Achieving goals you set, no matter how small they may seem, should be celebrated to increase your confidence and encourage you to continue to develop even more meaningful goals in the future. However, setting unrealistic standards for ourselves can lead to failure and disappointment if we cannot achieve the goals in the time-frame we planned.
Here are some ways that you can celebrate your small victories:
Don’t be too hard on yourself.
Along the path to accomplishment, there are always some disappointments. Failure is a lesson that can help you to learn how to better yourself and your strategies to increase the likelihood of success in the future.
Change your perspective
Often we are more judgemental of ourselves than others. Hyper fixation on ourselves and perfection is bound to result in disappointment. By looking at our situation from an outside point of view, we can gain a more reasonable perspective.
Document your progress
Keeping note of your progress can help remind you of how far you’ve come so that you can fully appreciate any achievements you make. An example is if you set a goal to walk more daily, you can keep track of this with a fitness watch. If you want to organize your things, you can take pictures of before and after to see how far you have come.
Dr. Barbara Edwards, a Princeton MD, is the Academic Director for the Ambulatory Residency Program at Penn Medicine Princeton Health, providing quality care to uninsured and under-insured New Jersey residents in Mercer and Middlesex counties.