Don’t Forget to Celebrate Success, Milestones, & Accomplishments

In yesterday’s post, we talked about the strategy of using your past accomplishments to motivate you in the present. There are other ways to help keep yourself on track and pushing toward your goals, as well. Sometimes we get so focused on making a big transformation or reaching our destination that we forget to notice the changes we’re making along the way. Noting your successes, as we’ve discussed already, can help to motivate us. Taking it further and actually celebrating those things can provide us with a bunch of other benefits that touch upon various aspects of our lives. Let’s discover the reasons why you should celebrate success, milestones, and accomplishments on your path toward reaching your goals.

Improve Your Outlook

Celebrations are fun! By attaching a party or some kind of fun activity to your latest goal milestone, you’re teaching yourself to view the pursuit in a positive way. Too frequently, we see our goals as a struggle or something we have to do if we want to be successful. This mindset makes it more difficult to progress.

Developing a success mindset can result when you make a few tweaks to your viewpoint and focus on the positives. Celebrating success in small achievements is one way to do this. When you take even a little step closer to your goal, embrace that success through some sort of enjoyable recognition. Reward yourself with a trip to the movies when you get an A on your exam. Anything that acknowledges your success in a pleasant way will do. And it doesn’t have to be something that costs money. For me, just keeping track of a streak of the number of days I’ve accomplished a new habit is very rewarding.

Celebrate Success and Feel Good

Celebrations of any kind tend to make us feel good. When we’re happy, production of neurochemicals such as dopamine in our brains is stimulated. Dopamine is known as a “feel good chemical’, in fact. As these chemicals are produced, our brains want more of them and their production causes us to seek opportunities to obtain that stimulation. This creates a positive cycle in which we will actually want to continue celebrating the kind of progress that has led us to feel so wonderful. If you want to make a new habit stick, your brain needs to get to the point where it craves the built-in reward, whatever that is for you.

Again, it can be as simple as the tiny thrill of seeing days in your streak building up. (I’m on day 30, day 44, and day 73 for my top three streaks by the way! And sharing that with you is one way I am celebrating success at incorporating these new habits into my life.)

Increase Your Confidence

Celebrating your achievements is a way of patting yourself on the back for a job well done. This is especially true when you include others in your activities. You build yourself up through these celebrations and reinforce the idea that you have the ability to complete your goal. Confidence is a strong motivator.

Share the Happiness

Not only are celebrations fun, they’re also happy-inducing. We talked about the feel-good chemicals released through celebrating success in reaching your milestones. Sharing these celebratory activities is a great way to spread the happiness around. It’s also very inspirational. Those closest to you will want to share in your success because they’re proud of you and want good things for you. In addition, your success might just spark the desire in your friends to reach for their own dreams. It’s contagious, really. So enjoy the celebration!

These are merely a few ways you can benefit from celebrating your milestones, successes, and accomplishments on the way to reaching your goals. Each one of these little celebrations you have will probably introduce you to yet another good thing to come from them. Enjoy the process and just have fun.