Every win counts

Kanisa George

IF THERE'S one thing in life we look forward to, it's the opportunity to achieve our goals. Living out those moments makes life genuinely worthwhile and adds value and purpose to the experience.

We all dream of achieving big things, and when the moment finally arrives it bestows on us limitless feelings of self-actualisation.

Getting to this place requires grit, a sense of willingness that surpasses fear and patience. Let's be honest, making it to the big league isn't an everyday occurrence and can sometimes take months, even years, to come to fruition. Realistically, we must dig our heels in and do the work.

While we're busy trying to get things right, naturally, life is racing by, and inadvertently or by the sweat of our brow, we collect little wins and tiny achievements along the way.

They might pale in comparison to the major goals ahead of us and often lack the same "wow appeal," but what might be lost on us is the correlation between small wins and value.

Small wins, or micro achievements, are often overlooked by many for their insignificance as they lack the fanfare we desperately crave in our lives.

Unbeknownst to the unassuming spectator (the vast majority of us), small yet incremental notches seep their way into the marrow of our lives, pivoting us from one season, reason and lesson to the next, and become, without us giving it much thought, the reason the big things are even possible.

Take, for example, the art of stick-to-itiveness. One might think sticking to a hobby after it becomes far too technical might be an insane proposal. However, a small achievement, like learning a new gardening technique, has the ability to hone soft skills like adaptability and problem-solving within the aperture of the process.

Small wins, in many ways, build character and resilience that may have nothing to do with the achievement itself and loom like a thick, invasive fog for many years to come.

We fallaciously ignore our "tiny achievements" because we regard them as unhelpful, valueless and not the "real deal."

Health and wellness coach Sonya Looney writes that the impact of small wins propagates much further than even the context of where that win was experienced.

"It's the wins (no matter how small) that impact intrinsic motivation, self-trust, and the perception of one's capability to reach for more."

Intrinsic motivation is a huge requirement when we go after those big wins. But if getting to this place takes time, how are we sustained in the interim? Incremental notches.

Each time we achieve a small win, we feel good about our efforts and push ourselves to do more. We motivate ourselves, and the intrinsic rewards result in habit-forming behaviour that has a spillover effect: self-determination. The more motivated you feel after achieving a seemingly inconsequential goal, the more energised you are to achieve the next.

Think of small wins as the bridge linking our desires to reality. Without them, we'll lack motivation, vision, and the enhanced sense of self-worth needed to get the job done. This perspective is akin to the views postulated by Looney: "The way you feel about yourself after the small win is actually way bigger than the actual actions of the small win. It affects you in other areas of your life."

It is easy to focus on the negative things in our lives, and because of this bias, our brains are built to remember the negative experiences far more than the positive ones.

This is where the small stuff comes in.

Lucky for us, our brains are wired to respond to rewards. Any accomplishment, no matter how small, releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which boosts mood, motivation and attention. An extraordinary ripple effect of this boost is that your brain also signals us to keep doing the activity again and again. And it's not so much the act of doing the activity, but the act of accomplishing it.

Why not use this to your advantage? The end game is your desire, so why not pave the road before you with tidbits that will empower you in the long run?

Upen Singh, author of A Good Life: Simple Ways to Make Big Changes, discusses the importance of viscerally celebrating your wins.

An emotional response like saying "Yes!" with a fist pump or giving a high five to a friend can manifest a positive attitude toward taking on more significant challenges.

She believes that the emotions you feel during or after a small win are instrumental in developing habit-forming behaviours that support motivation and repetition.

Significant achievements result from our self-rewarding habit, which we develop through the small efforts we make along the way. How we respond to these small efforts emotionally, directly affects our big achievements.

Working towards those life-changing goals would cease to exist but for the unimpeachable value and importance of our small wins. Don't ignore them or cast them aside as insignificant, for "the great victory, which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed."