Celebrate The Small Victories

Celebrate the small wins. I know it is super cliché to say, but it always ends up holding so much more truth and wisdom than it seems at first glance.  When you have high expectations of yourself, and your hobby is something very quantifiable, it can be tough to not get frustrated when training seems to be going poorly, or progress seems to be limited to non-existent.  Try to cultivate a habit of celebrating the small wins.  I mean really cultivate that habit.  Celebrate showing up to training.  Completing your warmup prehab.  Staying true to the RPE and prescription.  Completing all your exercises and sets.  Celebrate finishing the hard task.  Eating your vegetables or sticking to your macros.  Going to sleep on time.  There are so many little things to celebrate surrounding training that we could be having a party before we ever consider celebrating load progression.  There are so many things that go into simply showing up to the gym to work hard.  It all takes effort, planning, and time management.  Commend yourself for your effort every day.  Life is hard, don’t make it harder on yourself by not applauding yourself for all the steps you had to take to get yourself to where you are right now.  If you can learn to do that every day, for every small step or task completed, this will continue to foster a culture of focusing on the little wins.  It takes a million small wins, step by step, day after day, to reach a large, monumental win. 

Climb Your Hill

Climb your own hill.  Shout out to Ryan Stinn for this saying.  Everyone’s path to life is different.  The road to life is winding and difficult, remember to be mindful of the journey that you are on.  Remember to focus on climbing your own hill.  The mountain is climbed one foothold at a time.  Be proud of every step you take up your mountain.  Every step-up hill is harder than rolling downhill.  The more positive reinforcement you give yourself, the more momentum will build up in your favour.  There is no one single summit, but many individual summits along the way. 

Tell Yourself Good Job more often

Dopamine is addicting.  Most of us are already dopamine junkies, participating in risk seeking behaviour like powerlifting, doom scrolling, chugging caffeine.  Positive reinforcement creates dopamine responses as well.  Actively practicing gratitude and congratulating yourself for completing small tasks will trigger this dopamine response, building momentum and motivation to complete more small tasks.   Imagine how much better things would be if more of us heard the words good job from family, friends, bosses, and co-workers more often. 

Chip Away

In the game of poker, you win by making a lot of small wins repeatedly, while minimizing your losses along the way.  Hand after hand you stack chips in your corner.  Some pots are bigger than others.  Sometimes you lose here and there.  It doesn’t seem like you win much but over time that stack of chips grows and grows.  It is easy to celebrate the small wins in poker because they occur frequently and regularly within the larger game, creating a clear and obvious feedback system.  Stack chips one at a time and celebrate every small chip you add to your stack. 

Michaelangelo didn’t carve beautiful statues quickly.  He chipped away slowly at a big block of granite, chiseling here and there to add small details.  Slowly but surely creating beautiful stone carvings, this style of art is where the fitness term chiselled comes from.  Celebrate every little process goal you complete every single day.  Every rep is a small chip in the statue of the person you want to become.  Every meal a bit of sanding to add some fine detail.  Every extra hour of sleep some polish on your product. 

Chip away in the gym.  Literally use the chip plates session after session and week after week.  Go buy smaller micro plates if you need to.  Carry them around with you in your gym bag, that way you’ve always got your PR chip locked and loaded.  Adding one rep counts as chipping as well.  My favourite is chipping away by hitting the same weights faster or at a lower RPE.  Then go eat some chocolate chip cookies you earned stacking all these chips week after week. 

Habit

Celebrating the small wins is a difficult habit to build, but when done properly it can build so much positive momentum in one’s life is becomes contagious and spreads over to the rest of their life and those that surround them.  Didn’t snooze my alarm, good job.  Walked the dogs, hell yeah.  Ate a healthy breakfast, fantastic! Got to kiss Sam goodbye, Woo! Started writing this blog, albeit after procrastinating a bit, atta boy. 

