29. Celebrate Your Wins
This week we’re talking about the secret ingredient to creating more success in your life: celebration.
Celebrating feels good. And yet, most of us don’t spend much time doing it. Instead of celebrating our wins, most of us are either 1. jumping immediately to the next goal or 2. finding ourselves stuck in a cycle of negativity about things not being the way we want them to be.
Most people see celebration as a nice to have. But it is a must have.
First of all, celebration feels good. That’s a win in its own right. But on top of that, celebration does two important things. It reminds our brain that life is not just constant struggle. And it creates a connection between feeling good and doing the things we want to be doing. Our brains want to do more of what feels good. When we celebrate our wins, our brains see our wins as feeling good, and then they want to do more of that. This in turn creates more energy (and joy) we can use to keep working on the things we want to work on.
Beyond these very good reasons to celebrate, there’s this: never celebrating our wins is a huge contributor to burnout. If we don’t know how to slow down and celebrate our successes and wins, it can feel like we never have any, and that none of the effort we’re putting in is moving us forward. This obviously does not lead to sustainable growth over time. But celebrating does.
Tune in this week to learn more about how to celebrate your wins and the benefits of doing so. And if you think you don’t have any wins to celebrate, think again. We all have something. Whatever win you have, however tiny or big, start there. Celebrating anything will help you create more things to celebrate next.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What happens in our brain when we achieve something but don’t take the time to acknowledge it in a big way.
Why life can often feel like an endless to-do list, and how to see it through a different lens.
How the act of celebrating moves us forward in ways you might not expect.
My own experience of deciding to celebrate milestones in my business.
How my clients often view celebration when they are first introduced to this concept, and where this perspective comes from.
What I believe is the most valuable and powerful way of celebrating.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about celebration and why it matters.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week, we are talking about celebration. And this topic is so important and not to be overlooked. So if you're thinking that like the podcasts on like how to get along with people, and how to crush your goals, and how to do better work, and how to feel better, this podcast is just as essential as all of the other ones.
And in some ways, I think this podcast is even more essential because if we don't know how to celebrate our successes, if we don't know how to celebrate our wins, then it kind of feels like we never have any. So it almost sort of doesn't matter how well we're doing at anything because our experience of how well we're doing won't include what we're doing well, right?
So like, let me play that back. If we don't celebrate, if we don't slow down to do that, to have a celebration to notice what's working, if we don't pay any attention to that, then it will seem like nothing's ever working and like what's the point and why bother? And that's part of why people get into that kind of burnout headspace is because if you don't take time to celebrate, it will seem like there's nothing to celebrate.
And in the spirit of the podcast being about celebration, I will tell you something I'm celebrating. So my business has done pretty well over the last few years and I'm changing the way that the business is structured now because it was so successful last year. And as part of that I had to change how I pay myself. And I had to set up payroll for myself, which is new for me in this business. And like forever, you know, I've never done that before. I've been paid via payroll by other people and companies in the past, but I've never done that in my business.
So I had to do something I'd never done before which is like pick out, I don't know if you would call it a software, but like a program that I was going to use to pay myself. And set it all up and get it all connected and do it and then have the money, you know, like go from the one place and show up in the other place.
And I found the whole process to be super confusing. I didn't understand it. I was like on the verge of tears. My brain was like totally catastrophizing because I have a brain just like y'all. So I was like, “If I don't get this figured out right, like obviously, like I'm getting sued and going to prison and you know, the IRS will come and take all my money, blah, blah, blah.
I was like emailing my CPA every day about like a new thing. I was like, “Oh, thanks for your answers from yesterday. But like today, it asked me these things and like I don't know what the answers are.” I found it to be very confusing. And I'm sure that some of that was like the way I was thinking about it, but life is short, and we can't coach on everything.
And I did manage to get through it, even though I'm sure I had some less than helpful thoughts in there, too. I also had some helpful thoughts. Thoughts like, “I'm going to figure it out. Even if it's confusing now, like I can get to the other side of that. This is why I have a CPA, so I can ask them questions.”
And like I said, I did get to the other side of it. Last Friday, I received my very first like payroll deposit direct deposited, which was super exciting. It was so satisfying knowing like how much I had struggled and like how many times I had to email the CPA. And how many times I'd also had to like call the support team for this program that I was using, just to get everything figured out.
And now that it's figured out, it's like I don't ever have to think about it again, unless I need to like go in and make changes at some point. So it's just really interesting because if I didn't stop to celebrate, my brain would just stop thinking about that. I've had this experience before actually, when I paid off my student loans.
