As my coaching clients will know, I place a lot of emphasis on celebrating achievements and making sure to take the time to stop and reflect on what we’ve done. Often my clients achieve what they set out to achieve, and then without taking a moment to realise and celebrate this, move on to the next goal or task. I think it’s so important to celebrate both big achievements and the little day to day victories.
As a recovering perfectionist and someone who worked to my own ‘unrelenting standards’ for many years, this is particularly close to my heart. Nothing was ever good enough for me in terms of my own achievement, which meant going on and on and on and on with achieving, never stopping to acknowledge the good things I had done as part of this. It also meant that I tended to focus on the negative side of situations, rather than looking at the good. For many years I would come out of a client presentation or meeting internally beating myself up for saying something I considered silly, or not saying something I ‘should’ (hate that word!) have said, not being as slick as I felt I should have been in my presentation, not answering a question ‘right’, I could go on with endless ways of beating myself up. This meant what I had done well would go entirely missed and when I managed to get myself to a point of flipping this to focus on the good stuff first, it changed my life. There is always good stuff, and there are always things that we do well in any situation. Celebrating this first before looking at improvements for next time is a much kinder, productive way to look at a situation, in my experience.
As well as celebrating the larger achievements, I also think it’s important to reflect on what we achieve in the daily madness of life. Lack of willpower, an onslaught of to-do lists, social media, endless responsibilities and expectations, and procrastination are all real challenges us humans face. So when we manage to cut through the noise to create enough time to get to a yoga class or the gym / meditate for 10 minutes / calmly visit our parents / play with our children / tick off something on our to-do list, this calls for a little celebration. Life is wonderful, and it’s also hard, and it’s ok to acknowledge that sometimes. I managed to get myself to a hot yoga class at 6.30am this morning, and when I do manage that I lie there for a minute acknowledging my greatness for getting my sorry arse out of bed and along to exercise first thing on a Monday morning! So often we judge ourselves for not doing something that we wanted to, therefore giving ourselves a pat on the back and a bit of love when we do is essential.
This doesn’t mean everything has to be rosy all the time. An important combination for me in many situations is acknowledging the good first so I don’t go down a rabbit hole of negative judgement, then moving on to thinking about what could have been done better. Of course, in most situations we could have done better in one way or another, so it's a celebration of the good and then acknowledgement of what could be improved for next time. This relates to business meetings and work related stuff, as well as the day to day life stuff. Sometimes I smash it in terms of daily habits and doing what I know makes me feel good, some weeks I just cannot get myself together to do what I want to do, or I do a bit of self sabotage and do exactly the opposite of my intention. And sometimes that’s ok. And in all weeks, I will have done something good and thinking about that rather than focusing too much on what’s not been done sets me on a positive track back to happy days and positive achievements. What’s never ok is beating myself up for not doing something; it just doesn’t get me anywhere apart from feeling rubbish, and it certainly doesn’t help with getting myself back on track. Like most things in life, it all comes back to self-love and kindness.
Comments