It’s a simple concept, but few of us do enough of it: We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, milestones and triumphs of various kinds. We celebrate successes at the moment of victory.
But we rarely – if ever – review our past successes and retroactively celebrate what really counts, such as:
- How far we’ve come,
- How much we’ve accomplished,
- All we’ve learned, and/or
- The ways in which we’ve grown.
Taking the time to celebrate past successes can be an important, helpful, and worthwhile strategy for a great many reasons, including:
Celebrations Make Memories
It’s easy to gloss over your past successes. That’s why we so often do it. But it’s better to intentionally go back over them and celebrate.
Much like a destination wedding adds special experiences to the normal joy and excitement of a new marriage, a celebration of a past success makes that already-excellent triumph much larger, adding to its natural luster with extra activities, supportive feelings, and stronger memories. Celebrating past successes tends to install each one more vividly into your personal record book.
Celebrations Create Meaning
If you look back over your past, you’ll likely find a string of successes. As they pile up, each new one can begin to feel less important, more routine, even somewhat stale. But this is unfair to your past successes and to you.
Each of your successes – even the smallest and simplest of them – is actually a valuable building block of the life you have been steadily establishing. Creating a celebration to mark one or more of your past successes – perhaps as a group or perhaps individually – is a great way to make your past successes more vibrant, more important, and more meaningful.
Celebrations Provide Perspective
A string of successes inevitably find their way into the tapestry of all the events in your life, and can easily blur together or fade entirely from significance. Celebrating past successes pulls them out of the background and helps you understand and remember how you first recognized each opportunity, exactly how you achieved each success, and the various ways in which each of your past successes became a basis for further opportunity, growth, and accomplishment.
Celebrations Enhance Gratitude
It’s all too easy to forget the journey we’ve taken from our place of origin, and how we worked and struggled to arrive at where we are now. This is a major mistake, because a strong sense of progress in our work and our lives helps us feel more gratitude for our current position, abilities, and opportunities.
This is important, because a feeling of gratitude is beneficial in many ways, providing:
- More happiness and positive emotions,
- Better resistance to burnout and dissatisfaction,
- Improved health, sleep, and daily performance,
- Greater emotional resilience,
- An overall more productive and successful attitude.
Celebrations Bolster Confidence
For a variety of reasons, celebrations seem to act like a “confidence accelerator.” During the celebration, you absorb a burst of positive energy that reduces or even eliminates any self-doubts or low-energy feelings. Coming off a celebration of your past successes, it’s natural to feel significantly more confident about your ability to meet the next challenge and accomplish the next goal.
The more often you experience celebrations of your past successes, the less time there is between them for your confidence to wither away.
Celebrations Supercharge Motivation
In much the same way as with confidence, celebrations of your past successes tend to supercharge your motivation to accomplish the next success on your agenda. Remembering how well you have performed in the past tends to reduce any feelings of fear or reluctance to tackle the next opportunity, and also creates extra incentives for you to work full-bore toward the next milestone and the next celebration.
Because of all these and other advantages they bring, frequent celebrations of your past successes can provide a simple, easy way to leverage what you have already accomplished into a greater ability and a stronger drive to accomplish even more.
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