Attracting Abundance

The Law

Two Doors to Success

Happiness - XVIII

Small Wins

Who does not like to succeed. Success and Happiness are mutually causative, If you succeed you become happy, if you are happy you will succeed more often than not. To enter this mutually causative loop, I have found that it is best to start with small wins - small successes - those which do not take much time to mature to fruition. Each such small win sets in motion and deepens the formation of "success" neural pathways in the brain, thus paving the way for undertaking real blockbusters. 

Let me illustrate with a personal example. At the age of 60, it suddenly hit me that I had a poor body - full of flab and out of shape. I wanted a lean body with good endurance levels. I consulted some of my friends on the "how" and was discouraged by everyone. they advised me not to stress my body at this age. Anyhow, I decided to start with a morning walk. Since I am residing in a metro, I found that the best time to walk was early in the morning when the vehicular traffic is scarce. I decided to start my morning walk at 4.30 AM. That required me to get up at 4 AM; so I set the alarm for 4. In the first few days, getting up so early was really difficult. I persisted and started my walks. After a couple of months I decided to add light free hand exercises. After six months or so, I went for some weight exercises and other cardio exercises in Gym. My body resisted and made it known by aching at different places. That gave me the excuse for skipping the exercises and hugging my bed for longer time. I noticed that I felt good on the days I did my morning exercises and felt a little depressed when I did not. I had read that on exercising, some "feel good" chemicals like endorphine is released in the blood. I suspected that this was not the only or major cause for linking my exercises with feeling good. I have now come to understand that one of the most important cause for the feel good effect was my success in exercising - an objective which I had set for myself. When I met the objective, it gave my self-esteem a good boost and made me happy. It also gives me the confidence that I need to take up other tasks. 

I have also subsequently come to the conclusion that, the best way to complete a complex task and achieve the goals out of such tasks, is the break up the task into smaller steps and set up small wins. As  professionals we have been doing this quite often in our professions but  ignore this when in our personal development. In our personal lives, we normally fall into the trap of trying too much and giving up when we fail to reach our goals.

I have found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.

... Rosabeth Moss Kanter

"Of all things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.....every day progress - even a small win - can make all the difference in how they feel and perform". (Harvard Business review, Amabile et al, 2011 May). The small wins are a form of progress.

In the professional field, there is a common belief that high levels of performance are achievable when a fear psychosis is created. It has been scientifically proven that high levels of performance on a sustainable basis is possible when conditions are created for a person to feel happy sustainably. The HBR research article (referred above) lists out events which could create or shatter sense of well being or happiness.

When comparing the best and the worst days of the control group, the researches found that the "best day" was triggered when some progress was perceived and the "worst day" was triggered when a setback was perceived.

The presence of two triggers are often seen on the "best days" - help or support from  a person or a group and show of respect and words of encouragement. There is a reason behind exploring these issues in this post. Each of these issues could be used by you to create your small wins within your family, society and workplace. Support people, show respect, utter genuine words of encouragement and you have created a win for you. When an individual is in a "best day", his motivations levels are high and he enjoys his work.

The quality of perception also changes on how a person feels. On a good day, he sees constructive challenge in his work, he is more open to suggestions and ideas. On a difficult day the same challenges are perceived as intimidating and other's ides and suggestions are perceived as interference.

Do not fall in to the trap of evaluating progress as making a breakthrough and achievement of something spectacular. Surely such an achievement gives tremendous satisfaction and goo feelings but such are rare phenomena. The small wins are equally powerful in impacting the levels of our happiness and well being. Minor gains, in the desired direction, are capable of generating a big boost. One of my friend was working as a coder i,e. writing the code for a computer to follow and generate the necessary outputs. After almost  two weeks of coding, he merged his coding with one of his colleague's code who was working on a different part of the same software program. They broke their heads over the next three days as they could not locate the flaw in the code which prevented the programs to integrate properly. After a couple of days, I suddenly found my programmer friend trotting back to his house with his collar raised and hailing everybody on the street. He had solved the problem and he was on top of the world. In the next three days they fine tuned the program and the graphic displays to make the program a business benchmark. 

There is a catch here. as the small wins are powerful, so are the small setbacks powerful, if not more. Unfortunately, the human psychology is such that the impact of a negative experience has much more severely felt than the impact of a positive experience.

We will examine this in the next post.

Namaste

Prabir