Why It’s Important to Celebrate Wins at Work as a Woman Leader

Celebration is something that most everyone is familiar with, and we celebrate many occasions throughout our life. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and for some, maybe even a divorce - oh my!

Celebration is how we acknowledge the people, places, and things that are important to us. Celebrations bonded us together as people in communities, in countries, and our passions. It is an important part of history and our present-day life.

It's easy to think of birthdays and holidays and other standard celebrations, but it's also critically important in leadership. Here's why.

Celebrations are how something is elevated to greater importance, and in our professional lives, we tend to forget to do that for ourselves or the people we lead, or both.

As busy women leaders, we are trying to get it all done. So we show up the way we need to at work, make sure that all is as it should be at home, and throw in extended family and passion projects that are near and dear to our hearts, and our days are more than filled.

How often do you find yourself in the cycle of figuring out the next thing?

First, you finish a project, and before it's over your focusing on the next one. Then, you land the client that you've been prospecting FOREVER, and the focus shifts to the next prospect without missing a beat. You are given an award for an accomplishment, and you play it down. Say it’s nothing or no big deal.

Have you done that?

When we don't celebrate those moments what we are actually doing is disrespecting what we've achieved and ourselves.

Here is how it happens. Our conscious mind is the "goal setter"​ and our unconscious mind the "goal-getter."​

When we set a goal to achieve something, we essentially plant a seed in our unconscious mind (subconscious, if that's the term you like) that "this is what I want to find."​ So that's what our unconscious mind does for us. It sifts and sorts information and sensory data to bring us exactly what we need to know or be aware of to achieve our goal. What you focus on you find. Your unconscious illuminates the path forward to our goal. But then, after all that spectacular work, we don't even acknowledge what we achieved or the work that we did to achieve it. Ugh.

Your mind is also efficient, and what you repeatedly do becomes a habit. Getting in the habit of celebrating your successes plants the seeds of what you want to experience and attracts more of it. You reap what you sow, so to speak. Celebrating your successes creates more success. Simple but powerful.

And, because your leadership is "you"​ at its foundation. Who you are is amplified when you lead others, so you need to be able to do this for yourself first before doing it for the people you lead. Yes, even in this, you lead by example.

I want to leave you with one question to consider this week.

What is going right? 

So often, we focus on all of the things that go wrong in our leadership and life. This week contemplate what is going right and celebrate it! Start here and see what happens as a result.

Drop a comment below and let me know what's going right so I can celebrate you too!

Until next time, here’s wishing you all the Clarity and celebration you deserve!

Related: How to Let Go of Things YOU Can't Control