Acknowledge: Recognize Effort and Reward Success
“A person who feels appreciated will always do more than what is expected.”
– Author Unknown
Speaking of cheering on others for their success, consider this: You may be critical and envious of another’s success because you don’t acknowledge your own.
It’s easy to get stuck in the loop of Comparison Syndrome when we feel that we haven’t done enough. But maybe one of the reasons you feel that way is because you haven’t fully celebrated the big things that you have accomplished. Trust me, I speak from experience.
When my book the The CSS Detective Guide came out in early 2010, you’d think that the fact that I was finally a published author – particularly given my inherited belief that becoming a writer was hard and becoming a published author was even harder – would have caused me to shout it from the rooftops and celebrate at every moment possible. But that was not the case. When the box of books arrived from the publisher, I snapped a couple of photos and posted one to Twitter, and that was it. I took my book with me to a local tech meetup to show my friends, and when people asked if I would have a reading, I said that I would eventually set one up. But I never did. In fact, the excitement about the book, to which I had slavishly devoted eight months of my life to writing, was completely overshadowed by my focus on my next big goal of making my first international speaking engagement happen the next month. Seriously – I didn’t even have a party with my friends. As I wrote in a post for the Pastry Box Project, “my celebration of having accomplished one of my life’s Big Goals of being a published author consisted of a few clicks of a digital camera, a couple of tweets, and a buried blog post.”20
Part of the reason that I moved on so quickly was due to my own Comparison Syndrome. I was so busy feeling that I was “behind” my peers in terms of being successful and that I needed to “catch up” to the people whom I admired. Because I didn’t fully recognize and celebrate my own major accomplishment, it seemed almost as if it hadn’t happened. To this day, having written that book still hasn’t fully registered in my mind as the achievement that it was.
When we don’t acknowledge or celebrate success, good performance, or even progress, our motivation flags, and achieving long-term goals become more difficult. Whereas when we acknowledge our efforts, not only do we feel great, but we are then inspired to tackle even more. This is because acknowledgment and celebration activate the reward system in the brain and release the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.21 Activating the reward system is a huge part of motivation: the more we receive pleasure from rewarding our efforts, the more inclined we are to continue the activities that engender the pleasure of the reward. In short, we develop an addiction to exerting effort toward and achieving goals.22
In an online article, coach Emma-Louise Elsey recommends celebrating achievement and success23 when:
You’ve taken steps towards a big goal. Have you started learning Portuguese for your three-month sabbatical in Brazil? Have you changed your treadmill workout to steep inclines in preparation for a trip to Tanzania to hike Mount Kilimanjaro? Have you gathered up all of your portfolio pieces and written your application to get your work into the Smithsonian? Maybe you haven’t reached the ultimate goal yet, but the work that you’ve put in so far needs to be recognized and celebrated. And then you can celebrate again when you’ve hit your goal!
You’ve had a personally significant success. Regardless of size, if you’ve reached some sort of personal milestone, then you absolutely must celebrate it. Maybe you’ve been wanting to learn how to knit and you’ve knitted your first scarf. Maybe you’ve been wanting to learn how to drive stick shift since you were a teen, and you’ve finally mastered it through driving lessons. Maybe you’ve been wanting to rearrange your living room for years, and you’ve finally done it. Whether or not an outsider would think it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal for YOU. Celebrate the heck out of it.
You’ve learned from mistakes, difficulties, and failures. Celebrate failure? Yes! But really, what you’re celebrating is the learning. What have you learned from realizing that you’ve been approaching something all wrong? How has it helped you grow and gain clarity about yourself and your direction? Celebrate the fact that you are learning, growing, and expanding, and that your mistakes only make you stronger and more powerful, not less.
To break the habit of looking at the achievements of others and feeling that our own pale in comparison, we need to direct a laser-like focus toward acknowledging and basking in our own successes. But it’s not just the big things that we need to acknowledge and give ourselves credit for. It’s just as important (if not more so) for us to congratulate ourselves for showing up every day and putting in the work that moves us ever closer to our goals and aspirations. Building the habit of and addiction to forward progress will keep us motivated and on-track with achieving our goals.
When we’re busy working towards our goals and celebrating our efforts, we won’t have the time, mental bandwidth, or inclination to compare ourselves with others.
Creative Dose: A Celebration of Effort and Achievement
Purpose: To shift focus to your own efforts and successes
You may be critical and envious of another’s success because you don’t acknowledge your own. My recommendation? Celebrate your successes, both large and small, and do so with abandon. You’ll get in touch with just how much work you put forth and will also be less inclined to be as focused on what others are doing. You’ll also be more present to revel in the success of others.
