October 3, 2022
Hey folks!
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I’m big on making sure you take care of yourself while you write and edit and work. If you need a break, take it; if you need resources, use them; etc. So I’m coming at you today with yet another important element of the writing, editing, and freelancing journeys:
Celebrate your accomplishments.
This is huge. Whether or not you thought you’d achieve a particular goal or come to the finish line of a specific task, acknowledging that you did it is important. Acknowledging your own skills, your own achievements, and, quite frankly, your own awesomeness is worth it.
Don’t believe me? Here are some perks to doing it:
1. It boosts self-confidence
2. It makes you take a second to appreciate the work you did
3. It lets you look back and see that you made it through all the tough moments where you weren’t sure if you’d make it
4. It helps you focus on the things you’ve done rather than the things you have yet to do or didn’t do
Quite simply, celebrating accomplishments forces you to stop and take a moment to just feel good about yourself.
And this applies to big and small things. What you consider worth celebrating and what others consider worth celebrating might look different, but know that it’s all an accomplishment, and how you choose to observe it is up to you. But do make sure to acknowledge that you did it.
Some things you might want to celebrate:
– Completing an outline of a project, the first draft, the tenth draft, or anything that isn’t actually the final draft
– The final draft of a project
– The first time you show your work to someone else
– The first time you edit something
– The fifteenth time you edit something
– The completion of a course
– The purchase of a good computer for working on
– The first query letter you send out
– Finishing the scene you’ve been stuck on for weeks
– Reaching your weekly word count goal, be that 50 words or 5000
– Writing a sentence when you didn’t think you could even manage a single word
– Deciding on a title for your poem or story or book
– Literally anything that you feel some pride in doing
And maybe it feels wrong to celebrate yourself. Selfish, perhaps. But know that it isn’t. Acknowledging the cool and hard things you do is a good thing. Refer back to the reasons for celebrating above.
So when you reach those milestones, do a happy dance. Scream excitedly to your best friend. Buy yourself a new book. Take yourself out to dinner. Buy yourself a cupcake.
I’ve definitely done multiple things on that list to celebrate my own accomplishments and highly recommend. Sometimes just one of them for one accomplishment, sometimes definitely more than one.
As Verywell Mind points out, though, celebrating your victories isn’t the same as putting a reward in place to help you reach that point. Rewards are all well and good, but celebrating, unlike rewards, isn’t a reason to finish. It’s what happens after you finish and let yourself linger in the pride you get from that rush of doing a thing you wanted to do and actually did. Sink into that feeling.
Your accomplishments are worth celebrating.
Sources:
https://www.verywellmind.com/healthy-ways-to-celebrate-success-4163887