Celebrate, Don't Deprecate! (Be proud of small wins and achieve your goals)

Want to feel motivated and accomplished? Discover the secret of reflecting on your small wins and how it can change your perspective on progress and success in todays' podcast episode.

As a new year begins, many of us make resolutions to improve our lives. But as the year goes on, it can be easy to forget about our small wins and accomplishments, and focus instead on negative events and setbacks.

In today's episode, I talk about how important it is to celebrate and be proud of your small wins. In our fast-paced, high-pressure culture, we don't always take enough time to appreciate small achievements. Instead, we compare our own struggles and failures to the highlight reels of others. But the truth is, everyone has struggles and small wins, and it's important to acknowledge and be proud of our own.

Learn how to celebrate your accomplishments and achieve your goals in this inspiring podcast episode!

Transcript

Hey there. Welcome to the Friend in Your Ear podcast. I'm your host, Luna Smith, and I will be that friend inside your ear. Well, we explore all things self-improvement. I'll share tips, motivation and positivity to help you live your best life. From health and wellness to career and relationships. I've got you covered because that's what friends are for, right?

So tune in every week for a friendly chat to brighten your day. And let's make every day a little better together, shall we, friend? And now on with the show. With it being a new year, resolutions are often at the top of people's minds. So let's talk about New Year's resolutions. I wanted to talk about my own personal tradition, I guess, at least for the last few years, where at the end of the year or beginning of the next year, I like to write a list out of all the small wins, because a lot of times we tend to, you know, we might embrace them in the moment, but then by the end of the year, we've kind of forgotten about the little wins. And a lot of times the negative seems to make more of an impression in our minds when we think about a year. So it's best if we can put pen to paper and write out a list of any level of win that you've had. It doesn't matter how big, how small.

Just try to think about anything positive that happened in the past year. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be an accomplishment like getting a promotion or actually keeping your goal that you created at the beginning of the year. Maybe it's to walk every day or I don't know, anything, any kind of goal you've you've achieved or even just little moments you've had.

Like maybe it was a really big deal for you to take a day for yourself, especially those of us who are moms. And, you know, our self-care is definitely on the back burner. Any little win, even if it's just a one time, one little win. Write it down. Because seeing it all laid out really helps us to see what we've accomplished and gives us something to be proud about."

So that is the first step. I need to write down all your accomplishments, even if you only exercised 18 times. My own personal experience. Thanks to my yoga app, I know that I only did 18 classes. But you know what? That's still 18 classes. That's better than zero classes. So that's what I'm saying here is it doesn't matter how small an accomplishment it was or if you didn't measure up to your expectations, you should celebrate any bit of movement that you made that's in the right direction.

Even if, for instance, like, let's say you are a smoker and you made a resolution last year to quit smoking and maybe you only lasted three weeks. That's still three weeks to show you that you could do it for three weeks. And if you could do it for those three weeks, and you can do it for even longer, and that's that's kind of the point of all of this, I guess, is we need to write down these accomplishments so that we can see them and recognize them.

And then we need to reflect on them. We need to actually take time to reflect on that progress, because if we don't, then what is the point of it all? I mean, if we don't recognize our wins and we're just constantly reaching for maybe, perhaps big, lofty goals, and then we we don't achieve them, then we just get really down on ourselves.


But if we recognize even any little step of progress that we made, it kind of gives us that momentum to keep going and to to prove to ourselves that that we should be proud and that we are capable. I think we need to actually take that time to pause and reflect instead of just going gung ho into the next year.

So take that time to reflect on what you accomplished. What did you do that makes you feel fantastic about last year? It doesn't matter, like you said, how big, how small? What did you do that you are proud of? Because you should be proud even if you only went to those 18 yoga classes, you should still be proud that you went to 18, and that's still a big deal.

Talking to myself, Yeah, but it's still something to celebrate. And I think that in our hustle culture that we live in, we do not take enough time to celebrate those small wins. We're always playing this comparison game of everyone else's big highlight reels that they're posting on social media. And we're not focusing on the little missteps and the struggles and the failures that happened first.

And we should normalize that because it is normal. And if you don't know that already, I want you to know that because even the biggest celebrities who seem to have all the success, they often had so many failures before they even got to that point. And we just don't see that. So if you feel like you're failing because you only lasted three weeks with your resolution or only made a dent in your goal, you are not a failure.