I was like so proud of myself for like four minutes. And then my brain literally never thought about it again. And it's not like my brain stopped worrying about money. My brain just started worrying about different things. So for years and years, my brain was like, obsessing about the student loans. And then I like figured it out and like got them paid off, and then my brain just started obsessing about other things.
So this is what brains do. And this is why we have to look at things at the level of mindset and at the level of like what we're thinking, because even if the circumstance changes, like the student loans are paid off, or the payroll thing is set up, the brain that worries habitually will find something else to worry about. So that's one thing.
But to come back to the celebration piece, this is also why celebrating matters so much. Because, like I said, if we don't celebrate, if we don't take a moment to do that, our brain will just go like on to the next thing. And I think this is why sometimes for some of us, it can just seem like life is an endless series of to-do lists, like of task items.
I hear this a lot from my clients, it's like no matter how much they get done, they're like, “There's always so much more to do.” And in a way that's kind of true, but that's also kind of just like life as a human being. It's like we've done some things, we're doing some things currently, and there going to be more things to do later. Like, even if I've done all my laundry, if I'm wearing clothes now, I'm like literally making more laundry. But thinking about it that way doesn't make me feel super excited, so I prefer not to.
So our brains have that negativity bias that I talk about sometimes, they like to focus on threats or like things that they see as potential problems. This is another reason why celebrating on purpose is essential. Like we talk all the time about what is working lists and how powerful those can be.
Celebration, though, is a little bit different. So I wanted to give it its own podcast. So first of all, what even is a celebration? When I invite my clients to celebrate their wins, they ask me this all the time. They're like, “What even does that mean? Like, how do I celebrate?”
And it's funny, like they often first think of the things like drinking, or eating, or like going out, or fancy cocktails, right? And I think that's not surprising. But I think a lot of that comes down to our social conditioning and what we're conditioned to see as celebration, yes, but also as pleasure, right.
So people, I think have this connection in their brain between like the idea of celebration and the idea of consumption, right? Whether it's that food or drink, or it's like buy yourself a new sweater. Even like, I'm a houseplant person's, so like buy yourself a new like little baby succulent that’s adorable. But that's still like kind of the act of consumption, right? It's like, we're like getting something or we need a physical something in order to feel celebrated.
And I'm not against that at all. Like, as my own coach says, she says she's a happy hedonist. And I like that too, like I drink, and I like to eat really delicious food. And I have a plethora of houseplants that I love, and you know, sweaters also, fancy things. But that's not what I have in mind for celebration at this point, or rather in the terms of this podcast. Because I actually think that the celebration that is the most powerful for this comes down to language and the thoughts we think, right?
So with my setting up my payroll, I can definitely celebrate by like having a glass of sparkle rose. And don't worry, I'm having plenty of glasses of sparkle rose to celebrate all the things, all the time. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably see my sparkle rose sometimes.
But I think the number one thing that I can do is just pause in my day and be like, “I did that.” In the middle I wasn't sure how I was going to get it figured out. In the middle I felt super frustrated. In the middle my brain was full on catastrophizing and like pitching a fit. And now it's done. It's set up. I did it. I figured it out. I kept going.
So celebrating in this way, for a lot of people they're like, “What? Words? Just say words to myself?” But everything I'm teaching y'all is about changing the words we say to ourselves, noticing the social conditioning we have. Which is the old words we used to say to ourselves. The things we learned to say to ourselves as kids, which often are not helpful now, but they feel really natural because we've been practicing them for like three decades. Switching from those to the new chosen thought patterns that we want to have and the mindset that's actually going to be much more useful to us creating what we want in life. Whether that's a new job, a promotion, a new habit, better relationships, it doesn't matter.
The key to getting anything you want is changing how you think, noticing that old social conditioning, questioning it, unlearning it, and rewiring your brain to new, more helpful thoughts. And so thinking about our celebrations, like running through our celebrations linguistically with language written, spoken, or just inside your own head, that is you rewiring your brain. That is you teaching your brain new thoughts to think.
Now, there are a few reasons to do this. Number one, it just feels good. It just feels good. It just feels good to be like, “I did it. I did the thing. I did the thing I said I was going to do. I did the thing that felt hard in the middle. It's fucking awesome. I did that thing.” Right?
Here's what else it does though, celebrating your wins trains your brain to notice that life is more than just an endless series of to-do items. So often so many of us are like, “I feel completely exhausted, my life is just one fucking thing after another. And even the fun stuff has stopped feeling fun because it's just like okay, at 5pm I have to do this and at 7pm I have to do that, and I like do not fucking want to.”
