the next thing.
2) There’s criticism. “I should have done that last week? Why did I wait so long? It could have been better? Yeah, I got it done but I should have done it sooner and better.”
3) “There’s so much more to do. What does it matter? It’s only the tip of the iceberg. I have so much more to do.”
With the first one, there’s just no reinforcement. With the second and third scenarios, there’s a lot of criticism and you’re reminding yourself of what’s left to do.
We learn this in our society. Look at how our schools graded us. We could have gotten 95% of the answers right but the only answers that have a big round RED circle around them are the few that we got wrong. We are in a “you could have done better” society.
And the problem with ‘it could have been done better’ is that it could have. We can always do more and do it better. So it’s always going to be true that we could have done more or better. The other issue with all of this is that we also believe that we don’t deserve yet because it should have been better and when we do it better, then we will celebrate.
I’ll celebrate when I get it all done perfectly, when I complete the whole goal, when I finish all of the steps to get there. No fun. No celebration. No happiness. No joy.
How motivating is that? How enthusiastic and excited will you be about completing things?
I’m going to tell you about Retraining Your Brain to Celebrate Progress (trademark by Margaret M. Lynch). THIS IS IMPORTANT because when you do this, your whole system will get rewired, your neural pathways will get remapped and you’ll be energized to a level of motivation that will be much more than you’ve ever experienced.
And you’ll have much more fun because you’ll be celebrating progress. You’ll be celebrating each step of the way. So you’ll be happy and you’ll be retraining your brain to celebrate progress. This means you won’t feel over-worked and exhausted because you’ll be wired to stop and to celebrate!
And here’s how it works:
- Pick a couple of small action items you need to do to get to your next goal.
- Put them in your calendar for the next couple of weeks.
- When you do even a small part of each action item, you’re going to stop and say things like “I did it. I’m awesome! I did it. I’m awesome!” Several times. And THEN you’re going to do a little happy dance. You’re going to walk around your office or your home and say “I’m a rockstar. I did it. I’m awesome!” (OK, get over feeling stupid)
And I don’t care if it’s emptying the dishwasher or making one phone call. Celebrating like this will give you a major boost in your motivation. And as I said before, it will literally create new neural pathways in your brain that connect Pleasure to you getting stuff done.
And as the new neural pathways get bigger and stronger, the old ones with all the criticisms, etc. will go away because they won’t be used as often. Doesn’t that sound amazing???
So GO CELEBRATE! And let me know how it feels when you get more done and it feels more fun!
