Why Celebration is Crucial to Reaching Your Goals
I’ve always felt that celebration goes hand-in-hand with what I do.
I mean, resolutions and champagne go together like birthdays and balloons - and I do my best to reinforce that connection, rather than attempting to separate the two. That is partly because champagne is so fun, but also because celebration is an integral part of the process as work towards achieving our goals.
We decide to pursue goals for a reason - because we want to achieve them. And even more importantly, because of how we think we will feel when we reach them.
We want to feel proud.
Successful.
Happy.
Important.
Excited.
Valuable.
Worthy.
*insert any other feeling that you feel like you have to earn here*
But too often, when we reach the goals that we’ve set, we don’t actually feel those things. We don’t let ourselves feel successful or happy or excited. Most of the time, we don’t even stop to feel proud of that thing we’ve now achieved or accomplished.
There are a lot of reasons why this is, but choosing to celebrate, rather than merely gloss over our achievements is a foundational key to reaching our goals.
The importance of celebrating when we reach our goals (and also the progress along the way) is something that I have had dozens of conversations about recently - with clients, friends, family, and other coaches. It is something that we all seem to have on our minds. Most of the people that I have talked to have admitted to recognizing that they would like to celebrate their goals, but that they don’t. And the majority don’t recognize why it is so important!
So if you too fall into that camp of goal-achiever but celebration-neglecter, I hope that a greater understanding of why it is totally crucial to celebrate reaching your goals will have you reaching for the champagne.
First, celebrating when we reach our goals builds self-trust. The most important reason to celebrate reaching a goal is because of the self-trust that it generates. When we first set a goal, we generally plan to celebrate when we reach it. We often anticipate the excitement we will feel and the other emotions we hope to experience. But by glossing over those emotions once we have reached our goal, we aren’t doing what we said we would do.
It is never our goals themselves that make us feel those feelings that we’re looking for, but rather the way that we are thinking. And that’s great news because it means we can feel those emotions we want on purpose and intentionally all along the way - and also when we reach our goals.
In the beginning, we plan to celebrate what we set out to achieve, but when we get there, we often find ourselves just moving onto the next thing. Not only is that kind of sad, but it also slows our momentum! Because even though we may have just reached a goal, we are going to be less inclined to throw ourselves into the next one, because we just proved to ourselves that we don’t celebrate the things that we achieve.
Building the skill of celebration and continuing to strengthen our self-trust will serve us well on the journey. And when we take time to celebrate, we can start making progress on our next goal with even more self-trust than we started with.
When we reach our goals, we celebrate to honor our progress. Whether we have checked off one of our major goals, or just reached a milestone along the way, celebration is vital. Even if we’ve reached the “destination” or the “end of the road” for a certain goal, our growth and journey as a whole aren’t over. We will continue on, and likely set other goals along the way - but that in no way detracts from where we are now and the progress it took to get here. Taking time to celebrate creates the perfect opportunity for reflection on where we started and how far we’ve come. It probably didn’t all go according to plan, but we’ve grown and made progress - and that is always worth celebrating. Taking the time to celebrate is often what we need to create the space and opportunity to honor all of those steps along the way.
Make sure to celebrate because the result is part of the process. We’ve all heard that the journey towards a goal is just as important as the goal itself - because it is! All of the growth (and the majority of the work) happens along the way. That’s where we do much of the work towards building our self-confidence, creating more self-trust, improving our skills, and growing in every other possible way. Reaching our goals is often just the cherry on top of all the growth we’ve experienced, but it is still part of the process - one that we shouldn’t just skip over, but that we often do.
Making time for celebration is vital because celebrating is fun - and I mean, why not?! Why wouldn’t we take the time to celebrate our accomplishments, and our progress all along the way? There is no good reason to blow past our achievements, and every reason to celebrate them. Plus, it is just fun.
Celebration is so important, but I’ll admit, it can be tricky.
In a post-COVID world, actual parties are still rare. In most cases, actual cake or champagne, while delicious, may hurt rather than help our continued progress (especially if our goals are health- or weight-loss-related). Outings or other activities like shopping can also be a bit dangerous (especially if your goal is budget-related), and some people find that they don’t actually enjoy them, even if they feel like they should.
I don’t mean to make celebrating seem hard or impossible, but I do want to point out that only you know the best way to celebrate for you. I’ll be sharing some ideas for ways that you can celebrate yourself soon, if you’re looking for inspiration. But first, I thought it was important to establish why you should celebrate yourself (and your goals) in the first place.
Regardless of where you started, where you’re at, and where you’re going - I encourage you to reach your goals and then reach for the champagne (at least, metaphorically).
Until next time,