When our life begins to feel like frustrating and exhausting in that way, to me that is an indicator that we are not taking moments to celebrate our wins. We're also probably not taking moments for pleasure, but that's probably a topic for a whole other podcast. I think pleasure is super important.
And I think that's such a loaded word. So I just want to be clear, like I think we really strongly associate pleasure with sex. But that's not actually what I mean. That's a kind of pleasure, it's not the only kind of pleasure. I think we also highly associate pleasure with that eating and drinking, or like the shopping, buying like the fuzzy sweaters or like getting the house plants. That can be pleasurable, but that's kind of also not what I mean, either.
I think actually, a lot of pleasure comes down, like I'm talking about celebration into how we're thinking, and creating pleasure with our thoughts for ourselves, for our own enjoyment, even if we're also going to like have a glass of wine or like wrap ourselves up in a fuzzy blanket. Nothing against the wine or the fuzzy blanket, or the house plants or any of that, it's just that those things alone won't create pleasure if you don't have thoughts that are also creating the pleasure.
And we know this because tons of us are like kind of trying to get to pleasure through items in that way and it's not working because in our head, we're still feeling like frenzied, and anxious, and burnt out, and exhausted. So it's almost like the pleasure of the item can't get through that. This is why it all comes back to thoughts y'all.
Here's the other thing, the other reason to celebrate your wins, in addition to it training your brain to notice that like you do win, and it’s fun, and it's happening, and life is not just an endless series of to do lists. We want to do more of what feels good. So this is like a very basic function of the human brain.
I actually have a whole podcast on this about like how in the moment brain always wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. But a lot of the things that we want to do in our lives and that we want to do at our jobs requires energy and maybe doesn't seem like it's the most pleasurable in the exact moment. And in that way, I'm talking about like the immediate gratification pleasures, not like the thought pleasures, okay?
And sometimes it might even seem painful, not like literally painful, but painful in like, “I don't want to write that report because like I don't know what I'm going to say.” And it like feels like pain, right? I have been having that because I've been working on a report.
And my brain, it's so funny to watch and have the awareness I have as a coach, my brain is just like, “No, you can't make me.” And I'm like, “Okay, like we don't have to do it. The only reason we're doing it is because we want the outcome of having done it. And then when we do it, we can celebrate it.”
But let's get back to the lesson at hand, which is okay, I got a little off topic there y'all. I'm a little punchy today. Okay, so, to recap, we celebrate our wins. It feels good to do that it trains our brain to notice that some things are going well, and some things are going right.
And then here's the one that I didn't completely get into yet, which is when we celebrate our wins, we create an associative connection in our brain between the win and the delight of celebration. And that's important because your brain wants to do more of what feels good.
Like I was saying before that call back to that other episode, most of the time your brain wants to do what feels good. It's going to choose something that is that immediate gratification pleasure, right? It's like I want to feel good so open up Instagram. I want to feel good so put on Madam Secretary. That's what we're watching right now in my house. I want to feel good so, you know, whatever the immediate gratification is, bring me a pizza. But when we celebrate our wins, we teach our brains that effort also can feel good, right? It's like the very literal example of this is like if you were to take a run, and then you really celebrate yourself afterwards, and you talk yourself up and you're like, “I'm fucking awesome. I did it. I said, I was going to do it. I'm so great. Like I did the thing, I'm celebrating.” Your brain is going to be more likely to want to run.
Here's the thing y'all, most of us get this completely fucking backwards. So we're like, “Oh, I want to run. So I ran, but like I only ran a little bit so instead of telling myself I'm great and celebrating, I'm going to tell myself like how shitty that is.” Right? I see this happen all the time with all kinds of habits, but especially with physical movement, like activities.
And I studied creative writing in grad school, so I've seen this happen a lot with writers also. Writers are like, “Oh, I want to write a novel.” But then every time they sit down to write, they tell themselves that what they're writing isn't good enough. So then, of course, they don't want to write because they've made writing painful. They've made writing emotionally painful by always telling themselves how it's not good enough.
So anything you want to do more of celebrate it when you already do it. This is so simple and so many of us will never do this, but it will change everything. I cannot over emphasize how much this matters. Any habit you want to have you can use the lesson I taught recently about too small to fail to create a little tiny chunk of it. But then it's just as helpful to celebrate the shit out of every time you do it.
