Let's celebrate!

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Why is celebrating so hard for ambitious women? In today’s episode, I discuss my personal challenges with celebrating but why it is so important to do anyway. I will share the latest research on celebrating and how it helps create natural motivation and good feels toward yourself and your job and give you some very practical ways to make celebrations easy and fun…oh and…did I mention we will celebrate this being our 100th episode?

Topics in this episode:

  • Let’s celebrate our 100th episode together

  • My favorite way to celebrate and you get to join in!

  • The connection between celebration and creating new neuropathways which creates natural motivation toward your goals

  • Connecting the “good feels” with your successes to make reaching your goals easier

  • Celebrating the little “wins” and successes

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Working moms real quick. If you are a regular listener to this podcast, if you love the content, if you think more working moms need the tangible support and tools that this podcast provides, would you take 1 minute to rate and review this podcast? 


Wherever you're listening right now, reviews are still the number one way to beat the algorithm and get this podcast into the hands of more working moms just like you. Thanks so much for taking the time and let's dive into the show. 


Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 


Friends. Is it okay if I call you that? I really feel connected to you, my listeners, and to those I feel a real sense of connection with, I tend to affectionately say ‘my friends’ when I speak to them. 


Celebrating episode 100.

So my friends, we have something really special to celebrate on this episode. We are celebrating episode 100. Woohoo! I can't even believe it. Milestones like this are such an important thing to celebrate, and we're going to do that right here today. 


I really want to celebrate the impact this podcast has had in the world, in my life. But really, we're going to have a conversation about the importance of celebration. If you're anything like me, celebration does not come easily. It's got to be something really big for me to celebrate or even to really think about celebrating. 


Because most of the time it's not that I wouldn't celebrate something, it's that I don't even think about it. It doesn't even come to mind. And there's a lot of research that has been done that shows the importance of celebration in our brain. And you all know that I like to talk about brain science on this podcast and how it relates to our life as working moms. So I'm going to be diving into that on this podcast. It's all going to be so good. 


But I want to get a little personal here as we start because I already said that celebration is really tough for me or it's just not something that comes really naturally unless it's a really big thing. And I want to share why. 


I am an ambitious, high achieving, working mom. I like to check all the boxes. I'm a doer. I'm a get it done, I am the you can depend on me, I will always follow through kind of person. Which means there's always more to do. And it's hard to get my brain on board with celebrating when there is more to do. 


High achievers don't like to celebrate progress.

I hear this a lot from my clients as well. I'll celebrate when the project is done. High achievers don't like to celebrate progress. They like to celebrate accomplishment. And that's one of the reasons why it's really hard for me. And the other kind of goes hand in hand with high achievers, but it's also just simply a part of being human. And for sure, it's a part of my personality as well, which is it's hard to celebrate when I know I could have done better. 


We talk a lot about this on the podcast about how our brains are not hardwired for happiness, which we might associate with celebration, right? Happiness, celebration, joy, fun, laughter, all those things that come with celebration - our brains aren't hardwired for that. They're hardwired for survival. They're hardwired to show us all of our areas of growth so that we can improve upon them the next time and better our odds at survival. 


Indulging in the worst case scenario thinking

You might think I'm a little crazy because you probably don't consciously think about your survival unless you're in some life threatening situation, which I hope you never are. But one of the exercises I like to take my clients through is we start indulging in the worst case scenario thinking. 


So the exercise kind of goes like this: they'll be afraid or anxious about truly ending work at 5pm, right? That's what they want. They want to be done with work at 5pm, they want to shut down their computer. They want to not log back on. They don't want to be looking at notifications. That's what they want. 


And I'll ask them, well, what's the worst case scenario? 

And they'll say something like, well, I won't look good, like everyone else on the team. 

And then I'll say, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And they'll say, well, then I'll look like a weak link on the team, or at least I'll be perceived that way. 

And I'll say, okay, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And they'll say, well, if I'm the weak link, then I'll be fired. 

And I'll say, okay, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And then they'll say, well, my reputation will be damaged and then maybe I won't be able to get a job. 

And I'll say, okay, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And they'll say, well, my family will starve or we'll have to move back in with my folks. 

