Don’t Forget to Celebrate

A while back a friend and I were competing at a tournament. After my friend’s round, I congratulated them on their performance. This person immediately started criticizing themselves and listing all of the ways they could have done better. I reminded them, celebrate your wins today, tomorrow is when you can get back to work and improve. 

This philosophy was something that I was taught a long time ago in other sports. I find that if you immediately start analyzing everything you could have done differently after a game, match, tournament etc., you lose out on the joy of the activity. And if you don’t let yourself experience that joy, then why are you even doing it? Try and find the things that you did right. Did you give it your all? Did you hit a certain technique really well? Be proud of yourself and what you accomplished that day.

I have also found that giving yourself 24 hours to reset and take a step back, allows you to see everything a little more clearly. You need time to be able to process the day in order to develop a more effective plan of attack. Granting yourself a “reset” also helps to keep your morale and mentality positive as you go into another training session. If you are immediately negative after your competition, you will carry that with you into your next event. 

This is just as true outside of sports. Maybe you hit a roadblock on a project and didn’t accomplish everything that you wanted to get done that day. That doesn’t mean it was a bad day. Because maybe you can look back and see that you did have a successful meeting, or you were able to close out one of your lingering action items. These are still measurements of success. There will always be more work, so if you never stop to celebrate what you have accomplished you will face burn out very quickly. 

We have all heard that we are our own worst critics. I believe this to be absolutely true. And while I agree that “there is always room for improvement”, I feel like we lose sight of our joy when we forget to celebrate all of our victories, including the small ones.