Because if you do, you're too small to fail and then you're telling yourself it's so small doesn't matter, you're creating a negative association loop, your brain is never going to want to do that thing. It creates pain for you. That in the moment brain is like, “Fuck pain, why would I run if you're just going to tell me it's shitty afterwards? No, fucking thank you.”
Instead, you got to take whatever it is that you did, if you want to do it again, celebrate it. I don't care how tiny it is. I don't care if you like literally ran 10 steps, if you want to run 10 steps again, if you want to run 20 steps, if you want to run 10 miles, celebrate that 10 steps like it's the coolest fucking shit you've ever seen in your life. Right?
If I want to be able to set up complex systems for my business, and even if I have to email my CPA 16 times, if I want to give myself the ability of being able to do it, I need to praise myself when I do that. If I tell myself, “Oh my God, you're so dumb, I can't believe you couldn't figure this out and you had to email your CPA. Like what kind of business owner are you?” I am setting up that negative association.
I'm never going to want to do shit in my business and my business isn't going to grow. And I'm going to be disincentivized from growing the business because growing the business always means learning new things and having to take on new challenges and having to set up new programs. Then eventually it's going to be hiring, and then I'm going to have to learn how to be a manager, right, in my business. So that's the thing, anything we want to do more of we have to praise the shit out of now. Anything we want to do more of we have to celebrate the shit out of now, even if we're like doing like the tiniest, smallest increment of it.
This is going to make your brain hurt. We are used to second guessing and criticizing ourselves unless we see our effort is perfect. And that is the opposite of what I am teaching you. So I agree if that's how you've been doing things like that's probably how you were socially conditioned. It's how most of us are socially conditioned, you know, is to see what we're not doing well enough. But it just doesn't lead to sustainable growth over time. The celebrating does.
I have this thing I say to my clients when they do something that's like in the direction of whatever they're trying to do, right. So it's like if I give them a little homework and it like literally would take them five minutes, and they do the little homework I'm like, “10,000 points. 10,000 points, 100,000 points, a million points.” And they laugh at me because it feels silly, right? They're like, “I did this thing for five minutes. Why is she giving me a million points? Also, like what do these points even do?” They don't do anything y'all, they're made up, I made them up. But the brain likes that. Even if they are made up. I mean, everything's made up like even money is made up. But that's definitely a topic for another podcast.
So try this yourself, do something you said you were going to do, celebrate the shit out of it and give yourself 10,000 points, give yourself 500,000 points, give yourself a fucking billion points. Delight in it because that is how to make it fun. And when we make it fun, we want to do more of it. And then we don't actually need to like “motivate” ourselves.
When we celebrate our wins and when we focus on what we're doing well, and when we allow ourselves to take tiny steps and then praise the shit out of ourselves, we don't need to crack the whip. We don't need to like do all the shit to like, force ourselves to do effort. We're going to do effort because we want to, because it feels good, because it's fun, and because it's aligned.
All right so to recap, first you have to notice your wins. We didn't even talk about that, but this is a thing. It’s like a lot of people don't even notice their wins. They'll be like, “I want to do blah, blah, blah.” And then they'll do blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, “Did you celebrate that?” And they're like, “Oh, what?” Because they've like forgotten.
It's like, people have weird amnesia. They're like forget that they even said they wanted to do it. And then they did it and then their brain is like, “Well, now I have to do the next thing.” No, slow the fuck down, notice your wins. The irony here is like when you slow down and notice and celebrate your wins, you'll actually speed up over time, but it's going to feel like slowing down at first. It's kind of like what we talked about last time, this is a time investment versus a time expense. And if that doesn't make sense to you go listen to last week's podcast and let it blow your mind.
Okay. Notice your wins. Celebrate your wins. Celebrate them so much you feel ridiculous. Like just go fucking all out, give yourself 10,000 points. Allow yourself to notice and enjoy that life is not an endless to-do list and sometimes we're just celebrating what is working and we're appreciating ourselves. And we're noticing how we did the thing we said we would do, and we figured out the problem, we tackled it.
Really allow yourself to just like hang out in that, even if it's just for like five minutes. And allow yourself to see that like doing what you said you would do can feel good. And it doesn't have to be perfect to feel good.
Like did I set up that payroll perfectly? No the fuck I did not. I mean, hopefully by the time it was finalized it was like good enough. But there was so much messiness in the middle. And that's fine because I got it set up and I figured it out. And who even cares if it was messy in the middle? If I never let myslf get messy, I wouldn't have a business.
