This time of year is really special for me – we’re thankful for things that went well, reflective on our experiences and remembering those that we miss. It got me thinking about our intentions – shouldn’t we also be celebrating the intentions that we worked on and the ones that we learned from? After all, come January, we might me setting some new ones but what’s so special about January? And, why stop there? Let’s celebrate more often than once a year. After all, we’ve been working and learning from our intentions during the whole year. So, let’s talk about celebrating more and observe how the joy propels us forward and further through our intentions and our goals. But first, a song that evokes CELEBRATION!

Why do we need to celebrate?

Working on our intentions or any change, for that matter, is hard, especially in the beginning. It may require a significant change to how we think, act and spend our time. Now, that’s a lot to have accomplished all because we purposefully intended to be better. Therefore, we need to celebrate your endeavor. We need to celebrate because it was your willpower (with some neurophysiological involvement) that converted thought to intention, intention into action, action into motivation, motivation into practice and practice into achievement.

You worked on making a better YOU so you need to celebrate.

Joy also creates positive reinforcement for your action and that joy can help you sustain progress toward your intention. Thus creating lasting change.

Celebrate more often

So, why celebrate just once at the end? Why not, celebrate more than once? After all, if joy propels us forward and incentivizes us to keep at it, then more joy and joy more often would equal greater motivation. That, indeed, has been a lesson for me and a key reason why I encourage teams to celebrate more often.

Being more joyful is not bad for you so celebrate more

But some might ask, why are you celebrating if you haven’t achieved your goal? And that is a really good point – celebrating for the sake of celebrating is not meaningful for our intention. In fact, it might lead us to short circuit the work and go straight to celebration. Thus, in that terrific and seemingly, heartless question, lies a nice lesson on finding more reasons to celebrate.

Finding more reasons to celebrate requires us to be aware of our progress and mindful about how to measure it

So, break down your intention into daily, weekly and monthly goals and decide how you will measure progress. And Voila! You now have the means to celebrate more often.

Some ideas on what to celebrate

Do you need ideas? You’ve come to the right place.

• Celebrate the fact that you started and ended and even that you stuck around at the mid-point mark.
• Celebrate what you learned whether you were proved right or wrong.
• Celebrate your teams working together in alignment.
• Celebrate the losses too – when you win, you learn what to do; but when you lose, you also learn what not to do.

What do you think about celebrating and what are your ideas on reasons to celebrate more often?

Let me know in the comments what was most helpful for you. Stay safe and joyful this holiday!