Celebrate Yourself

Okay, let’s tell the truth.  Making dreams come true ain’t easy.  The reason all those inspirational underdog-come-from-humiliating-set-backs-to-win-stunning-victories-end-up-a-raging-success-and-get-interviewed-by-Oprah-type movies are so inspirational is because really operatically annoying things happen to the protagonist.

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Before they get to enjoy the slow-motion celebration with their friends, family and adoring fans as the ending credits roll, really annoying, like burning rash on your butt-parts annoying things happen first.  Overdrawn bank accounts, embarrassing interviews with unimpressed powerful people, screaming matches between business partners with low blood-sugar, 3:00am crises of faith enacted in front of the unforgiving Quicken files . . . yeah, dreams are like, breeding grounds for annoying.

That's why you’ve got to be your own fan; you need to celebrate the hell out of every single step in the direction of your dreams because each one of them is heroic.  When it’s 5:00am on a Monday morning and you’re up, writing in your journal instead of burrowing under your pink comforter with your entitled kitties, that’s stupendous; you need to acknowledge it.  When your co-worker finds their fourth criticism in the first paragraph of the ten-page proposal for your passion project and you keep in there, listening and breathing and explaining, you’re doing awesome work and need to tell yourself that.  When you put $25.00 extra dollars on your credit card payment instead of going to that new movie, you’re a freakin’ hero and totally should be immortalized in bronze in a town-square somewhere. 

Celebrating victories is good for a couple reasons:

1.  It’s fun and you need fun, lots of it; keep it rolling like the Mississippi river does through New Orleans, kinds of fun.  You need it to keep you amped up fight the good fight your dreams need.  In my work with sales professionals, I noticed that the successful ones took meticulous care of their moods.  Sales is the only profession in which if 2/3rds of your proposals rejected, you’d consider it a stellar year.  It’s frustrating and emotionally taxing and the only way you can keep doing it is managing your mood. Self-abusive sales professionals don’t last long.
2. It keeps you doing the heroic things you need to do in service of your dreams.  Major smarty pants, Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford has shown that linking positive reinforcement to the adoption of new habits increases their speed to adoption dramatically.  Celebrating your success after doing something you want to repeat, makes a link in your brain between the habit and the positive experience. The habits that can take weeks to set when you don’t celebrate can be accomplished in days when you do. 

So do it. Whoop it up for yourself.  Maybe the bronze statues might get a little impractical after a while but the accolades and epic poems, the fist-pumps and victory dances?  Bring ‘em on!  On the magical mystery tour between your dreams and your reality, the throngs of cheering crowds are few and far-between; you’re going to have to get good at cheering for yourself.
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What great steps are you taking in your life that you’d like to strengthen through celebration?