And finally, I want y'all to report back about this, if you don't have a win from recently to celebrate, if you're having that brain amnesia I was talking about before where your brain is like, “I've never done anything I said I would do.” First of all, that's a total lie, you've done lots of stuff you said you would do, and you've done lots of stuff well, but our brains often do hide that from us.
So just pick something. Go listen to the episode on too small to fail, pick something super small, and then celebrate the shit out of it and then write me and let me know what happens. Let me know how it feels. And let me know like what you're going to do next.
Because what you'll find is when you do celebrate your wins, you're going to want to have more of them. And that's how we get to every big, beautiful goal we've ever had and every wild dream. Because every big, beautiful goal and every wild dream is just a bunch of tiny things done over and over again, one after the other. And when you have a lot of celebrating it feels fun to keep doing them and keep going. And you get to your big, beautiful goal and your dream and it doesn't have to feel like a series of endless to-dos.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page.
All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week, we are talking about celebration. And this topic is so important and not to be overlooked. So if you're thinking that like the podcasts on like how to get along with people, and how to crush your goals, and how to do better work, and how to feel better, this podcast is just as essential as all of the other ones.
And in some ways, I think this podcast is even more essential because if we don't know how to celebrate our successes, if we don't know how to celebrate our wins, then it kind of feels like we never have any. So it almost sort of doesn't matter how well we're doing at anything because our experience of how well we're doing won't include what we're doing well, right?
So like, let me play that back. If we don't celebrate, if we don't slow down to do that, to have a celebration to notice what's working, if we don't pay any attention to that, then it will seem like nothing's ever working and like what's the point and why bother? And that's part of why people get into that kind of burnout headspace is because if you don't take time to celebrate, it will seem like there's nothing to celebrate.
And in the spirit of the podcast being about celebration, I will tell you something I'm celebrating. So my business has done pretty well over the last few years and I'm changing the way that the business is structured now because it was so successful last year. And as part of that I had to change how I pay myself. And I had to set up payroll for myself, which is new for me in this business. And like forever, you know, I've never done that before. I've been paid via payroll by other people and companies in the past, but I've never done that in my business.
So I had to do something I'd never done before which is like pick out, I don't know if you would call it a software, but like a program that I was going to use to pay myself. And set it all up and get it all connected and do it and then have the money, you know, like go from the one place and show up in the other place.
And I found the whole process to be super confusing. I didn't understand it. I was like on the verge of tears. My brain was like totally catastrophizing because I have a brain just like y'all. So I was like, “If I don't get this figured out right, like obviously, like I'm getting sued and going to prison and you know, the IRS will come and take all my money, blah, blah, blah.
I was like emailing my CPA every day about like a new thing. I was like, “Oh, thanks for your answers from yesterday. But like today, it asked me these things and like I don't know what the answers are.” I found it to be very confusing. And I'm sure that some of that was like the way I was thinking about it, but life is short, and we can't coach on everything.
And I did manage to get through it, even though I'm sure I had some less than helpful thoughts in there, too. I also had some helpful thoughts. Thoughts like, “I'm going to figure it out. Even if it's confusing now, like I can get to the other side of that. This is why I have a CPA, so I can ask them questions.”
And like I said, I did get to the other side of it. Last Friday, I received my very first like payroll deposit direct deposited, which was super exciting. It was so satisfying knowing like how much I had struggled and like how many times I had to email the CPA. And how many times I'd also had to like call the support team for this program that I was using, just to get everything figured out.
And now that it's figured out, it's like I don't ever have to think about it again, unless I need to like go in and make changes at some point. So it's just really interesting because if I didn't stop to celebrate, my brain would just stop thinking about that. I've had this experience before actually, when I paid off my student loans.
I was like so proud of myself for like four minutes. And then my brain literally never thought about it again. And it's not like my brain stopped worrying about money. My brain just started worrying about different things. So for years and years, my brain was like, obsessing about the student loans. And then I like figured it out and like got them paid off, and then my brain just started obsessing about other things.
So this is what brains do. And this is why we have to look at things at the level of mindset and at the level of like what we're thinking, because even if the circumstance changes, like the student loans are paid off, or the payroll thing is set up, the brain that worries habitually will find something else to worry about. So that's one thing.
But to come back to the celebration piece, this is also why celebrating matters so much. Because, like I said, if we don't celebrate, if we don't take a moment to do that, our brain will just go like on to the next thing. And I think this is why sometimes for some of us, it can just seem like life is an endless series of to-do lists, like of task items.
