Last year, Olympic performance coach JF Menard spoke to our Roundtable tribe about the importance of stoking your confidence by recognizing and amplifying your small wins. I loved his analogy of thinking about your career like a campfire. Picture how you build a fire: big logs go onto the fire every once in a while to keep it stoked, but to keep the fire burning, you need kindling. These small twigs, thrown on regularly are what will keep the flames of your fire alive until you add in your next big log. Career big logs look like a raise, a promotion, or a change in scope.
These things don’t happen very often and, once they do, the momentary energy they give us will start wear off fairly quickly. To fan the flames of enthusiasm for our work, we need to constantly work on throwing in the twigs. Twigs are small wins that fuel our energy. They could be: winning the parking spot at work this morning, having the Barista spell your name right on the coffee cup, or getting excused from a meeting. When we take a small moment to acknowledge that small win, we’re actually building positive neural pathways in our brains that strengthen our resilience and confidence when the big career logs are few and far between.
What’s a small win that you can celebrate today?
