Do you celebrate success?

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Over time, I’ve been exposed to a bunch of different motivational books, programs and shows and most of them cover at least the following basic ideas:

1. Have a goal or vision in mind before you get started.
2. Clearly articulate (in writing) what that goal or vision is.
3. Come up with a way to track progress, milestones or success along the way and actively track your activity and progress.
4. Make sure you celebrate successes as you go.

All of those make a lot of sense and I would recommend that it’s an excellent albeit really high level way to go about getting things done.

Having said that, I will admit that I have always been really bad about celebrating success.  For some reason, when something goes well my thought process is “well that’s how it was supposed to go – I would have been mad if that didn’t happen.”

Of course on the flip side, I will dwell way to long on setbacks or even things that are just less than great.  As you might imagine, the combination of those two things make it really difficult to stay positive.

Which is why I’m really trying to change.

I’m still okay with getting frustrated or upset when I have a setback – I want to be competitive, not complacent.  But I do think it’s important to enjoy your successes along the way.

Life’s too short to not enjoy it.

Success generally attracts success and if you don’t recognize your success, then you aren’t doing anything to attract more of it.  Don’t you prefer to hang out with people that are doing well and enjoying it?

As long as you don’t blow it out of proportion, it can be a real boost to yourself or your team to recognize positive progress.

So to that end, I’m going to share a couple of recent successes as a partial way of celebrating them.

1. I kicked off my first BANG! group last week (after many weeks worth of getting it set up), and it went really well.  I’m fully convinced that this is a fantastic product that can be and should be a boon to a lot of small business owners that are looking for a new perspective, some energy and some fresh ideas.
2. This is totally off the topic of work, but I entered the Kansas City Star’s Travel Photograph contest a couple of months ago and I learned today that I won the Animals category!  Below is the winning picture:

I also won an honorable mention for another picture:

To get two winning pictures out of 2500 entries is pretty good.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on celebrating success and if you have any recent stories you’d like to share.

Meanwhile I’m going to brainstorm on how to enjoy my prize money and really celebrate this the right way!

Shawn Kinkade    www.aspirekc.com

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