Filed Under: Intrinsic Branding, Leadership
By Jocelyn Lovelle
Root: Go Inward
The tire company said they had no record of our purchase, and then you found the receipt. The client, who had been on the fence, decided to say yes. You added nearly as much to your list as you took off, but you completed one project.
We are trained to celebrate milestones: the graduation, the big promotion, the wedding, the new client.
We are not trained to celebrate the small wins, the droplet victories of tasks completed, a pot of coffee brewed just right with enough time to sit and sip a cup, a kindness given or received.
If I have learned anything about celebrating, it is this: the small wins are the tap roots of our lives. They are essential to our well-being, to our capacity to embrace happiness, to receive joy. They are the foundation of our ability to cultivate resilience and to rise up when life is full of pressure and challenge. They are also the foundation that allows us to strive for the big wins, the outward marks of accomplishment and hard work.
The markers of a life lived with hands plunged up to the elbows in soil and abundance are the small wins we hardly take note of.
My invitation to you: Begin to cultivate a practice of celebrating your everyday wins and tend more to the tap roots that nourish your life.
But how?
- Call a friend and tell them about the tiny victory.
- Take one whole minute to breathe and savor the accomplishment.
- Congratulate yourself out loud (no one else needs to hear).
- Tell your kids about your mini success at the dinner table or over the phone.
This doesn’t have to be time-consuming or monumental. It can take just a moment, but that moment is significant, for what we do on a regular basis adds up to how we feel, act, think, love, grieve, and move through our lives–it’s failures and successes.
River: Go Outward
As the leader of a team, an organization, a business, how you show up for yourself and others creates the culture around you.
Celebrating the small wins builds confidence, generates trust, and creates a spirit of play and allowance that we all need as humans, however corporatized our work lives may be.
We know that play as adults is key to reducing stress and anxiety, improving well-being and mental health and leads to improved creativity and innovation. Creating a culture of celebration is one facet of play.
A couple of weeks ago I was visiting my friend, Brian. We have a mutual friend in common, Eric, who also happens to be a client of mine. Brian and I were talking about how kind and generous Eric is, how he is the friend you know will show up anytime, day or night, with no hesitation, if you called him from the middle of nowhere, stuck in the mud. Context: We all love Land Cruisers and heading off onto trails of dubious negotiation.
This conversation happened as Brian and I were driving his Land Cruiser through the Eastern Sierras back to his house, and he turned to me and said, “You know, when we get back, we should call Eric and tell him how much we appreciate him.”
We called, and Eric was humble, managing to receive our praise with grace, acknowledging his slight discomfort with all the attention.
His discomfort gave me pause. What if we celebrated each other just a little more? Leaders to teams, peers to peers, stranger to stranger. Could we normalize celebrating the small wins, the small kindnesses, the generosity of others, to such an extent that we all become comfortable with the praise, with the joy, with the play of it?
And if so, how would our teams show up for us, for themselves, for each other, for the organization, and for the larger world around them?
Celebrating the small wins is not just icing on the cake, but the tap roots of our ability to expand into healthy ecosystems with strong foundations that can weather the fluctuations of a marketplace, nation, and world that is continually in flux and disruption.
What better way to ground ourselves in a time of great upheaval than to celebrate on a micro level all the little things that are wonderful, generous, wise, abundant, and beautiful.
