Is it okay to celebrate the small stuff?

Hi there, it’s Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and this week’s video is all about celebrating success. It comes to mind for me because just yesterday, I concluded a three-day retreat with a corporate client that I am so enjoying working with. Actually, I guess it’s not corporate, it’s a military client and they’re just a fantastic group of people to work with. I’m working through this retreat with my business partner, a gentleman named Jackson Curtis, and here’s a shot of Jackson and I at a restaurant last night after an exhausting three days of delivering this retreat, just simply enjoying the moments, celebrating the fact that we set out to do something important and we both felt like we nailed it. Along with the participants, we just brought the right energy, the right content to get the teaching impact that we wanted. The retreat was all about emotional intelligence and how we can use that in leadership. Jackson and I were pumped and as we were driving back into Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is where I am right now, we decided we’d go out for a fancy dinner. Our first choice of restaurant wasn’t available, but we still found a place that was decent. I usually am vegetarian, but I do like eating meat, so we had big steak dinners and glasses of wine and dessert, and all that kind of stuff and it made us feel good. It was a time to punctuate and recognize our success. Too often, I think, so many of us, especially when it comes to our personal accomplishments, don’t do anything to mark the occasion. So, that’s what this video is all about. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Isn’t it so often the case that we have some goal that we need to do or a million things on our to-do list and we go ahead and we do these things, but we don’t in fact then pause and celebrate? In fact, it’s usually we’ve just added two more things to the to-do list and hardly recognize it all when we cross off the one item. I’ve talked before about specific positive psychology tools that we can use for that kind of one by one recognition of our to-do list, but sometimes there’s even bigger things. We quit smoking, we lose the 15 pounds that we set out to do, we complete a big project for our client or for our employer, we get a promotion or we achieve our children being successfully sent off to college for the first time. Any number of these things and we fail to even pause and say, hey, wow, that was a great job. In business, we’re almost equally bad at this. Gallup wanted to have a poll that says 67 percent of Americans don’t feel like they had any positive appreciation from their employer in the past year. So, there’s far too little celebrating of success. That failure, when we corrected, adds a ton of benefit. Celebrating success, this seems obvious but it’s worth saying, it increases our motivation. We feel better about going on to do the next thing and it really builds confidence and self-esteem in some very valuable ways. You know, when we work hard and achieve something, we learn about our own autonomy and our mastery. In my book, my best-selling book about happiness, I talk about mastery a ton. This idea of that I achieve a certain level, I level up in life and level up in certain areas of my life. If we don’t stop and recognize that, well, where’s my motivation to level up the next time? In businesses, celebrating success is this huge and important way to build team cohesion. Of course, there’s a whole bunch more advantages. So, as I close this short video, I might just say there’s tons of ways to do this.

The first way, and maybe most important way to celebrate success, is to share that success. Talk about it, speak about it with friends, and maybe people in your Mastermind group if you’re a private entrepreneur. Talk to your mom about it, talk to your family, talk to your friends, share it, share it, share it. We sometimes feel in our society that we shouldn’t be bragging, but there’s ought to be a few people in our lives where we can go in and share our accomplishments in a way that doesn’t feel conceited or egotistical, but just something that you want somebody else to be a part of. Give a gift. So, if it’s a colleague who worked, and they just get something small, a token of appreciation, it’s huge. It’s often something that people will value for years. And we can do that for ourselves too. Buy that little sum token that you know you’ll enjoy, but it’s because you’re recognizing your own achievement. Have a party. You know, even Jackson and I had only the two of us, but we went out for dinner, we had wine, we had dessert, we made it a social occasion. That’s part of our heritage, is that when we come together and break bread, have a party, and celebrate something, it’s a beautiful way to give recognition to something important. Then, if you want to take it to the next level, create some kind of significant reward. What I would especially encourage is some kind of experiential adventure. Go to the spa, go on a hiking trip, go to a Meditation Retreat, go on a holiday. I mean those are maybe pretty big rewards, so they might be saved for the bigger successes and achievements, but nevertheless those things can have a lasting value. Remember, experiences have more psychological reward for us and advantage for us over gifts ordinarily. Then finally, if you’re in a business setting, have a ceremony. I know we need to be careful that we don’t expose introverts to more public attention than they want, so check in with them. But to bring the team together and mark the occasions, not necessarily in a solemn way but in a formal way, is a really good way for people to say, yeah, this company notices when we do good work. Hey, if you like this kind of content, click the like button, share with your friends and family, with your Human Resources Director and I will see you next week. Bye for now.