Besides birthdays and holidays, when was the last time you celebrated? How often do you take the time to stop and recognize your successes and accomplishments or do the same for people around you? How would life change if you took time for celebrations?
As an solopreneur, I am often focused on the next thing to do. I imagine in whatever place you find yourself, that is your focus as well. There is something about the time and place in which we live that propels us forward faster and faster. It’s as if our gear shift is stuck in fifth gear.
However, taking the time to recognize successes and celebrate them has many benefits for living a well-nourished life.
Celebrations Are Good For You and Your Brain
When taking time out to celebrate, whether with family, friends, or even stopping to recognize your own successes, the brain releases endorphins – that feel-good chemical in your brain. You get a pleasurable response and your brain seeks out more celebrations. You begin to seek out more ways to celebrate.
For example, I decided in my new writing adventure, I would mark little successes with getting myself a new pair of earrings. Now when I see those earrings, they have become also “stones of remembrance” of those successes.
Stones of remembrance were from Joshua 4 as God delivered the Israelites from the flooded Jordan River and the stones helped them remember God’s hand of deliverance. Stones were used then to celebrate and remember God’s miracles.
Those earrings continue to remind me that I am celebrating my success as “first time getting published in an online publication” and “first time getting recognized as an author”.
Celebrations don’t have to be big to be good for your brain.
Celebrations Build Upon Themselves
As you begin to bring more celebrations into your life, you begin to see more ways to celebrate. Like my writing example, I am now more aware of how I want to celebrate my baby step successes as a writer.
I also see more the value of celebrations and how I feel about them, so I want to make sure others experience them as well. My son just passed an IT Professional Project Certification exam so we’ll be celebrating his accomplishments this weekend at a family gathering.
I realized too, that my daughter recently opened her own independent chair in a salon and my daughter-in-law is leaving her full time work to enjoy staying home with our grandchildren.
All of these “events” are milestones to celebrate. I will be creating “stones of remembrance” for them with words written on smooth stones, like “accomplishment”, “independence” “freedom”. Won’t we have fun celebrating?
By recognizing accomplishments, you can begin to see a pathway building to more and more successes. The successes themselves create a framework of confidence for taking the next risk.
Celebrations Bring Joy and Hope
Joy is one of those emotions that you want to broaden and build into your repertoire of emotions. As you practice joy, your brain has a wider range of emotions from which to draw. Like my earring example, I can feel joy when I look at my earrings and remember how joyful I felt getting that first article published online.
The joy goes on and on.
Celebrations also build hope. As you stop to celebrate, you realize what you have accomplished, relish in that accomplishment and see what is possible. It builds that hope muscle for what can happen for the future.
The Take Away
What about you? How will you begin to incorporate more celebrations into your daily life? Will it be through stones of remembrance like my earrings or words on a smooth stone? Or with recognizing accomplishments of yourself and others, like with my children?
Or will it simply be something like celebrating getting your backyard in order as spring arrives?
Whatever it is, you can be assured that celebrations can last long after the event. I look forward to hearing about how you begin to include more celebrations in your life. You can continue to grow your well-nourished life.
If you would like to explore how to do that, contact me. Let’s get you on the road to celebrating that well-nourished life now.
Nancy Booth helps you discard chaos and uncertainty as you journey towards a well-nourished life after 50. She helps you embrace wellness, purpose and intentional connections in your life. Her coaching process helps you design your own personal roadmap to help you build a healthy, purposeful and peaceful mind, body and soul. She would love to walk your journey with you.