Why should you celebrate your small achievements?

Let us begin with a question. What was your most recent accomplishment that you celebrated? Like many, you probably thought of something big like your graduation or perhaps a job promotion. But what if I asked you about your small accomplishments?

Everyone reacts differently to the small achievements in their lives. But most of us are so focused on our end goals that we often forget to celebrate the small steps forward that we make along the way. When we happen to achieve something relatively small, chances are we would have forgotten about it after a little while as we would move on and forget about it.

In contrast, when we face a setback, we will most likely give it a lot of our attention and it might weigh on our minds for some time. At times, we might even have trouble falling asleep because of over-thinking that one setback. 

There is a clear imbalance in how we react to our achievements and to our failures. This imbalance creates an inaccurate, poor impression of who we are and what we are capable of. It lowers our self-esteem and motivation. As we focus more on our failures while forgetting our achievements, we deprive ourselves of opportunities for the self-appreciation that we all need and deserve. If we do not recognise the small steps forward that we make towards our goal, we will not see how far we have come and when faced with a challenge, we might even feel discouraged to move forward.

This is why recognising small achievements is essential for a fresh and more accurate view of ourselves and for our capability to face new challenges. And the most effective way to recognise your small accomplishments is to celebrate them!

The benefits of celebrating small achievements

Aside from helping us to recognise our accomplishments, celebrating achievements also helps us to reward ourselves for the effort we put in towards our goal. It also helps us to compensate for the sacrifices that we make along the way.

When we reward ourselves for small achievements, we set ourselves up for further success. We like to reward ourselves because it makes us feel good. So, the more often we reward ourselves for our successes, the more we look forward to accomplishing something. From our personal experience, every time we successfully brought to life a design, we rewarded ourselves with a night out with family where we would share this accomplishment. We would talk to our family and friends about the ups and downs we experienced and received their support and encouragement whilst savouring our dessert. This greatly motivated us to keep on moving forward, one design at a time.

Thus, celebrating small accomplishments can improve our long-term motivation by compensating for the sacrifices that we make along the way. For example, if while working on your project you had to give up the time you spend with your friends, then celebrating your accomplishment by having some quality time with them will make you feel better about the sacrifice. Continuously compensating for what you had to give up is especially important for the long-term goals because it makes you feel less oppressed by your end goal. This promotes a healthier work-life balance and helps to avoid burnout which results in an ongoing motivation and overall higher quality of life.

What accomplishments should I celebrate?

It would be easy to say, “just celebrate all of your accomplishments!”. However, sometimes it’s difficult to identify an achievement when it happens. So, you wouldn’t know what to celebrate, and you would unknowingly skip all the good opportunities for a celebration.

After reading about people's experiences around what they identify as a small accomplishment, I found that it’s important to distinguish a planned accomplishment from an unplanned one.

If you like to have a structure in everything you do, you can identify in advance what will qualify as a small accomplishment by setting up an action plan for achieving your goal. To do that, you should first determine where you are on the path to your goal, which is why it will be very helpful to look at your past successes first. Take a bit of your time to write your previous achievements down, along with your corresponding emotions and reflections of them. This will also help you to remember your achievements in the future and in the moments of uncertainty you can always reread your notes and strengthen your faith in your capabilities. Once you know where you stand, write down what important steps you need to make in order to achieve your goal. Every time you tick off a step, don’t forget to celebrate! Even better, you could actually assign a reward for every completed step, so you know what to look forward to. 

Of course, life doesn’t always go according to plan and some goals are too complex to tell in advance what path will reach them. If you can’t identify your steps for achieving your goal or if you are not so fond of planning, there will still be plenty of unexpected successes to celebrate! To identify for yourself what qualifies as a small achievement, you need to first remember that everyone has their own challenges and their own definition of hard work. When judging whether celebrating a particular accomplishment will be meaningful enough to make you feel good about yourself and to motivate you to move forward, it all comes down to two things only you can tell, how much effort it took for you to reach your accomplishment and whether you got a step closer to your end goal.

How to celebrate your accomplishment

Whichever way we choose to celebrate our small accomplishment, it must make us feel good about ourselves and make our small accomplishment feel special. Since we are all so different, there is no universal way of celebrating small accomplishments for everyone. But just to give you some ideas, we put together a few guides and examples to consider when planning a celebration for yourself or for your loved ones.

Celebration must make you feel good. The way you decide to celebrate your accomplishments must make your achievement feel special, so do something that will make you feel especially good!

One popular way of celebrating your achievement that many people often adopt in the big city like Singapore is shopping. Update your look, get supplies for your hobby, or refresh your home. Buy something that you will frequently use to serve you as a reminder of what you have achieved and to inspire you for new accomplishments.

Every one of our jewellery comes as a result of our hard work and effort. Which is why we follow our own philosophy and celebrate every piece we create as a small achievement and in turn, we hope for you to be reminded of your own achievement while wearing our jewellery. Being able to transfer this feeling of celebration to you is the greatest honour we could receive.

Aside from shopping, another popular way of celebrating is to go for an activity like indoor rock climbing, ice skating, walking or having a picnic in the park, watching a movie in a cinema, dining in your favourite restaurant, cycling or rollerblading, painting, pottery making, getting a spa treatment. Try something new, experiment, invite someone you love to join you or do it solo with your favourite music playlist.

Try to reward yourself according to what you have sacrificed. For example, if you were working on a project that required you to give up socialising with friends, host a party or a weekend getaway with loved ones. If you did a lot of sitting in the office or had a heavy physical or psychological load, then you could go to spa for relaxation. Of course, this isn’t always applicable. If your goal is to quit smoking, then celebrating your one-month free of cigarettes with smoking probably wouldn’t be wise.

Try to celebrate your achievements in a group. Do not hesitate to celebrate your success in the company of loved ones. If your accomplishment is about your personal life, gather family members, loved ones, and closest friends. If it’s an important professional achievement, invite your colleagues to the party. Celebrating success with others creates social and family bonds that enhance the positive psychological impact of success for you, compared to celebrating it alone. 

Combine your celebration with self-reflection. Whichever way you choose to celebrate your achievement, adding self-reflection to it will significantly enrich your experience. Think of what it is that helped you with your small achievement, what made it harder, what kept you motivated and what could you do better next time. Talk about it with people around you if you are going for a group celebration, or otherwise write it down. This will boost your self-esteem and help you look at your achievement from a different perspective and guide you in the future.