Revealing Victory: Embracing Milestones with Poise & Appreciation

Achieving milestoes may be your main priority but what happens when you achieve them?

It is important to celebrate milestones and the achievements you have accomplished.

In this post, we’ll explore:

Why you should celebrate what you achieve
What milestones should you celebrate
How you should celebrate what you achieve
How to reset goals so that you can reach the next level
Lots more

Keep reading to find out more…

Why you should Celebrate Milestones

What milestones should you celebrate

How To Celebrate Milestones

How To Reset Your Goals To Get To The Next Level

It is so important that whatever stage in life you are, whether you are struggling or just starting something new, or even if you are successful and feel on top of the world, you keep pushing yourself to improve and keep looking for ways to become a better person than you were yesterday.

But, acknowledging what you have achieved is also important, no matter where you are, even if you’re not at the place you want to be yet. This is because recognising what you have done and accomplished helps you to see the progress you’ve made, and can be used to measure how far away it is you are from your actual goal.

Here are some of the benefits of celebrating milestones:

Personal Growth. I’m sure many of you weren’t happy with the situation you were in or the person you were a year ago, and that is why you started your personal development journey and your quest to obtain the things that you are lacking. Reflecting on the change you’ve made is a great way to see how far you’ve come and how much progress you’ve made in your goal of becoming a better person.
Hard work pays off. Celebrating the progress you’ve made is proof that you’ve put the hard work in and that you are dedicated to achieving your goal.
Life enrichment. Celebrating your achievements helps you have a more memorable life because you are celebrating points on your journey to success. Once you have completed the journey, you can look back at how far you’ve come and the highlights that you’ve celebrated.
Reflection and Perspective. Celebrating milestones also helps you understand what has worked in helping you get to this point and what hasn’t worked and what lessons you have learnt during the journey.
Happiness. By being grateful to yourself for making progress and improving, you improve your happiness and overall well-being because you are thanking yourself for making changes to become better. It also reinforces positive behaviours and encourages you to continue striving for excellence.
Self-confidence boost. At the start of every journey, you probably didn’t believe you could achieve your goals and have a better life. But the fact that you’re celebrating accomplishments shows that it is possible and makes you believe that maybe, your dreams can become a reality. This will give you the self-confidence boost to go all the way.

These are just some of the many benefits that celebrating your milestones has. However, I want to stress the importance of not celebrating before you’ve achieved anything. Many people like to go out and party and celebrate when they’ve been undisciplined and achieved nothing. Only celebrate when you have truly achieved something great.

Now, you may be thinking, “Well, what is something great?”.

This is the question I’m going to answer in the next chapter.

Keep reading.

When you first start, your goal often seems impossible. Your mind will come up with stupid reasons why you would fail:

“It’s not realistic”

“I’m just not the kind of person that could do something like this”

Whatever those thoughts are, they are often the ones that make us doubt ourselves. But you’ve already achieved the first milestone: starting. By ignoring those thoughts and pushing past them, you have already proved those thoughts wrong and provided evidence to yourself, that you can do it, and that even you can achieve the goal you set out for.

So this is the first thing to celebrate: You starting.

The second thing to celebrate is when you’ve achieved half of the goal you’ve set out to achieve. This is a good benchmark for you to see how far you’ve come and how much progress you’ve made. This should be a point where you look back at yourself at the start and realise that the person you were six months ago is almost unrecognisable to the person you are today. You’ve made progress and cultivated all of the private victories and your public ones are starting to show. This is the second milestone to celebrate.

The third thing you should celebrate is achieving what you set out to achieve.