I hear this a lot from my clients, it's like no matter how much they get done, they're like, “There's always so much more to do.” And in a way that's kind of true, but that's also kind of just like life as a human being. It's like we've done some things, we're doing some things currently, and there going to be more things to do later. Like, even if I've done all my laundry, if I'm wearing clothes now, I'm like literally making more laundry. But thinking about it that way doesn't make me feel super excited, so I prefer not to.
So our brains have that negativity bias that I talk about sometimes, they like to focus on threats or like things that they see as potential problems. This is another reason why celebrating on purpose is essential. Like we talk all the time about what is working lists and how powerful those can be.
Celebration, though, is a little bit different. So I wanted to give it its own podcast. So first of all, what even is a celebration? When I invite my clients to celebrate their wins, they ask me this all the time. They're like, “What even does that mean? Like, how do I celebrate?”
And it's funny, like they often first think of the things like drinking, or eating, or like going out, or fancy cocktails, right? And I think that's not surprising. But I think a lot of that comes down to our social conditioning and what we're conditioned to see as celebration, yes, but also as pleasure, right.
So people, I think have this connection in their brain between like the idea of celebration and the idea of consumption, right? Whether it's that food or drink, or it's like buy yourself a new sweater. Even like, I'm a houseplant person's, so like buy yourself a new like little baby succulent that’s adorable. But that's still like kind of the act of consumption, right? It's like, we're like getting something or we need a physical something in order to feel celebrated.
And I'm not against that at all. Like, as my own coach says, she says she's a happy hedonist. And I like that too, like I drink, and I like to eat really delicious food. And I have a plethora of houseplants that I love, and you know, sweaters also, fancy things. But that's not what I have in mind for celebration at this point, or rather in the terms of this podcast. Because I actually think that the celebration that is the most powerful for this comes down to language and the thoughts we think, right?
So with my setting up my payroll, I can definitely celebrate by like having a glass of sparkle rose. And don't worry, I'm having plenty of glasses of sparkle rose to celebrate all the things, all the time. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably see my sparkle rose sometimes.
But I think the number one thing that I can do is just pause in my day and be like, “I did that.” In the middle I wasn't sure how I was going to get it figured out. In the middle I felt super frustrated. In the middle my brain was full on catastrophizing and like pitching a fit. And now it's done. It's set up. I did it. I figured it out. I kept going.
So celebrating in this way, for a lot of people they're like, “What? Words? Just say words to myself?” But everything I'm teaching y'all is about changing the words we say to ourselves, noticing the social conditioning we have. Which is the old words we used to say to ourselves. The things we learned to say to ourselves as kids, which often are not helpful now, but they feel really natural because we've been practicing them for like three decades. Switching from those to the new chosen thought patterns that we want to have and the mindset that's actually going to be much more useful to us creating what we want in life. Whether that's a new job, a promotion, a new habit, better relationships, it doesn't matter.
The key to getting anything you want is changing how you think, noticing that old social conditioning, questioning it, unlearning it, and rewiring your brain to new, more helpful thoughts. And so thinking about our celebrations, like running through our celebrations linguistically with language written, spoken, or just inside your own head, that is you rewiring your brain. That is you teaching your brain new thoughts to think.
Now, there are a few reasons to do this. Number one, it just feels good. It just feels good. It just feels good to be like, “I did it. I did the thing. I did the thing I said I was going to do. I did the thing that felt hard in the middle. It's fucking awesome. I did that thing.” Right?
Here's what else it does though, celebrating your wins trains your brain to notice that life is more than just an endless series of to-do items. So often so many of us are like, “I feel completely exhausted, my life is just one fucking thing after another. And even the fun stuff has stopped feeling fun because it's just like okay, at 5pm I have to do this and at 7pm I have to do that, and I like do not fucking want to.”
When our life begins to feel like frustrating and exhausting in that way, to me that is an indicator that we are not taking moments to celebrate our wins. We're also probably not taking moments for pleasure, but that's probably a topic for a whole other podcast. I think pleasure is super important.
And I think that's such a loaded word. So I just want to be clear, like I think we really strongly associate pleasure with sex. But that's not actually what I mean. That's a kind of pleasure, it's not the only kind of pleasure. I think we also highly associate pleasure with that eating and drinking, or like the shopping, buying like the fuzzy sweaters or like getting the house plants. That can be pleasurable, but that's kind of also not what I mean, either.
