Taking time to reflect on your achievements

When we strive for better outcomes, it is important that we not only reflect on our failures to determine what we could do better but also acknowledge and celebrate our successes.

An important reason to acknowledge our success is it can help us continue to achieve. If we reflect back on what worked well and why, we can often repeat the process and hence continue to benefit over and over again. We essentially develop a formula, a formula for success.

Whatever we want to achieve, whether it be weight loss, debt reduction, reaching savings targets or other goals, it’s important that we reward ourselves when we successfully achieve them. This can be in the form of treats such has having a nice piece of cake after achieving a certain weight goal, or going on a holiday or to a nice restaurant once we achieve our financial goals (just don’t blow the budget and end up back where you started). Using rewards helps build a successful mindset as it creates our drive to really work hard and get to where we want to be.

Good goals are hard to achieve, they don’t just happen, and sacrifices need to be made. The more you reward yourself at the end, the happier you become and the more likely you are to make the necessary sacrifices to get you there. It’s a way to stay sane, think of professional athletes and their cheat meal. Usain Bolt was known to eat 100 chicken nuggets a day.

Finally we don’t need to celebrate on our own. We can share our successes with others, causing them to also feel motivated and allow them to achieve success. It becomes contagious with everyone feeding off other people’s successes. Have you ever noticed how successful people tend to hang out with other successful people?

We may feel that we never ever get to where we want to be. We always strive for more, never satisfied with where we are. While this can propel us to future successful endeavours, the one goal we should all strive to achieve is to be happy. What better way to be happy than to reflect back on our achievements and celebrate the little successes that have got us to where we are today.

– Liam Rutty –