Allow yourself to feel successful
Not letting yourself feel like a success might seem like a good idea. You might feel that you don’t want to let yourself get complacent. You might have heard not to let yourself be satisfied with an achievement but to always set your sights higher.
There are three huge problems with not allowing yourself the satisfaction of feeling like a success.
If you never feel like a success, you will start to feel as though you are failing. This might cause to to fail when you should otherwise have succeeded.
A big part of job satisfaction comes from feeling good at your job. If you never let yourself feel like a success, you won’t get the job satisfaction that you could otherwise have. You might fall out of love with what you do. This will in turn cause your work to suffer and create a negative feedback loop.
Part of what you are doing, whether you realize it or not, is training your brain using positive and negative reinforcement. If you follow a plan and reach a goal but then don’t acknowledge your success, your brain won’t get the positive reinforcement that would help connect the steps that you took with the feeling of success. Much of the work we do is for delayed gratification. I might not exhibit a photograph for months after I did the work of creating it and setting up an exhibition. It’s easy to never feel like the work is “complete.”
If you hit a milestone or complete an important work or project, make sure you give yourself the credit you deserve for getting that thing done. Maybe it’s a small thing and maybe no one else noticed but it was something that you wanted to do and you succeeded. Make sure your brain knows that you did. Otherwise you might set your brain on a path of not recognizing that the steps that you followed lead to the results you set out to achieve. Help yourself out by allowing yourself to feel good about the work that you do.