Celebrate Your Successes, and Learn for Even More
“Celebrate what you’ve accomplished, but raise the bar a little higher each time you succeed. ”
It's December: time to look back at our KPIs, and face the facts: we've either succeeded or we've missed the mark. Either way, what did we learn, to help propel us in the next project, our 2018 KPIs and next year overall? Using reflection and celebration, we can raise the bar to fuel future wins.
The Selfication blog sums up some research on this well: Teresa Amabile from The Harvard Business School studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. When she and her associates designed and analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in seven companies they found something very interesting: The efforts of tracking small achievements every day enhanced the workers motivation. Amabile explains that the practice of recording our progress helps us appreciate our small wins which in turn boosts our sense of confidence. We can then leverage that competence toward future, larger successes.
This is because any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates the reward circuitry of our brains. When this pathway is opened some key chemicals are released that give us a feeling of achievement and pride.
In particular, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released which energizes us and gives us a feel-good aura. This chemical enables us not only to get that sweet feeling of reward but also to take action to move toward what triggered it’s release in the first place.
Sometime during this month, either yourself or with your team, try reflecting on your successes to recognize how you can continue to do better in 2018:
1) Where did you succeed this year? What other projects, big or small, did you accomplish? Are there notable parts of these projects that you want to highlight where things worked really well?
2) What do you feel when you review all of those combined successes?
3) What can you do to recognize your team, direct reports or others who helped bring about those successes?
4) List three "wins" that you want to incorporate in 2018 and how you will commit to doing so. Ready, set...more wins to come!