What do you think when you hear the word ‘celebration?’ What images come to mind?
Is it a birthday party that you first thought of? A wedding or anniversary? Was it a team or personal triumph?
Almost certainly, it was a positive event. Likely, something that was incredibly personal and impactful to you and your life. As in most things we discuss, it’s unique to you.
Keep thinking about it.
Do you remember how you felt? Was anyone there with you? Did the celebration stretch or was it momentary?
Keep remembering.
Are you feeling good right now? Most of us probably are. When we remember our celebrations and what we’ve celebrated in the past, it brings up good memories. This is important. It’s important to recall the good feelings and memories of a celebration.
A celebration is a end result of a journey. Not the end but a slight pause in an otherwise always continuing journey. A celebration, celebrates. It celebrates achievement, victory, progress and growth.
We’re going to challenge you to do something different with it. Because, you can’t have a high without a low and no victories come without failures. Achievement isn’t achievement without struggle. Progress and growth can’t happen without backslides and lessons learned.
What losses did you face before your celebration? What failures did you overcome? What lessons were learned?
Celebration is an amazing thing. It creates gratitude, unifies teams, cements visions and allows us to acknowledge goals being hit. It also, importantly, allows us to let go of our failures.
Letting go of our failures is one of the extreme benefits of celebration and we often never even think about it. To be clear, letting go of failures doesn’t mean to forget the failures. Letting go of failure means recognizing that we have failed and overcome. That the sweet taste of victory and achievement is only sweet after the bitter bite of loss and failure.
To celebrate is to remember. But don’t just remember the good, remember the entire journey and something amazing will happen. Your future failures, they’ll hurt a little less. They’ll be a little easier to recover from and you’ll find yourself more resilient than you were in the past. Celebrations are opportunities to grow our resilience by recalling the past challenges without the immediacy of the pain and frustration.
If you take the time to really reflect on those challenges when you celebrate, your celebration will be all the sweeter and your future frustrations, just a little less disruptive.
What’s that really mean? More opportunities to celebrate, more often. And that can’t be a bad thing!
To check out our celebration this week inside the Lab, as we have reached our One Year Anniversary of the podcast.
Please head over to the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab Facebook Page and tell us your favorite memory from the podcast, or perhaps you favorite guest or episode. We would love to hear from you!
Join our private Facebook Community Group, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab ~ A Place for Service Professionals to Give & Grow