I think actually, a lot of pleasure comes down, like I'm talking about celebration into how we're thinking, and creating pleasure with our thoughts for ourselves, for our own enjoyment, even if we're also going to like have a glass of wine or like wrap ourselves up in a fuzzy blanket. Nothing against the wine or the fuzzy blanket, or the house plants or any of that, it's just that those things alone won't create pleasure if you don't have thoughts that are also creating the pleasure.
And we know this because tons of us are like kind of trying to get to pleasure through items in that way and it's not working because in our head, we're still feeling like frenzied, and anxious, and burnt out, and exhausted. So it's almost like the pleasure of the item can't get through that. This is why it all comes back to thoughts y'all.
Here's the other thing, the other reason to celebrate your wins, in addition to it training your brain to notice that like you do win, and it’s fun, and it's happening, and life is not just an endless series of to do lists. We want to do more of what feels good. So this is like a very basic function of the human brain.
I actually have a whole podcast on this about like how in the moment brain always wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. But a lot of the things that we want to do in our lives and that we want to do at our jobs requires energy and maybe doesn't seem like it's the most pleasurable in the exact moment. And in that way, I'm talking about like the immediate gratification pleasures, not like the thought pleasures, okay?
And sometimes it might even seem painful, not like literally painful, but painful in like, “I don't want to write that report because like I don't know what I'm going to say.” And it like feels like pain, right? I have been having that because I've been working on a report.
And my brain, it's so funny to watch and have the awareness I have as a coach, my brain is just like, “No, you can't make me.” And I'm like, “Okay, like we don't have to do it. The only reason we're doing it is because we want the outcome of having done it. And then when we do it, we can celebrate it.”
But let's get back to the lesson at hand, which is okay, I got a little off topic there y'all. I'm a little punchy today. Okay, so, to recap, we celebrate our wins. It feels good to do that it trains our brain to notice that some things are going well, and some things are going right.
And then here's the one that I didn't completely get into yet, which is when we celebrate our wins, we create an associative connection in our brain between the win and the delight of celebration. And that's important because your brain wants to do more of what feels good.
Like I was saying before that call back to that other episode, most of the time your brain wants to do what feels good. It's going to choose something that is that immediate gratification pleasure, right? It's like I want to feel good so open up Instagram. I want to feel good so put on Madam Secretary. That's what we're watching right now in my house. I want to feel good so, you know, whatever the immediate gratification is, bring me a pizza. But when we celebrate our wins, we teach our brains that effort also can feel good, right? It's like the very literal example of this is like if you were to take a run, and then you really celebrate yourself afterwards, and you talk yourself up and you're like, “I'm fucking awesome. I did it. I said, I was going to do it. I'm so great. Like I did the thing, I'm celebrating.” Your brain is going to be more likely to want to run.
Here's the thing y'all, most of us get this completely fucking backwards. So we're like, “Oh, I want to run. So I ran, but like I only ran a little bit so instead of telling myself I'm great and celebrating, I'm going to tell myself like how shitty that is.” Right? I see this happen all the time with all kinds of habits, but especially with physical movement, like activities.
And I studied creative writing in grad school, so I've seen this happen a lot with writers also. Writers are like, “Oh, I want to write a novel.” But then every time they sit down to write, they tell themselves that what they're writing isn't good enough. So then, of course, they don't want to write because they've made writing painful. They've made writing emotionally painful by always telling themselves how it's not good enough.
So anything you want to do more of celebrate it when you already do it. This is so simple and so many of us will never do this, but it will change everything. I cannot over emphasize how much this matters. Any habit you want to have you can use the lesson I taught recently about too small to fail to create a little tiny chunk of it. But then it's just as helpful to celebrate the shit out of every time you do it.
Because if you do, you're too small to fail and then you're telling yourself it's so small doesn't matter, you're creating a negative association loop, your brain is never going to want to do that thing. It creates pain for you. That in the moment brain is like, “Fuck pain, why would I run if you're just going to tell me it's shitty afterwards? No, fucking thank you.”
Instead, you got to take whatever it is that you did, if you want to do it again, celebrate it. I don't care how tiny it is. I don't care if you like literally ran 10 steps, if you want to run 10 steps again, if you want to run 20 steps, if you want to run 10 miles, celebrate that 10 steps like it's the coolest fucking shit you've ever seen in your life. Right?
If I want to be able to set up complex systems for my business, and even if I have to email my CPA 16 times, if I want to give myself the ability of being able to do it, I need to praise myself when I do that. If I tell myself, “Oh my God, you're so dumb, I can't believe you couldn't figure this out and you had to email your CPA. Like what kind of business owner are you?” I am setting up that negative association.
