4 minute read
Celebrating Isn't Just Fluff
by Lin Schussler-Williams
As we are celebrating the one-year anniversary of Pillars of Franchising, it is a great time to ask ourselves whether we are putting the power of celebrating to work in our own businesses.
Advertisement
You might think, “Really? The power of celebrating? Sounds like a bit of fluff to me.”
Bear with me, and I promise by the end of this (very brief) article, you’ll be celebrating with me!
Neuroscience and most of the world’s wisdom traditions have taught us that what we focus our attention and awareness on grows in our experience. I won’tgo into all the sources, but if you really want to know, just Google “what you focus on grows _______ and fill in the blank with neuroscience, scripture, the name of any major religion.
Here’s one way to say it from leadership expert Robin S. Sharma:
This works in the negative too. We probably all know what it’s like to dread that trip to the dentist next week and have our dread feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If it’s true that what we focus on expands in our experience, then what you focus on in your business, and what you help your team focus on in your business, grows in the experience of all the people who matter: your customers, your team, and of course, yourself.
Given this idea, making celebration an integral part of your approach and your team culture, well, it’s simply common sense.
Let’s explore three ways to put this to work:
Celebrate on Purpose
You set up celebrations on purpose and on a regular schedule – for yourself, and if you have one for your team – that makes celebrating a habit. Habits become real when they are our responses without thinking. Habits require us to give our attention and focus to something in order for it to become a habit, and, well, we have already established, what we focus on grows.
Creating as a habit can feel forced, so it is important to be genuine and to remind everyone involved in the exercise that the payoff is, well, more to celebrate. Just ask Oprah:
Celebrate Even When It Sucks
It is important to remind everyone involved that one of the most powerful things about a celebration habit happens at the end of a hard day or week when, despite the circumstances, you reach for what you can see as good; even if it is just that it is over, you learned something, or things are looking up!
The trap of a hard day, week, month, year, or decade is that it is so much easier to complain. It even feels reasonable to complain, and often impossible to celebrate. But raising your focus to look for something worthy of even a small celebration is a mindset hack that pays big dividends.
Celebrate in Advance
Lastly, the pro tip is to celebrate in advance and to make doing so a habit.
I lead a group of women who gather every Friday morning to celebrate wins from the week past and declare what they will celebrate next Friday.
It might sound like this: “This week, I am celebrating that I made the tough phone call in my business I’d been dreading and got a happy customer in return. Next week I’ll be saying, I am so happy and grateful now that my new happy customer is thrilled with what we delivered and has introduced me to another potential client.”
Celebrating in advance may seem awkward or silly but ask any gold medal Olympic athlete if they visualized the win before it happened. Most will say yes. We accept the idea of visualization when it comes to athletic achievement, why not for your business? What might happen if you asked your team not only to celebrate something they feel good about from the last week but what they’d like to feel celebration-worthy about next week?
Athletic trainers around the world know that your subconscious mind does not know the difference between experienced success and imagined success. So, let’s celebrate as if it’s already happened, in advance!
Next year, about this time, I will be so happy and grateful that Pillars of Franchising has had a banner second year, and all its readers are happy and prosperous!
