Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(52)
I’m going to explain a way to do just that by using celebration without a Tiny Habit Recipe. You do this by celebrating in the course of your everyday life. It’s pretty simple. But it requires paying attention to the moments when we do the good stuff and reinforcing those good behaviors with celebration.
I’ll give you an example.
Sarah, a single mom raising two kids, had already used Tiny Habits to cultivate some habits that helped her work more efficiently and eat more healthy food.
After she put the kids to bed, one of two things usually happened. Either she fell asleep next to them in her work clothes and full makeup, or she made it to her bedroom and collapsed on her own bed—still in her work clothes and full makeup. Sometimes she’d manage to get undressed and throw her clothes on the chair in her bedroom, and sometimes she’d even brush her teeth and change into pajamas. But she almost never washed her face. This nagged at her—everyone knows you’re not supposed to go to bed with makeup on. People told her, “It will clog your pores! And give you wrinkles!”
Sarah had heard all that, but she had more pressing concerns, like keeping her kids fed and the lights on. She didn’t think too much about it until one night when the kids were with their grandparents and she had a surplus of energy. So she washed her face before bed. It was a little thing, but after she dried her face and looked in the mirror, she smiled. She felt that same sense of Shine that she had felt when she celebrated her other habits, so she invoked a different internal narrative—one that said, Good for you, Sarah. You washed your freaking face! You’re the kind of woman who takes care of herself. She took a moment to feel good about herself instead of bad.
Sarah didn’t design a Tiny Habit Recipe for washing her face, yet her celebration still helped wire in the habit of taking care of herself as a way to wrap up the day. That’s great. But Sarah’s story continues.
Now that she felt like someone who invests a bit of time for self-care, Sarah did more than wash her face. She started putting her clothes away at night instead of tossing them on the chair. She celebrated this and kept going, letting the effects of feeling good expand to other areas of her life. Notice how Sarah’s evening rituals got wired in because she took the opportunity one night to celebrate a behavior she wanted in her life. This simple beginning became a powerful way to change how she felt about herself.
My point is this: You can use celebration at any moment in your life. No need for a plan. No need to write down a Tiny Habit Recipe. Just notice any good behavior you do and celebrate it. If you can feel Shine, you are on your way to making that good behavior automatic. But more important, you’ve gained the ability to impact your emotional life for the better by finding opportunities to feel positive emotions instead of focusing on negative ones. Remember that you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.
Celebration Is the Bridge from Tiny Habits to Big Changes
Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.
When Linda first started doing Tiny Habits, she wrote off the celebration part of the method. Making things smaller and easier made sense to her pragmatic, analytical brain. But celebrating after every little thing? Not so much. That didn’t seem compelling or comfortable to her, so she carried on with the habits she had constructed. She had some successes and some failures, but she wasn’t seeing the big changes that others were talking about.
When Linda and I worked together to make Tiny Habits more transformative in her life, I kept seeing that she needed to embrace celebrations in her practice.
Feeling successful isn’t just a skill we use to lock in a habit—it’s also an antidote to the go-big-or-go-home culture and a new lens through which to see yourself.
To get herself over the celebration hump, Linda tried one of my favorite techniques for feeling positive emotions—the Celebration Blitz. I encourage everyone to do this if you need a score in the win column: Go to the messiest room in your house (or the worst corner of your office), set a timer for three minutes, and tidy up. After every errant paper you throw away, celebrate. After every dishtowel you fold and hang back up, celebrate. After every toy you toss back into its cubbyhole—you get the idea. Say, “Good for me!” and “Wow. That looks better.” And do a fist pump. Or whatever works for you. Celebrate each tiny success even if you don’t feel it authentically, because as soon as that timer goes off, I want you to stop and tune into what you are feeling.
I predict that your mood will be lighter and that you will have a noticeable feeling of Shine. You will be more optimistic about your day and your tasks ahead. You may be surprised at how quickly you’ve shifted your perspective. I guarantee that you will look around and feel a sense of success. You’ll see that you made your life better in just three minutes. (That’s worth repeating. You made your life better.) Not just because the room is tidier, but because you took three minutes to practice the skills of change by exploring the effects of tiny celebrations done quickly.
Linda trusted in the process enough to give it three minutes. And that was all it took. She became a self-proclaimed “celebration convert.” After a couple of months, she noticed that she was even celebrating things that weren’t habits. She’d sail through a green light on a morning when she most needed to, and scream, “Yessss!” in her empty car. As she folded the last bit of laundry, she’d say to herself, “Nice job, Linda!” These moments wouldn’t have warranted notice before. What she used to notice was all the annoying stuff—the red lights and the cashier who shuts down the lane she’d been waiting in for five minutes. But now the little wins popped out at her. And she started celebrating them. Linda told me that this wasn’t even a conscious choice. And that’s because her brain had learned that celebrating felt good. She had unwittingly made a habit of celebrating.