I'm never going to want to do shit in my business and my business isn't going to grow. And I'm going to be disincentivized from growing the business because growing the business always means learning new things and having to take on new challenges and having to set up new programs. Then eventually it's going to be hiring, and then I'm going to have to learn how to be a manager, right, in my business. So that's the thing, anything we want to do more of we have to praise the shit out of now. Anything we want to do more of we have to celebrate the shit out of now, even if we're like doing like the tiniest, smallest increment of it.
This is going to make your brain hurt. We are used to second guessing and criticizing ourselves unless we see our effort is perfect. And that is the opposite of what I am teaching you. So I agree if that's how you've been doing things like that's probably how you were socially conditioned. It's how most of us are socially conditioned, you know, is to see what we're not doing well enough. But it just doesn't lead to sustainable growth over time. The celebrating does.
I have this thing I say to my clients when they do something that's like in the direction of whatever they're trying to do, right. So it's like if I give them a little homework and it like literally would take them five minutes, and they do the little homework I'm like, “10,000 points. 10,000 points, 100,000 points, a million points.” And they laugh at me because it feels silly, right? They're like, “I did this thing for five minutes. Why is she giving me a million points? Also, like what do these points even do?” They don't do anything y'all, they're made up, I made them up. But the brain likes that. Even if they are made up. I mean, everything's made up like even money is made up. But that's definitely a topic for another podcast.
So try this yourself, do something you said you were going to do, celebrate the shit out of it and give yourself 10,000 points, give yourself 500,000 points, give yourself a fucking billion points. Delight in it because that is how to make it fun. And when we make it fun, we want to do more of it. And then we don't actually need to like “motivate” ourselves.
When we celebrate our wins and when we focus on what we're doing well, and when we allow ourselves to take tiny steps and then praise the shit out of ourselves, we don't need to crack the whip. We don't need to like do all the shit to like, force ourselves to do effort. We're going to do effort because we want to, because it feels good, because it's fun, and because it's aligned.
All right so to recap, first you have to notice your wins. We didn't even talk about that, but this is a thing. It’s like a lot of people don't even notice their wins. They'll be like, “I want to do blah, blah, blah.” And then they'll do blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, “Did you celebrate that?” And they're like, “Oh, what?” Because they've like forgotten.
It's like, people have weird amnesia. They're like forget that they even said they wanted to do it. And then they did it and then their brain is like, “Well, now I have to do the next thing.” No, slow the fuck down, notice your wins. The irony here is like when you slow down and notice and celebrate your wins, you'll actually speed up over time, but it's going to feel like slowing down at first. It's kind of like what we talked about last time, this is a time investment versus a time expense. And if that doesn't make sense to you go listen to last week's podcast and let it blow your mind.
Okay. Notice your wins. Celebrate your wins. Celebrate them so much you feel ridiculous. Like just go fucking all out, give yourself 10,000 points. Allow yourself to notice and enjoy that life is not an endless to-do list and sometimes we're just celebrating what is working and we're appreciating ourselves. And we're noticing how we did the thing we said we would do, and we figured out the problem, we tackled it.
Really allow yourself to just like hang out in that, even if it's just for like five minutes. And allow yourself to see that like doing what you said you would do can feel good. And it doesn't have to be perfect to feel good.
Like did I set up that payroll perfectly? No the fuck I did not. I mean, hopefully by the time it was finalized it was like good enough. But there was so much messiness in the middle. And that's fine because I got it set up and I figured it out. And who even cares if it was messy in the middle? If I never let myslf get messy, I wouldn't have a business.
And finally, I want y'all to report back about this, if you don't have a win from recently to celebrate, if you're having that brain amnesia I was talking about before where your brain is like, “I've never done anything I said I would do.” First of all, that's a total lie, you've done lots of stuff you said you would do, and you've done lots of stuff well, but our brains often do hide that from us.
So just pick something. Go listen to the episode on too small to fail, pick something super small, and then celebrate the shit out of it and then write me and let me know what happens. Let me know how it feels. And let me know like what you're going to do next.
Because what you'll find is when you do celebrate your wins, you're going to want to have more of them. And that's how we get to every big, beautiful goal we've ever had and every wild dream. Because every big, beautiful goal and every wild dream is just a bunch of tiny things done over and over again, one after the other. And when you have a lot of celebrating it feels fun to keep doing them and keep going. And you get to your big, beautiful goal and your dream and it doesn't have to feel like a series of endless to-dos.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page.
All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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