And then I'll say, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And they'll say, well, they'll be perceived as a loser or some kind of loser that doesn't really have a place in the society or value right to offer this society. 

And I'll say, well, what's the worst scenario about that? 

And they'll say that, I won't have any friends. I won't have any meaning. Life will be purposeless. 


Usually by the time we get to this part, I like to say something like this - If you were living back in tribal days when your survival hinged on being part of a tribe, what do you think would happen if it was true that you were a loser without any friends and had no ability to work. And always the answer is death. 


Do you see our brain? How it makes this jump from shutting down your computer and your work brain at 5pm every day and the threat of your existence, even though that possibility is so minute, even though it's so crazy, even that your brain thinks it, your brain does in fact see it. It's job to see it and to induce fear in your body to make sure that it doesn't happen. It's your brain's job to keep you alive, not to bring you happiness or joy or feelings of celebration. 


I have to be honest, my friends, my brain has become an expert at this. I focus so much on what I'm not good at, all of my areas of growth as a means of either physical or cultural survival. And it inhibits my ability to celebrate. Or in other words, I really have to work at it and make it a conscious choice. And because of that, I have all of this worst case scenario thinking and my brain is always focused on growth and it's wired for survival and not happiness. Because of all of that, when I do choose to celebrate, it feels really uncomfortable because it goes against my brain's natural state of survival and because it's something that I have to put a lot of conscious thought into, which on some level feels wrong. 


Celebrating hasn't come easy to me.

And so celebrating feels forced or feels uncomfortable. And we humans like to thrive in comfort. So celebrating doesn't come easy to me, even though I have read all of the science behind it and I know it's important. And we're going to talk about all of that here in just a moment. Celebrating hasn't come easy to me. It is something that I have had to practice. 


So I want to take a moment and stop and actually celebrate this podcast. I have to say that I love writing and creating this podcast. It is one of my absolute favorite things that I do in my entire week. It's planning what I'm going to say to you, recording it and sharing it. That's the first thing I want to celebrate. 


Highlighting the success of this podcast.

I love this podcast and the impact that it's having on this world. And I don't know if you know this, but this is an international podcast. People have listened to this podcast in over 45 countries and it ranks in the top 5% of all podcasts in the world. I'm actually going to put a link for you so you can see that information, where it comes from and how podcasts are ranked. I just find that fascinating. 


You can have it all!

And I am celebrating that in the top 5% in this world, there is a global movement to change the paradigm for career driven women that are also moms, where they stop choosing between their work and their dreams and motherhood and choose to have both. And this podcast is a part of it. This podcast has over 250 listeners across the globe that are unique individuals or really its unique devices that have downloaded this podcast at least once. 


And those listeners have actually listened to over 810 episodes since the podcast began just a little under two years ago. And at this current trajectory, we're going to be at that magical 100,000 download milestone in just a couple of months. Isn't that wild? These numbers just blow my mind and they feel so celebratory worthy because they're big and they're flashy and they highlight the success of this podcast and the work that I put out into the world. 


And one of the things I really want to do as a part of this celebration is I want to hear from you. I want to hear about how this podcast has impacted you personally. 


  • What are some of the main things that you've taken away? 

  • What are the breakthroughs that you've had? 

  • What's the one thing that has made a difference in your working mom life? 


I'm going to share more about this request for your celebrations at the end of this podcast, and I'm also going to be sending out an email about it. So you're definitely going to want to make sure you're on my email list in order to get that. So I'll put that in the show notes as well, but we're going to come back to that at the end. 


Celebrating you. 

This is something that I've really just never done before, which is to ask for your comments, your thoughts, your celebrations and wins. I want to hear all of it so that I can highlight it right here on a future episode because I'm not just celebrating myself and the success of this podcast and what it's had in my life. I'm celebrating you and the movement that we are co created. I'm so excited and I get so fired up just thinking about hearing from you. So there's lots of big things to celebrate here, but there's also a lot of little things to celebrate as well. 


Celebrating progress and all of the little wins along the way towards a big accomplishment is one of the most effective ways to create natural motivation and momentum. 