This is your big moment. The moment everything changes for you. You have finally done what everyone told you is impossible. To honour this moment, you have to celebrate all of the factors that contributed to your success:

The fact you took action
The major roadblocks
The lessons you’ve learnt
The progress you’ve made
The discipline and perseverance you’ve instilled in yourself
The small wins like waking up early, meditating etc.
The people who supported you and believed in you from the start

Apart from these 3 milestones to celebrate, you should also celebrate:

Overcoming a major obstacle on your journey. When you set out to achieve a goal, there is always one or two things that are the biggest roadblocks and are the ones that stand between you and where you want to be. The biggest challenge was overcoming these obstacles. Although you might not have quite reached your final goal yet, you have taken a major step in the right direction and have contributed a lot of effort into overcoming this so this should be worth celebrating.
When a task that seemed impossible at the start becomes normal for you. Achieving success is all about stacking the small private victories so that you can have your big public victory. The private victories can be things like taking cold showers every day, waking up early, meditating, journaling etc. All of these tasks have contributed to you being where you are today and the reason why you can continue to grow and make progress.

Now, not all of these milestones should be celebrated in the same magnitude as each other. You’re not going to celebrate as hard when you are halfway as when you achieve the goal.

So how do you know how to celebrate each milestone?

Great question.

Let’s dive right into the next chapter and find out: How To Celebrate Achievements

Different milestones deserve different degrees of celebration. Obviously, your celebrations are going to differ when you’re only halfway to your goal compared to when you’ve achieved your goal. Here’s how you should celebrate each milestone:

Small Milestones

These are the small milestones that you should be proud of achieving but in the grand scheme of things, you are still not quite at the end goal yet. Examples include taking action and stopping procrastination when you’ve successfully implemented a habit into your life, completing a small personal goal etc.

The way these should be celebrated is by being grateful to yourself for putting the hard work in. Write yourself a thank you letter for achieving whatever you’ve achieved. This may sound a bit unusual but taking the time to thank yourself for doing what needs to be done actually has a lot of psychological benefits.

Firstly, you’ve proved to yourself that you are capable of achieving great things and that you should ignore that nagging voice in your head that holds you back. It will also give you a sense of happiness because you’ve done something worth remembering.

Remember: These are just small achievements so don’t go overboard and destroy all the progress you’ve made by slacking off and going out for a big night. You still haven’t achieved your goal yet and you need to keep your head down and keep working.

Medium-sized Milestones

These are milestones where you’ve achieved something that you thought you could never do when you just started on your journey. Examples of these include when you’re halfway to achieving the goal you’ve set out to achieve or when you’ve overcome a major obstacle that was holding you back.

This should be celebrated more expansively. Go out, enjoy yourself for the weekend, and do what you want to do. I want you to really recognise how much progress you’ve made and how much you’ve accomplished and be grateful to yourself for it. You’ve been going hard for so long and now it’s time to just take a step back and appreciate.

However, don’t go too overboard and do something too big. Save that for the big occasion when you finally achieve your big goal. Remember that you’re still not at that moment when you’ve truly climbed the mountain and completed the journey. Appreciate, and enjoy, but then get back to work and keep the grind going.

Big Milestones

This is the big moment when you’ve finally achieved your ultimate desire. You’ve sacrificed so much and changed yourself for the better. You should be almost unrecognisable compared to the person you were when you just began this journey.

There should be no holding back here. Go all out and really enjoy yourself. That one thing you always wanted to do but couldn’t before for whatever reason? Go out and do it to the fullest. Enjoy yourself and really celebrate what you’ve achieved.

Your manner of celebration is completely up to you. Do you like to go out and party? Go do that. Do you like travelling? Travel and see the wonders of the world. Whatever it is that you love doing, go and do it because you’ve achieved something truly great and that is worth celebrating to the fullest.

However, after you’ve finished celebrating, it’s important to get back to work and push for the next level.

Notice how after each celebration, I always come back to refocusing and putting in the work so you can achieve the next level. Celebrating is important for appreciating how far you’ve come but remaining focused and being able to push yourself to the next level is equally important. Otherwise, you’ll just slack off and destroy all the progress you’ve made and all that hard work you’ve put in and all the sacrifices will have been for nothing.

So remember, celebration is important, but remaining focused and disciplined is equally important.

