Do you feel like you work tirelessly but stay stagnant? Do you feel like no matter what you do you’re not getting anywhere? Do you feel dissatisfied with what you have and where you are? If this sounds like you, you might just be missing the mark.
Now, I don’t mean you’re not working hard enough or not “doing enough stuff” because you are. What I mean is that you’re missing the landmarks. You’re moving from one thing to the next and not acknowledging or celebrating your progress. When you move from one thing to the next without celebrating your wins, you get exhausted and discontent.
Do you remember when you wanted that job? When you didn’t have that house? When you couldn’t afford to take the family to Florida? Now you can, and it’s on to the next thing. No wonder you feel miserable! When we don’t take time to appreciate our successes and measure our progress, it gets lost in our lust for new conquests.
It doesn’t take much to appreciate our wins and bask in our little victories before moving on to the next target. If you’re tired of feeling exhausted and underwhelmed by your life’s progress, read these three strategies to stop living an unmeasurable life, and start living in constant celebration.
- Create Measurable Goals.
When we set goals, we often make them vague or immeasurable. Such as “get more clients,” “spend more time with my family,” or “work out more.” However, there’s no real way to track your progress with vague goals. How many more clients do you need? How much time are you spending with your family now? How much more time do you want to spend with them?
Unless you set measurable goals, you won’t experience any sense of accomplishment when you do get more clients or you do spend more time with your family. You also won’t feel motivated to continue working towards the goal because you’re not measuring results.
To shift this habit, set 1 to 3 small measurable goals you can achieve within a week. This could mean drinking 3 more cups of water, spending 1 less hour on your phone each day, or taking a walk every morning or evening. Whatever you need to do to get you in the habit of celebrating and tracking your wins on a daily basis!
- Evaluate How You Celebrate.
What does celebrating mean to you? Most people would answer with cake, confetti, or a cheer squad, but it doesn’t always have to look like that. Celebrating can look like a lot of things—giving yourself time to focus on yourself, going to lunch with a friend, sharing your success with your spouse, letting yourself have a cheat meal, or anything else that gives you a second to embrace your milestone.
Celebrating doesn’t have to be big like a new car or a trip to the Bahamas, it can simply be giving yourself permission to appreciate your success before moving onto the next thing. Evaluate your life and ask yourself, “How do you currently celebrate non-numeric goals?”
How do you celebrate your relationships? How do you celebrate your good days? How do you celebrate a promotion? Separate and appreciate the difference between personal values and monetary values. When you start finding little things to celebrate, you’ll stop rushing to get to the “next” thing.
- Start Tracking Your Long-Term Goals.
Sometimes our goals feel too big for proper measurement… so we don’t measure them at all.. We don’t know how to track our goal to buy a house in 5 years, start a family, or quit our job and become an entrepreneur. Those things may seem far away now, but everything you do plants a seed for something else to start later.
What are you doing now to track your goals with a duration of more than a year? 5 years? 10 years? Make a list of the things that would need to change in your life now to start working towards those goals. Maybe you need to have more money saved each paycheck, maybe you need to start spending weekends working on a business plan, or maybe you need to start discussing parenting with your partner.
Whatever that looks like for you, look at the steps it would take to get to your goal and what you can do now to start working towards it. This clarifies your path and allows for a direct series of steps for following that goal. Then, when you do achieve that goal, you’ll be able to trace your steps and see where you started.
Everything starts somewhere. There was a time when you didn’t have all of the luxuries you have now, so don’t let them go unappreciated. The more we take time to celebrate our wins and success, the more achievement and appreciation we’ll feel for our accomplishments.
If you’re tired of feeling insatiable, stagnant, and miserable, look back at all of the things you’ve accomplished and how badly you wanted them before you had them. As you continue to reach those landmarks in your life, celebrate them, and you’ll find more joy in where you’re at!