We are huge fans of celebration.
We send birthday gifts and snail mail and congratulatory Facebook posts. We mail flowers and dance at weddings and drop all the heart eyes for beautiful art. We love cheerleading for our friends and colleagues, and we are so proud of our peers’ accomplishments. Awesome people are easy to celebrate.
Sometimes we forget to celebrate ourselves.
As entrepreneurs (and busy worker bees), we spend so much time with our heads down, debating the next project and planning out the next task. We get so focused on what still needs doing that we forget to pause and celebrate what we’ve already done.
We nitpick and self-criticize instead of feeling proud of a job well done. We see the holes and what-could-have-beens in our own work — when we would never see such tiny gaps in anyone else’s projects. We think about getting better (a good thing), but rarely look back to see how far we’ve come.
It’s time to stop and celebrate.
Take three minutes right now and make a list of the projects you’ve completed in 2021. Better yet, think back to your victories over the past year (crisis communications, huge organizational pivots, virtual events, big campaigns, maintaining some semblance of mental health…it was a major year that deserves a heavy dose of reflection).
How are you going to celebrate these wins?
Buy the bottle of champagne. Eat a fancy dinner. Write yourself a note. Frame the work and hang it on your office wall. Have a team party. Tell your closest friends about the things that make you proud of yourself (we don’t do this enough…).
Do something to mark your own victories instead of waiting for someone else to celebrate for you.
Hard work is good. (We do a lot of it.) But sometimes you have to get off the hamster wheel. Stop fixating on everything on your to-do list — or on every project that’s still ahead. Pause and recognize what’s going well — and take actual time to celebrate.