Now let’s move on to the final chapter: How To Reset Goals To Get To The Next Level

When you are close to achieving your goal, to cross the finish line, or even get to the next level, you have to reset your goal. This will give you the psychological boost to not slack off and keep going at the same intensity as you did before. It is what you need to push past the feeling of complacency and not give up when you are so close to achieving what you want to achieve. Resetting your goals “allows us to create a vision of how we would like our life to be. When we have a goal, we tend to increase the amount of time and effort we spend on an activity and develop effective strategies to achieve that goal.”

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say you want to bench 100kg. You start only being able to bench 50 but you put the work in and grind at it every day. Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you can bench 90. At this point, you need to reset your goal of being able to bench 100 to being able to bench 110 kg. This will give you the psychological boost needed to get over the line and possibly even go beyond it.

Benefits of Resetting Goals:

Maintain Motivation: When you keep grinding away at the same goal for a long period, you might start to get a feeling of emptiness and tiredness. You’ll start to feel less and less motivated to complete the goal. By resetting and changing the goal, you give yourself that mental edge that reignites the motivation you need to keep pushing and get there.
Avoiding Complacency: When you’re close to achieving a goal, you start to get complacent and slack off. This is because you think that you’ve already achieved a lot and you can slack off now. YOU CAN’T. You have to keep going and ignore the intrusive thoughts that tell you, “This is good enough”. There are always ways to improve, no matter what you’re doing, so striving to do that and resetting your goals will help you avoid complacency and keep pushing to the next level.
Encouraging Growth: Resetting goals will help you strive to become better and encourage personal and professional growth. By challenging yourself with new objectives, you have the opportunity to develop new skills, expand your knowledge, and broaden your horizons.
Adapting to Changing Circumstances: Intensity drives Adaptation. To change and adapt so that you can become better, you have to have a level of intensity that you sustain for a long period. However, that intensity can fade away when you get close to achieving the goal and. by resetting your goals, you push yourself to keep going and get to the next level and that re-ignites the intensity that you need to keep improving.
Sustaining Momentum: When you’ve built momentum, you should do everything in your power to cling on to that and keep it going for as long as possible, because once you lose that momentum, it’s hard to get it back again. Setting new goals can help you sustain the momentum you’ve built from achieving your previous goal. It keeps you moving forward and maintains a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
Preventing Burnout: When you pursue the same goal for too long, everything you do will feel like a drag and you start to develop symptoms of burnout. Resetting the goal allows for breaks and prevents burnout by introducing variety and new challenges into your life.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of resetting your goals, let’s explore how you can adapt your goals.

One example of where I’ve used the tactic of resetting my goals when I’m close to achieving them is when I wanted to start taking cold showers. I started off being so scared of cold water and when I went in, I immediately jumped back out because I just couldn’t stand the water being that cold.

Then, I realised that to achieve my goal, I needed to take it slowly and take small steps. So I turned the tap to warm/cold water instead of cold and I went in it for 2 minutes seconds. Once I could stay in the warm/cold for 1 minute 40, I reset my goal I turned the tap a little colder, and I repeated the process again and again.

Now, I’ve gone from not being able to stay in a cold shower for more than 5 seconds to consistently taking cold showers first thing in the morning for 2 minutes. This is the power of resetting your goals.

As a general guideline, when you’re 80-85% of the way to your goal, reset it to slightly above your original goal and try to accomplish that instead. Then repeat the process and you will see yourself making much more progress much more consistently.

However, you should also remember to celebrate achieving your original goal. Just because you’ve reset your goal to being able to bench 110 kg doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the time to celebrate being able to bench 100 kg, which was your original goal. Take the time to appreciate what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished, and then keep going and strive to become better every day.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve learnt the importance of celebrating milestones and how to celebrate them, it’s time to start implementing them.

Take action now because doing is the best form of learning.

But before you get started on the checklist, I’d like to hear from you.

How will you be celebrating what you achieve and how are you going to reset them to get better?

Or maybe you have a question about something you read.

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Revealing Victory: Embracing Milestones with Poise & Appreciation