Let me say that again for you in a slightly different way. If you want to feel more motivated and you want to build natural momentum that feels easy, celebrate the heck out of your daily, maybe even hourly progress. This is called the Progress Effect, and it's been widely studied, and at its core, it indicates that people that acknowledge and celebrate their progress feel better about themselves and their work and consequently are more productive and find their work more meaningful than those that don't. Which means that taking the time to celebrate even the smallest of things is one of the most effective uses of your time if you want to enjoy your job more and be more productive in your time, that you spend working. 


So I want to take a moment and celebrate some of the little wins that I associate with this podcast. For me, one is that I have never missed a weekly episode. Consistency was the number one thing that my editors told me when I started out. And I have consistently put out content for 100 weeks. And that feels like something to celebrate, right? It's required me and I celebrate this as well, it's required me to be very disciplined and it's required me to find very consistent time in my calendar to write this podcast, to capture my ideas, to think ahead on weeks where I might be on vacation or where there's a holiday. And so I have to plan ahead of time and I celebrate that. 


Celebrating my consistency and discipline. 

Only once have I actually had to ask my editor for an extension. I'm actually supposed to send them the raw podcast that I record by the end of the day on Wednesday. And I think only once, and it was because I had COVID did I request that I send it to them, I think, on either Thursday or Friday. And then they had to turn it around really fast for me. But I want to celebrate my consistency and the discipline that I've created around this podcast. 


And I also want to celebrate the ten reviews and the 4.9 five star ratings that this podcast has on Apple podcast and the 20 reviews resulting in a 4.9 star rating on Spotify. If you are one of those people, thank you so much. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, I would love for you to rate and review this podcast. It is one of the most effective ways to get it into the hands of more working moms out there. Just take two minutes and do that, please, It would mean the world to me.


I know that this content has been impactful to you. It brings tears to my eyes to think that I am putting something into the world that I know is making a real impact in people's lives. And every once in a while, I hear from you and I'll get a random email from someone. I just got one just the other day that said: ‘This podcast spoke to me. Thank you so much for speaking on this subject. I felt like you were talking to me.’ That's what she said. 


And sometimes I hear from women on my breakthrough calls where they'll talk about the podcast and all of the things that they've learned on it. I love hearing from you in all of it. It makes me emotional to think about the impact that this is having and the movement that we're creating and I just celebrate that impact, both the stuff that I know and the people and the effect that it's having that I don't. 


I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I usually write this podcast as I walk, and I dictate it on my phone. And that walk is almost exactly 3.2 miles. No matter which way I walk, I never walk the same way every single day. I always walk in strange loops all around my neighborhood or down into my main street and in my town and so forth. But it always turns out to be about 3.2 miles, and I just want to celebrate that. 


Using our time wisely.

I am using that time wisely by moving my body, getting out of my space, and getting into my best thinking space. I could go on and on and on about small wins on this podcast, but I think you see what I mean when I say celebrate the smaller wins as well. Celebrate the progress. So we've talked about big things to celebrate and we've talked about small things to celebrate on this podcast. Let's talk about what it actually means to do all of that. And then I'm going to give you an opportunity to do it with me. You have to be ready for that. Okay? It's going to come up now. 


I shared earlier how I have struggled with celebration. And I remember several years ago really diving deep into, like, why I struggled so much with celebration. Because, at the time, I felt it was like a big problem. I don't celebrate, I don't even know how to celebrate, right? I didn't know what it meant to me, and I thought about it. It's strange for me to think about this now, but I spent a lot of time cognitively thinking about and diving into and analyzing what is celebration and what does it truly mean for me. 


The best form of celebration is the one that involves moving your body.

And, what I come up with then still rings true for me today. I think the best form of celebration is the one that involves moving your body. A lot of times we like to acknowledge our successes and our wins by treating ourselves to dinner or a massage or raising a glass to a toast and all of that's great. For sure, you should do all of that. You're deserving of that special dinner and that nice bottle of wine or that massage or date night. But celebrating is an action. It's something that we do. It's not an acknowledgment or like a little head nod towards something. It's something that requires movement within our body. 


In preparing for this podcast, I was looking up a few facts on celebrating. And I read this quick article about chemotherapy clinics and how they often have a very tangible way of celebrating after every round of treatment that a patient goes through. And this article was referencing that one clinic, after you have a round of chemo, you get up and you ring a bell and everyone applauds you. All of the other patients, all of the other nurses, the doctors. Every single time that bell gets rung, it is an acknowledgment that the person just did something really hard, went through a round of chemotherapy, and everybody cheers for them. It just brings tears to my eyes to think about that. 


