Whatever your goals were the past year, you would have come up with new ones by now. I am also sure that some items from the previous year have been carried over to your new list. But before you castigate yourself for not achieving those goals, why not celebrate the progress that you have accomplished now? Some people are so obsessed with accomplishments that everything is either a win or a failure, when in fact life is a journey and not a destination.
If you look back at your own life, you will see that your monumental accomplishments were not due to one factor alone but to a series of small wins. Your accomplishments for the past year might have been hampered by the health crisis and dismal economic conditions but if you look close enough, they are worth celebrating. Small wins help us appreciate where we are today because, after all, progress is better than no progress at all. So, here are some reasons why you should celebrate small wins.
It gives you joy now. There are some goals that are just prodigious that you have to break them down into milestones. These milestones serve as guides, so you know that you are on the right path to your ultimate intention. And like what I said, small progress is still progress and any kind of improvement is worth acknowledging. Celebrating small wins helps you recognize your professional growth and reinforces the lessons you have learned along the way.
And when that happens, it will also help build momentum to help you keep going. Punctuating your journey toward your goal with milestones will help keep you motivated into pursuing it more. Just as a marathon runner needs occasional slowing down and drinking water, celebrating small wins helps keep you going toward your destination and highlights what you are really passionate about. These milestones further fuel your drive because it makes you realize how much you really want your goal.
Small wins will help you clarify your personal vision and recalibrate your path in the right direction. These milestones will teach you what works so you can adapt as needed and identify which ones need tweaking to continue your growth and progress. And celebrating them does not always mean throwing a party or announcing to everyone your accomplishment. Sometimes, small wins can also come in the form of a roadblock.
Roadblocks often tell us that certain resources or work processes do not work, which helps us avoid using them in the future. Discovering these roadblocks early on should also be celebrated because it teaches others to manage their expectations and prepare well. Roadblocks often also help you think creatively and unite the team toward looking for possible solutions.
Celebrating small wins also helps you become accountable for your own contribution to the team’s goals and acknowledges your effort into making it a reality. Sometimes, individual contributions get lost in the team’s accomplishments and members fade into the background. People managers can avoid this by celebrating team accomplishments with a team reward that everybody appreciates, while also acknowledging members who have significantly contributed to the team’s success.
Listing the number of milestones you have accomplished will give you the confidence to go further. A collection of small wins will show tangible results that other people will notice because small wins add up to big ones. In performance evaluations, you can cite these small wins as professional progress and your contribution to the team’s success and can be used to highlight what you have accomplished outside your scorecard. These added accomplishments can help you identify what you want to further develop in yourself, as well as point you toward team activities where you can contribute the most.
To help you remember these small wins, list them down and keep them readily accessible. When you feel down or need an added boost on a slow day, you can read your list so you can stay motivated to complete your goals. At the end of the year, you can use the list for your performance evaluation. For all you know, your manager might even see that what may be a small win for you is pivotal for the whole project and enables other members of your team to do their work well.
If you are managing people, one of the effective ways of motivating your team is to celebrate small wins. You do that by constantly catching your people doing good and commending team members who exert discretionary effort to reach the team’s goals. And when your team encounters issues and problems, set the example of how to approach them. Stop pointing fingers and get right to the root cause of the problem and find solutions. By being practical and solutions-oriented, you avoid putting people on the spot and foster an environment where people are forced to look for solutions rather than blame. It then opens the communication lines between you and the team because the focus is on results and how to achieve the team’s goals.
As you look at your new year’s resolutions, there might be some that are from your previous list and that is okay. You did what you could given the past year’s conditions. At least now you know how much further you need to go to achieve them. And if there is anything the past years have taught us, it is that great things start from small beginnings.
Image credits: Ben White on Unsplash