Tiny Triumphs: Rewiring Your Brain for Success through the Power of Celebrating Small Wins
“Happiness is not about the grand finale; it’s about dancing through life’s small joys” – unknown.
In the tapestry of life, our minds tend to highlight limitations and flaws ahead of the boundless evidence for optimism. It’s a human reflex, rooted in making sure we don’t end up as lunch for a sabretooth tiger. But this impulse is far less useful now that we aren’t on the menu anymore.
Negativity bias is not something we can or should get rid of. It is a natural human tendency and fighting it can do more harm than good. Instead, the best strategy for offsetting our predilection for pessimism is celebration. Like training a muscle you didn’t know was there, we can develop the skill of accentuating and celebrating the micro moments of success throughout our day. Becoming conscious of the daily cosmos of tiny triumphs offers our mind an alternative to our fearful, anxiety-laden default programming.
Celebrate when you get out of bed; when you manage to get your kids in the car; when you fold the washing; when you finish that challenging set at the gym; when you make that phone call; when you touch your toes. Each of these moments is a tiny triumph that accrue to create an investment portfolio of happiness that can define the tone of your existence.
Superpowered
As Stanford researcher BJ Fogg puts it, celebration is the superpower of behaviour design. It taps into the reward centre of our brain and floods our system with dopamine, establishing a neural link between feel-good-vibes and the behaviour you just celebrated. This of course reinforces the likelihood you will continue to do the behaviour.
The real artistry of celebration occurs in the way it detaches our consciousness from privileging outcomes over systems. Goals are a fickle mistress, often characterised by shifting goal posts, sometimes stunted by disruptive road works, and only briefly satisfying when we achieve them. We spend far more time in the process of success than the accomplishment of it, and celebrating tiny triumphs pulls us into the moment and encourages us to prize the process.
It is not uncommon for goals to fail to materialize as originally envisioned, or they may morph into a different shape entirely as we veer down a different path. If we only have eyes for the ‘prize’ we can miss out on experiencing the wonders of the journey.
The excuse to celebrate
Why delay acknowledgement of our progress until we reach that arbitrary milestone in the future, when there are so many opportunities to witness and celebrate our growth throughout the process? We can far more effectively generate momentum towards our aspiration by focusing the tiny triumphs along the path.
It does require effort and a dose of persistence. Celebration is a skill, and like all skills it requires repetition, patience, practice, and faith in the process to become part of your operating system. But it can be as simple as offering yourself a smile or as raucous as bellowing hell yeah! Once you start looking for excuses to celebrate you will start to see them everywhere, and these moments will accrue to create a critical mass of wellbeing that offers a sustainable response to negativity bias.
Now I want to celebrate you for making it to the end of this blog. In a world often clouded by negativity, let us raise our glasses to your tiny triumph