Celebrating Success

Catching people doing it right and ensuring that successes are recognised and reinforced.

People get things right far more often than they get things wrong. Undoubtedly mistakes provide splendid opportunities for learning, (see Analysing mistakes), but so do successes. It is understandable why mistakes tend to receive more attention than successes; but you can easily redress the balance by 'catching people doing it right' and reinforcing success.

'One success leads to another' goes the old adage, but not if successes go unrecognised and the norm becomes the avoidance of mistakes. It is surprisingly easy for standards to drop and for people to assume that success means being cautious and careful and keeping out of trouble.

Even when people are successful, they often do not know why. It just seems like a fortuitous piece of good fortune. People who attribute success to luck are not learning the lesson Thomas Jefferson clearly had when he said 'I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more of it I have'. More often than not people do not know why something they have done led to a successful outcome. The trick is to learn from successes so that they can be repeated and specific lessons learned from one success can be generalised to different circumstances.

There is plenty of learning mileage in celebrating successes. For example, people discover that:

• emphasising the positive is a far more powerful motivator than emphasizing the negative
• no news, ie if no-one says anything then it must have been all right, is not good news
• you win some, you lose some, but either way it's OK to 'go for it'
• success is rewarded with the best reward of all: recognition
• things are successful for a combination of reasons rather than there being one single factor
• once you know the reasons for a success you can plan future successes even though the circumstances will never be identical
• it isn't healthy to be inappropriately modest and 'hide your light under a bushel'
• celebrating someone else's success gives vicarious pleasure from which everyone benefits.

A fair list of potential lessons from the delightful practice of celebrating successes. Make it a habit to find a success to celebrate, say, once a week and adopt the bottom line practice of ensuring that the ratio of recognising successes to recognising mistakes is at least 2 : 1.