[dropcaps type=’square’ font_size=’80’ color=’#4a4a4a’ background_color=’#ffffff’ border_color=”]I[/dropcaps] t’s easy for me to feel like I haven’t been doing as much as I should, and that I’m making very little, if any, progress towards my goals. This feeling probably comes from my inability to take a moment to stop and celebrate how far I’ve come.
The moment I finish a task, I think about what I can do next; without pausing to reflect or learn from what just happened. In effect, this also means that I don’t take the time to celebrate a win, or mull over a loss. When I receive feedback, I often feel like I forget to take the time to soak it in – especially when there are no areas of improvement, and I’ve received positive comments. I don’t let myself really experience what a job well done feels like, and I jump from one task to another.
This past month, I’ve really come to terms with how detrimental this tendency can be to my mental and emotional well-being. Not taking a moment to pause and give myself a pat on my back has led me to be very critical of myself; because I don’t celebrate wins when they happen, I forget that they happened in the first place.
As a result, most of what I do remember about my performances, is areas of improvement. I focus on this more than I should, without acknowledging how I won’t give these same areas a second thought the moment I perform better. This makes it impossible for me to assess how far I’ve come, because any improvements from the past are quickly brushed aside, whereas the smallest of mistakes are magnified to ensure they don’t happen again.
Just last week, I went alone to the hospital to get the second dose of my vaccine. As someone with a phobia of needles, this was no small feat – it was probably the first time I had ever gone for a vaccination appointment unaccompanied. I didn’t cry or resist.
It was a major improvement from all of the other times I’ve attempted to get vaccinated alone. I’ve been known to cry, flail my arms around like a baby thrown in the deep end of the pool, and even throw up. There have been instances when I’ve turned around and gone back home, not even having the courage to go in.
I was nervous when I went in this time as well – I didn’t know what to expect; while I had managed to get through my first dose without a mishap, I hadn’t gotten that vaccine alone. And the last time I had tried to get a jab alone? Well, let’s just say that day probably made it to the staff’s list of some of the worse days they had at work.
Suffice it to say that what’s a simple act for most people, something they probably don’t even think twice about, is a complete nightmare for me. While the event in itself held no bearing on my life, apart from you know, being fully vaccinated, it was the implicit significance of the event that made it so special to me.
I tend to fixate on tangible end goals – like graduating college, or securing an internship for example, but what I fail to realize is that my journey doesn’t end there. On the contrary, it starts there. My journey from a student to a graduate will kick off next summer, and while my GPA will matter, what I learnt throughout college will ultimately decide what I go on to do.
And that’s why this is so important – because while the vaccine itself will not do much beyond giving me the freedom to go to malls in Mumbai, the psychological boost of confidence from doing a previously daunting task, at the brink of adulthood, has gently carried me over the chasm from being a diffident teenager, to a somewhat confident adult. Nothing else has changed, and quite frankly, I still have a long way to go before I can live on my own and manage things better – but knowing that I can do something as scary as this without my mom gives me hope, and there’s nothing better than knowing you can do something, even if you don’t have it all planned out.
After I got my second dose, I was pleasantly surprised as I realized that while I had whimpered and squirmed the entire way there, I had managed to get the second dose of my vaccine without hurting myself or anyone else – which, all things considered, was a pretty big win actually.
After the initial soreness wore off, and I started feeling better, I just got back to my routine as if nothing had happened. I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of the personal growth I had just witnessed, and chose instead, to focus on how poorly I had picked a slot to get vaccinated, and how that had led to a lot of work being piled up for me.
I think that I often forget to deconstruct accomplishments to see the amount of hard work that’s gone into them. Whenever I hear of someone doing something cool, my instinct is to applaud them for how well they did it, but I don’t stop to think of every small win they’ve had which compounded to their big win. I often assume their success was quick, and in the process, discount not only their journey, but also the growth that has come from the hours they spent achieving something.
And I’m not alone. A study by Harvard Business School found that millions of people around the world engage in a similar thought process – consequence cause matching. Simply put, this phenomenon is the notion that small steps, and small actions, can only have a small impact; and it takes a mammoth action to achieve something with a noticeable impact. This is, of course, not true – it is a cognitive bias that tricks us into believing that our impact will always be proportionate to our action.
[blockquote text=”I’ve internalized the traditional definition of what constitutes a win, which is perhaps the underlying cause behind my inability to celebrate small moments like this. While there’s nothing wrong with having a high standard for myself, and subsequently, for what I consider a job well-done, it is not right to discount all of the progress I’ve made along the way.” text_color=”” width=”” line_height=”undefined” background_color=”” border_color=”” show_quote_icon=”yes” quote_icon_color=”#4285F4″]
A friend of mine recently shared a wonderful, effortless way to keep track of these moments – she has dedicated Notion pages for each domain in her life; from her personal workouts to her professional commitments, and she makes it a habit to fill these in whenever she feels like she learnt something new along the way. This not only makes it easier for her to track how far she’s come, but also serves as a source of intrinsic motivation when she needs it [a dopamine boost from her accomplishments; a win-win if you will! :p].
When she first told me about this, I was on the fence about its utility. After all, I was doing just fine – I was improving in areas where I had been asked to, and I didn’t give anyone a chance to complain about the same thing twice. However, I had no idea how far I’d come. I could no longer relate to the person I used to be a few years ago, because I had lost all semblance of connection to her by failing to document my journey from who I was to who I am.
We’re all made of layers, and each layer signifies some sort of progress from the one that came before it. It sounds incredibly cheesy, but I like to think of these layers as links in a chain – that hold each version of me together and keep me going.
If my journey is the chain, then the small wins I’ve had along the way are what hold these links together. It sounds like something you’d read after cracking open a fortune cookie, but I have truly started to see the power that small wins hold. Sure, they may not change the world, but they change your world.
And more often than not, that’s enough.