Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(49)

Sometimes you can even enlist others to help you celebrate. Jill, a Habiteer who wanted to incorporate a daily round of squats into her morning routine, was struggling with celebration. Because her daughter was always trying to imitate her, the little girl would try to do squats right alongside her mom. One day Jill decided to give Emma a high five when they were done. It felt so good that she did it the next day and the next. A celebration was born, one that worked well for that particular habit if little Emma was around.

It doesn’t matter whether your celebration is an explosive anthem or a subtle thumbs-up. What matters is that your celebration creates the feeling of Shine, the internal feeling of success.





POWER CELEBRATION


When you are creating your range of celebrations, I encourage you to include at least one that is extremely potent—what I call a Power Celebration. You want this option in your back pocket for habits that you need to wire in very quickly.

When I need to feel deep Shine, I think back to Mrs. Bondietti, my fourth-grade teacher in Fresno, California, and I imagine this amazing—and strict—teacher putting her hand on my shoulder and saying to me, “Good job!”

Boom.

This moves me. This makes me feel awesome. This creates a strong feeling of Shine.

I don’t overuse this celebration. I save it for when I need to create a habit quickly.





WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU CAN’T FEEL IT


The celebration piece of Tiny Habits can sometimes trip people up. They can’t get themselves to celebrate or they’ve tried out a number of celebrations and still feel like a big faker. In these cases, there may be a bigger issue than finding the right celebration. So let’s look a little deeper.

Back to Jill.

When Jill took the Tiny Habits course, she struggled with celebration. It wasn’t because she didn’t have a great way of spotlighting her success. She used to play competitive basketball in high school and would dramatically punch one fist in the air after every basket. (By the way, this celebration likely wired in the habit of shooting baskets accurately.)

The problem was that when she did her tried-and-true celebratory move now it felt silly. “Kind of embarrassing” is how she described it to her Tiny Habits coach. Why? What was the difference between doing her new squat habit and scoring a three-pointer? Jill eventually realized that she didn’t think she deserved the celebration. When she’d sunk a sweet shot, she felt like she’d earned that celebration. But wiping the counter? Come on. Anyone can do that. That doesn’t take any skill or effort or talent. It’s no big deal, right? It felt silly to Jill to celebrate such a small success.

You may be thinking the same thing: Why should I congratulate myself on two push-ups, or flossing one tooth?

The answer to this is threefold.





This is how the system of behavior works


Let’s say the TV in your living room is old. Sometimes it turns off for no reason. You smack it on the side and it turns back on. This doesn’t make sense to you, but it works every time. An engineer could probably tell you why this works, but it doesn’t matter because you got what you wanted—to finish watching your show. Behavior is also a system that has invisible components, but we know that dopamine is a key part of making habits stick. That’s how your brain works.





Celebration is a skill


Celebration might not feel natural to you, and that’s okay, but practicing this skill will help you to get comfortable. When I was learning to play the violin, my teacher showed me the proper way to hold the bow, but I resisted. I wanted to do it my way. She insisted that the only way for me to become proficient was to practice doing it the right way. I didn’t listen, and my progress stopped. I learned that she was right.

So tough-love BJ is here to tell you that you can resist learning to celebrate, but be aware that you’re choosing not to be as good as you could be at creating habits. For most people, the effort of learning to celebrate is a small price to pay for becoming a Habit Ninja.





You are doing something worthy of celebration


This is the most important answer because recognizing that you are doing something worthy of celebration will change so much for you. Your ability to ignore self-criticism and embrace feeling good about your successes will ripple out into your life in positive ways that go far beyond the Tiny Habits you create and celebrate.

As I tell all my students, it is not a small accomplishment to perform a new habit exactly as you designed it. I would argue that making a change is a pretty darn big deal no matter how small and incremental. Why wouldn’t that be something to celebrate?

If celebrating the small stuff is hard for you, the go-big-or-go-home mentality is probably sneaking up on you. Shut it down. It’s a trap. Celebrating a win—no matter how tiny—will quickly lead to more wins. Think about all those times you could have changed but didn’t, and here you are, two squats in—changing.



It also helps to find the deeper meaning in what you are doing. Tiny Habits can seem small on the surface, but if you dig deeper, you’ll find the real reason you wanted to do them in the first place, and you’ll discover that the value of the actions is definitely worth celebrating. Jill wanted to create a habit of wiping down the counter after breakfast. But she was having a hard time feeling Shine when she celebrated, which made the habit difficult to lock in. So she thought more about what the habit meant in the larger context of her life. Why was she actively trying to cultivate this habit? Why was it important?