Celebrating the small wins may sound like toxic positivity, but I am in no way telling you not to feel negative emotions.  Negative things will happen, you will be frustrated, sad, angry, upset.  Feel your feelings.  Acknowledge them.  Celebrating the small wins means acknowledging that you are having a tough time, and being proud of how you responded to that adversity.  It’s easy to be a hype man when everything is going well, true character is revealed when things are going poorly.  I am not telling you to suppress negative or unhealthy thoughts.  I am telling you to work at controlling the dialogue in your head and turn it into that loving and supporting inner role model you always needed.  Teach it to positively reinforce your actions, big or small, from day to day.  If all goes well that inner dialogue will express itself in the world and you will be more supportive and grateful to others as well, not just yourself. 

Goals

We all have goals.  Goals keep us moving in the right direction up our path.  Always striving for more.  More weight on the bar.  More reps.  More protein.  More wins.  More money. More status.  No matter how high we climb, we always find another path leading further up our hill.  After all is said in done, whether one achieves the outcome goal set for oneself, will mean less than what was learned and expressed by the actions one took day after day after month after year.  More important than the lofty outcome goal is the lessons a person learns along the path that can then be applied to the rest of your life.  Whether it is time management, problem solving, overcoming adversity, breaking through plateaus, managing failure and disappointment, all these lessons and methods will help us set ourselves up for success when planning how to attack our new goal when inevitably priorities or goals change. 

Another important outcome of learning to celebrate small victories day in and day out is how that attitude sets examples for friends, family, and for some of you, your children.  You never know what attitudes, disciplines, characteristics, or habits your family will notice and adopt passively, or learn over and over because the example was set for them repeatedly.  Eventually you will find yourself bringing out other people’s ability to celebrate small wins. 

Practical Application

While it may seem silly and unrealistic to actively applaud yourself for every small task that is completed, the main lesson is that we are trying to cultivate a positive internal dialogue, hoping that it will bleed out into how we act in the world and influence others.  If you are always looking for the negative, you will always find it.  It is easy to compare yourself to others, some of us even get caught comparing ourself to our former selves.  I know I am very guilty of this.    

One way my partner and I try to celebrate small wins every day is with a gratitude practice done together on our daily dog walks.  What was the best part of your day?  Why do you love me today?  We ask each other these two questions every day.  I already mentioned this, but it can be so easy to only focus on the negatives or blow negatives way out of proportion.  The obvious example is the content creator who gets 100 positive comments but cannot stop thinking about the one negative comment.   

No matter how good or bad of a day we have had, it forces us to take a moment to shine the light on something we enjoyed about the day.  It also allows us to take a moment to focus on something our partner did, big or small, that shows the characteristics we love about each other.  I admit I am not the type of person who would naturally take part in an activity like this.  It felt awkward and cheesy at first.  Sometimes I still make it cheesy on purpose because I love cheesy.  Some days are repeats, but that is probably a good thing.  Some days it is small acts of kindness, some days it is a big event.  What matters is vocally expressing it to your partner and celebrating the small victory out loud. 

Love your life or change it.  Love is a decision, not an emotion.  Choose love.  Love comes with the good and the bad.  Loving something or someone gracefully means loving them even when they screw up.  Grace means loving someone despite their faults.  Our brains often overstate the negative things that take place in our lives.  This characteristic has probably been helpful in keeping humans alive and progressing forward throughout history, moving us forward from day to day.  Negative reinforcement is real and is a powerful motivator.  I guess I am proposing that positive reinforcement is a more powerful and productive motivator.  Choosing to celebrate the small wins is choosing to love your life every single day, good or bad.  No matter how special something is some people can always find a fault.  You will find what you are looking for.  No matter how bad a day you have, you should always be able celebrate something small in your day.  The more you can do that, the more those small wins will build momentum, and the less daunting your final goal or task may seem.  Choose to celebrate the small day to day wins.  Choose to love the process.