Celebrating the progress that you’ve made.

Why do they do that? It's to create that motivation towards a larger goal that all of these amazing people have, which is life. They want to celebrate the progress of another treatment down, to fuel them with all the good feelings so that they can come back to the next one. Knowing it's meaningful, knowing that it's working, knowing that it's pushing them towards their goal. And they do that through a physical manifestation of ringing the bell, applauding each other. 


My guess is it's really hard for someone to walk out of that clinic without some smile on their face, some feeling of pride, that they did the thing that was really hard. And they're proud of themselves. They're celebrating the progress that they've made, which, by the way, that's another action you can take to celebrate, which is to smile. It's such a beautiful illustration of what it means to celebrate. 


A pat on the back, a smile, ringing a bell, throwing your hands up in the air like Rocky Balboa. A hug. A deep, calming breath with a smile, writing down I'm proud of myself on a piece of paper and writing it five times and I haven't mentioned my favorite yet. I'm going to do that in a minute because I want us to all do it together. These are celebratory actions, and all of these things can be done in the moment, right? And that's one of the reasons why they're so effective. 


The act of celebrating doesn't have to be big and cost a lot of money, but it does need to take place immediately following the success or the small win. 


Because what we know about the act of celebrating is that it produces dopamine in your body. Dopamine is a natural substance that your brain releases that makes you feel really good. And whenever it gets released in your body, a neurological pathway is created that says, oh, that feels good. We should do more of that. And then it remembers what it is that you did that produced that feeling. Remember, your brain is always on your side wanting to help you. 


So when something feels really good, it wants to help you create more of that experience so that you have more feelings of feeling good. And your brain connects whatever you just did to that experience of dopamine. It remembers it, and then creates natural motivation to do it again. 


Celebrating is such an important part of habit creation.

That is why celebrating is such an important part of habit creation. If you've read anything about what it takes to create a habit, celebration is always a part of it. And it's for this reason that celebrating creates neurological pathways that connect the new habit to feeling good, which creates natural motivation to do it again. 


My husband and I have recently taken a parenting class to help us with our five year old son, who's just the most amazing little boy, just a really big feeler with big feelings, and we've wanted to learn how to love him and help him. And so we took this three week parenting class. It was just like once a week for three weeks. The psychologist spoke of the importance of positive affirmation and something she called positive consequence immediately following the behavior that we want our son to continue to do. 


Basically, when he does something, well, something that we want him to do, it is followed by a positive affirmation or a positive consequence. And she also talked a little bit about the research that's been done to show that that's a more effective way of getting your child to continue to do the things that you want to do instead of negative consequences when he acts out and does the behavior you don't want him to do. 


Now, if you've never heard of what a positive consequence is, I didn't know what that term was either. So real quick, positive affirmation would be like verbally praising him when he does something that he wants to do. And a positive consequence would be like him getting a reward, which could be as little as, like, a high five or a hug. Or it could be something bigger, like a little bit of screen time or a dessert later or the opportunity to pick the next family game or family movie. 


And the reason why positive affirmation and positive consequence immediately following the behavior that we want to see in our son is the most effective way to get him to do more of it is because the affirmation and the positive consequence trigger dopamine to be released in his body, which feels good. And then his brain creates a neural pathway to the behavior that he just did and the good feelings, which in turn is going to make him want to do it even more because it feels good. 


Celebration is an act. 

Literally, celebration rewires your brain, or in this case, what we're talking about, the positive affirmation and the positive consequence rewire his brain to do more of it. Celebration is an act. It's something that you do, something you embody, that literally requires you to get out of your head and into your physical body so that your body releases all of the dopamine and the good feels, and it reinforces neural pathways in your brain that say, oh, well, that feels good, let's do it again. 


Going out to dinner, having a glass of wine, a massage. Again, those things are great and you deserve those things, but they are oftentimes too far removed from the success itself. And so your brain does not connect those good feelings with the things that you're celebrating. 