You still did that and you should be proud for what you did, and you should use that as evidence that you are capable. And you know what? You can do even better now that you have that in mind, now that you know that you were able to do that small thing, you could do even bigger things. So that's why it's very important to write down your accomplishments no matter the size.It doesn't matter if you did not get a promotion or you did not lose £10. Don't focus on that. Focus on what you did do. So let's say you had a goal to lose £10 and you didn't lose any of it. Maybe you gained weight, but how did you feel during the year? Maybe it didn't matter to you because you weren't focusing on that.

Maybe you had a lot of enjoyment in treating yourself and just living life. And it doesn't matter that you did not make that goal that you said at the beginning of the year, because our goals are ever changing any way. You don't need to adhere to them if your values change for the year. So you are not a failure because you didn't lose those £10.

You are winning as long as you feel happy with what you did accomplish and if maybe that was walking every day and maybe you didn't lose weight, but you've noticed that your mental health has improved because you walked every day, then that is a big win. So I guess I'm just trying to say is that we should be celebrating everything that we do that makes us happy, that pushes us in the right direction, and that shows us that we are capable of doing what we set our minds to, even if that is not to the full capacity or degree that we were hoping for.

Any little bit counts so give yourself a pat on the back for that because it matters. And if you prove to yourself that you can do that little bit, then you can prove to yourself again and you can still accomplish what you want to accomplish. So let's talk about what we should be doing to help also build more momentum.

I was already talking about it here was celebrating the small wins and one way to celebrate them is to treat yourself and give yourself a pat on the back and then give yourself a reward because that is, again, more motivation to keep going and to celebrate, not just make more resolutions, but have celebrations for the wins that we did have.

The key here is reflection and celebration, because without those things, resolutions really have no meaning. What is the point of constantly making goals and deciding at the beginning of a new year, though, this is the year that you're going to climb the mountain, but maybe you only make it three weeks in and you only get up to, I don't know, like a small hill. And then you decide because you didn't make it up to the top of the mountain, you are not going to make it at all and you quit. We can't stop there this year, even if it doesn't happen in the month of January, even if it doesn't happen in the month of June, you still, at any point in time can still put one foot in front of the other and go towards your goals. 

By celebrating your small wins, you give yourself the recognition you deserve, and it helps you to stay motivated and to keep working towards your goals. So that's why it's so important to celebrate. Celebrate those wins that you've made for yourself. It's a big deal. Any amount of time, any amount of dent in your big, lofty goals, it's a big deal and that needs to be celebrated. So celebrate you celebrate any win you have. It doesn't matter if it was a thing that you acquired or some kind of status upgrade. It doesn't matter what exactly that looks like for you. It could just be that you spent a day by yourself, living life, basking in the sunshine and eating ice cream, and you look upon that fondly, and that is a win for you for the last year. It does not matter how small or seemingly insignificant it might be if it made you happy and made you feel like a better person, it is very much significant and something to be celebrated. 

So let's normalize this. I mean, not achieving your goals does not make you a failure. You are not a failure. We are human and we are imperfect. And we have busy, hectic lives. And sometimes it's just a matter of what the goal looks like. That's the issue. Sometimes we have these very not well-defined, but extremely lofty goals, and it makes it hard to accomplish that and it makes us feel like we are failing if we don't accomplish that thing. 

But if we take that goal and we break it down into these tiny little steps in stages that we have that will get us to that bigger goal then any of those little steps that you take is a small win to be celebrated.So that is a tip, I suppose is that if we are goal setting, which I think a lot of us do, not everyone, but a lot of us do, I personally like to at the beginning of a year and I'm not the greatest. I look back at my goals throughout the year, but if I do look at them, I have a much better chance of accomplishing them.

So that is another thing that should be done. As you write down all your accomplishment from the last year so that you can give yourself that recognition and then write down your goals for the upcoming year and then break those down into even smaller goals to help you achieve them. Because every step counts and every step is a step in the right direction.

Hopefully. But even if it's not, even if you fall backwards, it's still learning and it's still showing that you could take that step. So should still be celebrated. You should still be celebrating you. It's something that we don't do often enough. We need more celebrations and and less judgments of ourselves because we are our own worst critics, of course, and especially in the culture that we live in, where we're constantly seeing everybody else's achievements and wins and not seeing the behind the scenes struggles that it took to get there, and how many failures there might have been.

We don't see all of the the failed projects that maybe never even made it to light that someone was working on and then just never happened. There's so many things you don't see and we are just basing our own full picture lives on very tiny pictures of other people's lives. So we should stop comparing ourselves in that regard. Celebrate you. Celebrate what makes you happy no matter what that looks like for you. You need to celebrate yourself and your wins and your steps and your missteps and be proud. Because having any kind of goal and making any kind of dent in that goal is something to be celebrated. So celebrate you. And I hope if you aren't already doing this tradition of writing down all of your accomplishments and wins from the past year as you go into the next year, I hope that you will do this with me because it does matter.

And I know some years are going to be better than others in this regard. I had a pretty rough last year and so when I try to think of what happened, that was a win last year, it's very likely that my mind wanders to all of the not so great parts of the last year. So that happens to you, you're normal, okay? It's just the way humans are programed. We tend to focus on the negative, which is why I wanted to make this podcast to focus more on positive things. If you find your mind wandering and judging yourself, just acknowledge it, let it go and try to really laser focus on the things that brought you joy in the past year because those are the real wins, whether it's a goal or an experience or a feeling, those are the wins.

For instance, something I could count as a win that I did for myself when I was going through a pretty rough period with some health stuff and family health stuff. And I was not getting enough sleep and I was just very, very overwhelmed. And having to handle it all myself. And I was struggling. And by the end of the day I had like an hour period to myself and to get things done and all I wanted to do was basically just veg out on the couch and mindlessly watch TV before I went to bed.

And I did do that a couple of nights and then a few nights. Then I remembered that in school, one of the things that I used to do to help to regulate emotion, I guess, was I was a dancer and I would often just dance it out if I had to get through anything. And so I did that during the hour before putting my son to sleep and going to bed myself.

I just turned up some loud music, not where he could hear it, and I just danced as hard and with my full soul as much as I could. And it felt amazing. And I got, you know, it just like, made an impact because we store so much of our emotions in our body and movement, helps to get that out.

And so I would consider that a win. And it was, you know, it's mixed in there with a really rough period of time that I was going through. But doing that, taking that time for myself and making that choice, that was a win. Remembering the joy that dance brings me. That was a win. So that is something that would go on the win list, you know, something to be celebrated, even though to me it's kind of like all wrapped up in this like negative part of the year.

It's something that was positive. So I'm just giving this as an example because your wins can really be anything. And so anyway, going off on a tangent, right, those wins down, no matter how big or how small, look at them, reflect on them, bring that joy and that feeling and that celebration and that pride into the new year with you.

Whether that means setting more goals that you were going to strive to achieve little by little, because we should be taking very small steps towards them. That's one way to do it. But even if you aren't setting goals, just taking that time to be proud of yourself and to find what brings you joy so that you can have more of that in the new year.

It's just very important. And if you are doing it already, I really encourage you to do it and to be proud of yourself. No matter what you achieved or did not achieve. It's whatever brings you joy that matters. So I hope you go into this next year with joy and pride and a positive outlook on life. And it doesn't matter what you're going through that's hard.

Find those micro moments, those things that make you feel bliss and that make you feel like you can do it and you can get through it and celebrate the win so that there can be more of them, because we just need that momentum to get started. We just need that first step, the first stumble to show that we can do it.

So here's to a great new year. Let's do it. Let's make this year count. Let's make it our best, most blissfully positive year yet. And I wanted to leave you with the mantra of the week. You do not have to use this mantra. You can find one that resonates with you more. But because of this, the subject. I thought this one was appropriate.

So if you need a mantra for your week to help you get through, to remind yourself of something to focus on, to give you guidance, then I want to offer you this the mantra I choose to focus on the positive that is your choice. And you can choose to focus on the positive. I know it's a lot easier and much more of a human tendency to notice the negative, but you have the choice to focus on the positive.

So I hope, like me, we can both do this together and we can choose to focus on the positive of this week. Any positive little thing, choose it. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. It's going to be a little of a bumpy ride because I'm just getting started. This was actually one of my goals for this coming year was to launch this podcast. So bear with me as I get my bearings and thank you so much for joining me here. 

I eventually want to have a segment at the end of the podcast called The Good News Segment. So if you have any good news that you would like to share, to have me share on the podcast, I can share it with whatever name you want or anonymously, but I just want to celebrate those wins. So if you have any good news, anything you want to celebrate, feel free to send me an email at the front in your ear pod at gmail.com with your good news and I'll share it on the podcast. 

If you enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to follow if you aren't already and to leave a review, hopefully a five star review. It will really mean a lot to me and it will help my podcast to get the traction it needs, which will be a win for me anyway and help me get that momentum I need to get going as well. So I really appreciate your help on that front and I hope that you have an amazing new year and that you will come back for more chats with me. So thank you again for joining me. 

I hope you have a great week and thanks for letting me be a friend inside your ear.