Step 1: The Self-Talk of Reward
Now that we know the power of self-talk and particularly talking to ourselves in the third person, we need to use it as much as we can.
To keep ourselves motivated by everyday progress, we need to make sure that our self-talk is that of encouragement, not berating.
Just like we would encourage a kid to keep them motivated to take on big projects, we need to encourage the younger part of ourselves that is sensitive to self-criticism and recognize our own efforts.
Here is an example of what you can say to yourself to acknowledge your efforts, even when everything’s not finished or perfect24:
“Wow, Amy, you’re working really hard on this project!
You’re doing great!”
And when you’re done:
“Great job, Amy! You kick butt!”
You’ll spur yourself on to continuing doing the work because it’s important to you, it interests you, and because you like it.
Step 2: Take A Success Inventory
You may be so in the habit of barely taking heed of your successes that they rush past you, and you forget them almost as quickly as you achieved them.
First, review your lists that you generated from the Creative Doses: Take Inventory and Apples to Apples in the previous chapter to refresh your memory on what some of the wonderful things you’ve accomplished.
Then, let’s get even more in more in touch with both your small and large successes to help you celebrate both. This exercise is adapted from the article “Celebrate Success!” by the team at LeadFearlessly.com.25
Go back into your calendar and look at the past 12 months. For each week, try to remember:
What new ideas did you dream up?
What did you initiate or start?
What did you get done or complete?
What did you launch?
What strengths, talents, and skills did you put to use?
What abilities and knowledge did you develop or acquire?
What relationships did you initiate, grow, or strengthen?
What challenges and obstacles did you overcome?
What are you most proud of?
What surprised you?
Don’t worry if you can’t remember everything perfectly, the goal is really to bring as many
as you can to mind. The answers to these questions should be a rich trove of situations that deserve recognition and celebrating!
Now that you know what to reward yourself for, it’s time to actually do something about it.
Step 3: Reward and Celebrate
How will you celebrate? The choices are endless. Here are some tips for you:
Buy Yourself A Present. Treat yourself to something that you love. While an experience is great, such as getting a massage or taking yourself to a concert, also make an effort to you treat yourself with an object. Looking at and/or using it will be a constant reminder of both your hard work and an embodiment of how you are respecting yourself.
Hold a Retroactive Celebration. You don’t have to limit yourself to celebrating things that have happened recently. Just because your success was 10 years ago doesn’t mean you can’t finally give it its due and celebrate it now. It’s your life – you can do whatever you want. And besides, people love parties and celebrations. Your friends and colleagues will be happy for the excuse to come together and support you! Put together a get-together potluck or a barbeque, host a dinner party or a gathering at a fancy restaurant, or go bigger and hold a bona fide party. Whatever you do, make sure you bring in people who are important to you to share in celebrating your accomplishment.
Achiever’s Choice. How would you most like to honor yourself? Choose whatever resonates the most with you and then commit to it. Choose a day and time, and schedule it on your calendar so that it has as much importance as everything else that you block time out for.
Bonus Action: Get A Success Buddy
You don’t have to celebrate by yourself. Team up with someone who is working on acknowledging their successes as well, and agree to be “Success Buddies.” Share your successes with each other, no matter how large or how small. Agree to remind each other of dismissed or forgotten successes as well.
With all of this celebrating of how great you are, who has time to bother thinking about what others have done?
Act: Start Your Own Adventures
“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Clearly, comparisons keep you stuck and they don’t help you accomplish anything. But I will go one step further. Your envy may be a safety crutch: a vehicle and excuse for staying stuck in the deceptively safe place of “woulda/coulda.” Yeah, I said it. Instead of going and “doing the damn thing,” you’re spending your valuable brainpower watching others kick ass, then you berate yourself for not having done enough. It’s time to snap out of it: there’s a solution for comparison-fueled paralysis. The antidote for envy is action.
Creative Dose: Take Action
Purpose: To create the distraction of action
What have you been longing to do that you’ve been putting off until the right time? What have you always wanted to do? When you pursue your interests, you don’t have the time to be envious. Shut down Comparison Syndrome by creating the distraction of action.
It’s time to cultivate your own successes.
To start pursuing activities that probably would otherwise stay on your bucket list with no checkmarks by them, join (or create!) a club focused on action. Luckily, you don’t have to look far, there is a new organization called Akxen that does exactly that.
Step 1: Create the Group
Gather several people to meet every week to create support, give accountability, and create community.
Step 2: Make a Bucket List
Get a notebook. Write a list of 150 things that you’ve always wanted to do or activities that sound intriguing.
For example, here’s my list: take voice lessons, take an acting class, go learn to scuba dive, learn how to speak Mandarin, travel to Bali, bench press my body weight.
