How are you celebrating?

Welcome back to the LIFT Your Impact newsletter, where you can learn how to achieve your goals by LIFTing others. Here you will gain insights and top tips on leadership, communication, and storytelling. I also provide daily video tips on Instagram here!

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Happy New Year! In my last newsletter, we covered my 10-step technique for Creating Your Future History for 2023. Ideally, you’ve spent the last 2 weeks visualising your own future. If not, there’s still time! One of the reasons I love this exercise is that you can pick it up whenever you want.

As I mentioned before, my favourite step is number 8:?

Imagine celebrating after the event!

For many years, I would just achieve a goal, get terrific feedback, and move on to the next event. Then I noticed my personal motivation levels going downwards. This brings to mind Alina’s conversation with Susan Brady on the Body Talk Podcast, when Susan cautions against tying your happiness to your achievements. This causes you to move on to the next thing without celebrating or appreciating what you’ve accomplished.

For a long time, the act of doing the event, feeling proud of myself and fulfilled by the work I was doing, was enough to keep driving me forwards, but eventually I felt worn down. I hired a business coach who reminded me of the importance of celebration. She told me about the actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, who had spoken about the need to celebrate to remain motivated. He had realised he was losing his love of acting because he just kept working and never celebrated his achievements, even his Academy Award.

One note of caution, though. Material rewards won’t necessarily fulfil you. People need to feel inherently fulfilled by the experience in order to keep pushing past challenges and driving themselves beyond the point at which others would stop. Internal enjoyment of the achievement and a sense of fulfilment are far more important than material rewards.

So what will your celebration be?

1. What will you achieve simply by working towards an upcoming challenge or event? It’s important to feel that the journey will be worthwhile no matter what happens, even if you don’t win the pitch or get the job. What learning will you take away? How will this help you grow your skills? Being fulfilled regardless of the outcome will ensure your monkey mind won’t resist taking on the next challenge.
2. Who will you connect with afterwards to share the story? I’ve found that the conversations I have with friends and family after big events are so important. Opening up about what happened will amplify any feelings of pride or fulfilment; or it gives your loved ones an opportunity to be compassionate and console you, if things didn’t go so well.
3. What will you do for yourself as a positive reward? It needn’t be expensive. Sometimes, putting on some music and dancing around screaming “Yes!” is enough to feel good. Muttering yes under your breath isn’t enough, though. Your mind will end up saying, “Is that it?!?!” You need to celebrate the way that children do it.

Take time to enjoy the moment. Connect with people. Say kind words to yourself. Then set the next goal. By doing so you’ll be in the best state possible to succeed when you experience the inevitable obstacles and objections that a new goal may throw in your way.

And if you haven’t tried creating your future history, now’s your chance! See what happens. Then message or email me and tell me what happened. I’d love to hear from you, because I know how much this has helped me and transformed the personal and professional lives of the people I have been teaching for decades. Enjoy!

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