Join Klaudia to discover how celebrating small wins can boost your happiness and motivation in this month’s Happiness Challenge!
Whether you’re struggling to see your growth or just need a reminder to pause and appreciate tiny victories, this episode is packed with practical tips and uplifting motivation.
Learn five simple ways to celebrate your wins, shift your mindset from FOMO to JOMO, and create joyful habits that make every step forward count.
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My name is Claudia and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge, a podcast where I test drive the best happiness hacks that science has on offer.
In the previous episode, 225, my guest, Gavin Oates, best selling author, speaker, stand up comedian, author of the book Confidently Lost, discussed with me that progress isn't always about big milestones. Celebrating, as he called it, tiny rebellions. I love it.
I love this phrase, like saying no setting boundaries or doing less is just as important as thinking of big achievements. So this month I'm focusing on celebrating small wins. How do we do this well? And what is the impact on our happiness if we stick to this practice?
So in this episode I'm sharing five ideas to celebrate your wins. Especially, especially when progress feels slow, messy or imperfect. So let's dive in.
We'll know this from our own experience that when we are recognizing even the tiny steps towards something we're working on. Absolutely. Our motivation goes up, our mood goes up and we can see how far we have come.
But progress, of course isn't always about big milestones and it's not linear. So how can we celebrate our progress if we maybe feel stuck or the progress just isn't perfect? So here are my five ideas.
Number one, shift the definition of your progress. So let's expand the definition of a win.
The wins might look like saying no when you are usually saying yes, taking a break without guilt, sending an email. You have been avoiding getting out of bed on the very difficult day, trying something new even though it didn't go well.
So in other words, a win is a way of saying I'm trying, I'm experimenting rather than I'm succeeding.
So one interesting question to reflect on here is what did I do today that past me would have found hard again, trying to notice that small progress we are making.
And also one of my favorite things here, and that comes from my book, the Alphabet of Happiness, is that entire idea that in the world of many opportunities, commitments, quests that are battling for our attention, is that we often might be suffering from fomo, the fear of missing out. But why not shift our mindset to Jomo, the joy of missing out.
Because if you are missing out on something, you are directing your attention towards something else. Like resting, like self care, like responding to your needs.
My second idea is to start a Wins journal or a Wins notebook or a Wins folder generally for next two weeks. I would love you to write down three very small wins at the end of each day.
And what is amazing about this Exercise is that after two weeks you will look back at your 42 small wins and see first of all how many of them you have. You have 42 of them thinking wow, that is incredible progress that often goes unnoticed.
But secondly, you can look at the themes emerging about the things you are proud of and the efforts and where your efforts had positive impact. And that is really interesting insight as well. What is it that you value and also where your efforts are bringing that to positive change.
And my tip here is to name the feeling when you writing your wins. So say I am proud, I am proud that I stay calm during stressful meeting. Or I was brave to say how I truly feel.
Again, when we naming those positive emotions, we are shining more spotlight on them. Number three, create a mini celebration ritual.
So sometimes if we just write it down, if we just park it somewhere in our notes, the impact may be as not uplifting as we wish. So one thing about celebrating our wins is not only noting them but also celebrating them physically. Because our brain loves embodied rewards.
So it might be a happy dance, it might be saying something out loud, it might be playing a 32nd favorite victory song. It's very much about that physical movement. And it might feel silly. It will feel actually silly. But it works again.
In my book, the Alphabet of Happiness, I wrote about this idea of positive. A beneficial start to the day is about high fiving yourself in the mirror while brushing your teeth. Again cheesy.
But research shows that combining a familiar activity such as brushing our teeth, which we do every day, with an out of ordinary gesture such as high five stimulates our brain to pay more attention. It makes it easier to form new neural connections and learn. And this is called anaerobic.
It's a simple exercise that keep your brain active by surprising it and snapping it out of everyday routine.
And because high five is such a positive gesture in itself associated with winning, joy, zest, pride, it also gives us that positive mood lift in the morning.
So incorporating this idea of high fiving yourself or high fiving someone else when you're celebrating your small win helps you to really celebrate that win. Idea number four is share and celebrate together. Wins grow when they are witnessed and they become more real when they are witness.
So tell a friend, your partner, your group chat, your social community. And of course the bonus here is that we celebrate someone else's wins too. Because the joy is contagious.
And that way we helping ourselves to shine a spotlight on our progress. But also we are cheerleading and supporting people around us. And idea number five, use the past me versus present me check.
This one is powerful one and I love this one because it's very much tackling the social comparison that we are experiencing when looking at social media. So ask yourself what can I do today that past me would be proud of?
Maybe you are calmer, maybe you are setting boundaries, maybe you are more self aware, maybe you're recover faster after a setback. Grow often hides in those subtle shifts.
Recently I had a stressful conversation with my husband and I actually realized that I'm much better at emotionally self regulating after such conversations.
So even though I may get initially angry as I used to do previously, I'm able to work with that feeling much quicker to come back to more collaborative space. And that's big for me. That's big for me because few years back, oh my anger would just explode and just be out there.
Whereas now I'm much better in that emotional regulation.
As already mentioned, this tip is particularly beneficial if you are stuck in comparison loop because it is very easy to overlook the progress that you have made, especially if you feel that not all the pieces of your life are exactly where you would like them to be. Maybe you feel you're not moving forward with in life as quickly as you would like. And when we look at social media we have that social comparison.
Whereas if we compare ourselves to our past selves then hey, we are of course making progress.
Okay, so the happiness there this month is I would love you to choose one or two or three ways that I discussed today and practice those for next couple of weeks.
I really want to stress that the big transformation are really built on tiny evidence of progress and we don't need a perfect week, we don't need the massive breakthroughs. We just need to start noticing what's already moving forward. And if today your win is simply that you listen to this episode, that absolutely counts.
So thank you so much for listening. At the end of the month we're going to jump in together into some science of celebrating our small wins.
But in the meantime I hope to see you at my webinar. It's a free webinar.
On 20th of April at 6pm UK time I am discussing how to build well being habits that stick and one step of habit formation is absolutely celebration. Hey, small wins are really important.
You can sign up to my webinar at my website thehappinesschallenge.co.uk but in meantime I wish you a wonderful few weeks ahead and I see you at the end of the month. Bye bye. Sam.