You will stick with an action item until it is achieved; then you can move on to the next one.
Step 3: Share and Support
During the meetings, each person has an equal amount of time to report on her/his progress on her/his actions and goals.
Successes are celebrated by a high-five around the table that ends at the achiever.
Step 4: Meet Regularly
The way that Akxen clubs work best is for people to feel supported and to be with a group of like-minded individuals who are interested in having experiences rather than simply thinking about them. Weekly meetings help all of the group members stay on task and also be held accountable for their intended goals.
Here are some tips to make the experience of taking action even better:
Instead of focusing on the outcome of the goal itself, look for the resulting feeling of the outcome. For example, the point of going deep sea fishing may not be to catch anything, but the feeling of contentment you have being out on the water and the experience of feeling closer to nature.
Focusing on the feeling rather than the goal itself also helps keep you from having your goal be a moving target. For example, it could feel like you’ve never achieved learning Mandarin if your criterion is speaking it fluently.
Similarly, remember that it’s not about the goal, it’s about all that you experience and learn in the process of pursuing it.
Your group members will be a constant source of inspiration and information. You also will get a healthier perspective on what people go through to achieve their goals, and go beyond the Facebook and Instagram view of people’s lives.
As a bonus, you get to connect with others who are going after their dreams, which will put you in an environment of success.
Surprisingly, Akxen clubs are a new concept, and you may not have a local group. If that’s the case, start one, and let me know how it goes!
To get more information on how Akxen clubs work and how to start one yourself, check out their website: creativedo.se/akxen-club, and their Facebook group: creativedo.se/action-club-facebook-group. You can also see their Meetup.com group: creativedo.se/action-club-meetup, and create your own.
Leveling Up
Because my own compulsion to compare was so deeply ingrained, I know how deterimental the habit can be: it puts a kibosh on your ideas and stops you dead in your creative tracks.
Through using the tools in the chapter to eliminate triggers that can spin you into a downward comparison spiral, and then get you to a place of really appreciating the confluence that is you, you’ll develop a deep understanding that you can’t be compared to anyone. From this improved perspective, you’ll be able to turn envy into something grander and greater that not only celebrates the accomplishments of others, but lays the foundation for your own future success.
Let us continue to move onward to quell our doubts about not being creative at all, feeling too busy and overwhelmed to even think about being creative, and our fear of not having any original ideas. That’s right: our final destination on our journey is Creativity Denial.
Chapter 7 | “I’m Not
Creative” - Creativity Denial
This chapter examines:
Owning Your Creativity
Activating Your Imagination
Granting Permission
Stress v. Eustress
Regaining Time
Power Pose
Finding Inspiration
Generating Ideas
“The essence of being human is being creative.”
— Joel Garreau, author
One of the things I love about speaking at conferences is getting to know the other presenters during the speakers’ dinner. I always have a great time and learn new things. There was one dinner in particular at a conference last year which was no exception, but as a bonus, I also got to see the Inner Critic in action.
Someone at the table asked about my work, and I shared that one of the methods that I use to teach is Applied Improvisation. The natural follow-up
question was “is there an improv exercise that we can do at this table?”
Soon we were playing a game which I call “What is this?”3. Everyone puts a random object in the middle of the table, then the person who starts chooses an object. Next you describe the object in detail to your neighbor and then give it to him/her. Here’s the catch: you cannot say what the object actually is. You must create something completely out of your imagination. For example, say I chose a tube of lip balm. I take the lip balm, turn to my neighbor, and say “This is the jeweled sacred holder of the ancient pen nib of the most amazing writer in history on the planet Betelgeuse. It has traveled through a wormhole, and has been passed down from generation to generation in my family. I want you to have it.” And then that person would do the same for her/his neighbor, fabricating something entirely different.
Almost everyone was having a wonderful time devising completely different and outrageous descriptions, but I could sense my friend Joelle sitting beside me becoming increasingly anxious as it neared her turn.
When the object got to her, she lamented, “I’m totally going to mess this up. I don’t know what to say. I’m really bad at this kind of thing! Seriously, I’m really just not good at this stuff.”
My Inner Critic radar went off! It took me several times of giving Joelle support by telling her “just say whatever comes to mind. It’s okay. You’ve got this. You’ll be fine,” before she relaxed enough to tentatively try her hand at fabricating a mini story for the object.
Naturally, she ended up creating something delightful, unexpected, and entertaining. Her anxiety about “not being creative in that way” had created an enormous block that she had to break down before she could come up with anything. Even though we were playing a game, she was so anxious about not being creative that she inhibited her powers of imagination.
Banish Your Inner Critic Page 23