Now, it still might feel good to go out to dinner and to acknowledge your wins and successes. You're just not going to get that natural motivation that dopamine hit the momentum that's created through that, through the neural connection between the celebration and the success. 


This past weekend, I celebrated my 40th birthday, which if you've been listening to this podcast, you know I've already did a podcast where I talked about my turning 40. My birthday is actually in August, but I celebrated it this past weekend with three of my very dear and close friends by going on a girl's ski trip. Now, I have not skied in 20 years. They have not skied in over ten. We went into it with really low expectations, but it was a ton of fun. 


And I've actually been planning this trip for years now. I've been wanting to go skiing for probably the last five years or so, but my husband has had no desire to go. He is a very handsome six foot one man with a lot of shoulder girth and he likes to tell me that his body mass should never be going downhill fast. So if I was going to be going on a ski trip, I was going to have to go with my girlfriends and so that's what I did. So I've been planning it for several years and I decided I was going to be doing it for my 40th. 


I was planning with one of my girlfriends back in April or May and we decided to go to Tahoe, which is basically about a three hour drive from where I live and two of the friends had to fly in because they don't live locally and let's just say it was a little bit of an adventure. 


Right at the beginning of the trip, I told one of my friends to keep reminding me that this trip was a celebration of my 40th birthday. Because not only is it taking place five months after my birthday, but it also just felt really uncomfortable to think that these three amazing women were coming just for me, that they would literally take days off of work, travel in, pay their way for a ski trip just for me. And it was easier for me to think that they would more easily pay for that or come for that. 


But I know how much more meaningful the entire experience would be for me if I connected the celebration of the weekend to me if I let myself feel all the good feels. Not just from the actual vacation, which, of course, was fun and had a lot of good feels to it, but also the good feels that come from being loved by three amazing humans. 


Many times over the course of the weekend, I took a moment to reflect and breathe in the joy of the people and the experiences. And a couple of times I even screamed and I laughed with so much joy as I was heading down the mountain and I would sing songs at the top of my lungs and I just laughed till my sides hurt. 


You are worth celebrating.

And I remembered that I am worth celebrating. You are worth celebrating, too. Not just your accomplishments, not just the things that you do, but who you are. 


  • I celebrate your tenacity to go after the dream of having a career that you love and a family. 

  • I celebrate your resourcefulness as you have had to navigate new challenges almost daily in your life as a working mom. 

  • I celebrate your bravery as you advocate for yourself, as you tell your boss, your company, the people you work with, what it is you need to be successful as a working mom. 

  • I celebrate your determination to go after the life that you want to not settle. 

  • I celebrate you. 


Jump up, smile and dance!

And I want to celebrate with you right now to get those good feels in our bodies.. And so I want to celebrate with you by doing my absolute favorite celebratory action, which is dancing. I actually have a 30 second dance party button in my office that I hit as a way of practicing celebration and getting those good feels going. Right now, I'm just going to give you a few seconds to smile. Move those hips if you're standing, or your shoulders if you're driving and bring to mind something about yourself that you want to celebrate in this moment, it doesn't have to be a big deal. 


Something you love about yourself, something that you did some way you handled, something with finesse, something big, something little. Bring it to mind. Smile and just dance. You feel it so good. It's hard to like, not dance and smile at the same time. 


For me, just getting out of my head and into my body always feels so good, which is why it's one of my celebratory actions. In fact, it's my absolute favorite. So keep dancing. As I just share a few of these final things with you. 


Conclusion.

I had mentioned it earlier. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your takeaways from this podcast, the episodes, the nuggets of knowledge that have been most impactful to you. Would you mind sharing that with me, please? My email is rebecca@rebeccaolsoncoaching.com. You can simply send me an email with some of your thoughts and takeaways, or you can get on my mailing list where I will be sending out an email later this week to formally ask for your feedback and to ask for those memories and thoughts and those impactful moments. 


There's a link in my show notes on how to join my mailing list if you have not already done so. And of course, please, as I said earlier in the episode, rate and review this podcast, it means the world to me. It gets this out into the world. 


Let us celebrate the impact that this podcast has had. I couldn't have done it without you as listeners, as the ambitious working moms that you are. I love you all. Thank you so much.

Rebecca Olson