Creating success - the importance of celebrating your wins
When you finish a task or receive feedback do you tend to focus on the negatives rather than the positives? Could someone say 9 great things in your appraisal but you dwell on the 1 ‘room for improvement’ comment?
It’s not your fault! It’s not that you’re a negative person: we are wired to pay more attention to the negatives in life as a survival strategy. It's a product of our evolution. We’re primed to remember anything that might be a threat to us. Nowadays in our comfortable lives things like interviews, criticism at work or an argument stimulate the stress response not just life threatening things. News titles with negative headlines get more clicks as on an unconscious level we feel we need to identify bad things to keep ourselves safe. Just think about how the media and government use the negativity bias for their gain!
Getting out of our comfort zone and making mistakes are part of what helps us to grow and be successful. If we focus too much on the negatives of life we’ll stay stuck. We don’t just want to be safe, most of us want to be happy too. Accepting praise and compliments are an important part of creating a balance. Seeing the bright side of things can help us feel more hopeful and resilient.
What we focus on grows
Apparently a negative event is processed and stored almost immediately whilst a positive event takes around 7 seconds to be processed and stored in our minds. With this knowledge, it’s important to savour the moments we’d like to bring to the forefront of our minds, the more vivid and fun we can make things the better - our brains like rewards.
What areas in your life are you the most self critical or negative? Choose one area you’d like to feel more positive about.
Success log - keep a folder or a record of all the positive comments you’ve received. Read them on days when you need a boost.
Celebrate your wins - dance to your favourite tune, share your news, write it down, meet your friends to celebrate together.
Savour the moment - focus on your senses if you want to strengthen a memory. Take a second to choose a lovely moment past or present - it could be something nice you enjoyed due to your hard work, someone you respect giving you a compliment, satisfaction at achieving something. Close your eyes, think back to that time and notice your senses -what do you see, hear, feel, think, smell or taste in that moment? Breathe into what you notice. Where in your body do you feel it? What word or phrase sums up the experience?
Gratitude journal - at the end of the day write down 3 gifts relating to the area you want to feel more positive about. The gifts can be anything - the smaller the better. A step towards a goal, an insight you’ve gained or something different you’ve tried. Doing this allows you to reflect on your day in a different and more positive way and primes your mind to notice more gifts along these lines the following day. This is a simple way to re-training your mind.
If you’ve grown up around people who tend to dwell on the negatives of life or if you were discouraged from being proud or ‘showing off’ then it might be a bit harder for positives to stick. If that’s the case then please book a call and we can talk through some ways to help.
I’d love to know what you think and how you get on with these tips. Let me know on the feedback form below.