Celebrate your wins with me!

One thing I am doing differently with myself at MKB Strategic Consulting Ltd is to practice what I coach my clients to do. The first is practicing celebrating the wins and the moments of alignment, purpose, and growth. I’m trying hard NOT to race through and onto the next thing. I've learned that racing through is a recipe for feeling never good enough. So, here goes.

One year ago, I started MKB Strategic Consulting Ltd.

As I reflect on my first year in business, I am looking at this growing business that stands on my 20+ years of facilitating and scaling up organizations and leaders. I added up the successes I’ve helped with and the companies I touched this year, and I did an exercise I often do with teams and leaders.

Here’s what I tallied in the past 12 months as successes:

- 10 start up companies supported in bringing their dream to reality

- 5 scale up companies helped to scale up

- 5 teams coached

- 19 leaders coached

- 5 strategic planning sessions designed and delivered

- 3 new educational programs designed and delivered

- 6 x 2+ day events to create decision making designed and delivered

- 12 large group workshops delivered

- 7 invited speaking engagements at conferences and private events

- $2 million + in funding raised for multiple charities

- 1 advanced certification completed

How did I feel?

This year, the tally felt different. I asked myself why, and here’s what I realized:

I do not have a single client I think is a jerk.

The work I did was incredibly aligned with the purpose I set for my business.

While I did have times when I was tired or overwhelmed, for the most part, I am pretty close to my vision of an ideal day. I’m at least shooting in the right direction.

The conclusion I drew from combining the achievements with the feelings I recalled?

This has been a year where even when it was hard, I was almost always at the center of my current Venn diagram definition of purpose filled work, delivering results, working with the right people, and the way I want “do” life.

Why am I sharing this?

I’ll be honest, the humble brag isn’t natural for me and I worry I might be jinxing things by sharing it. But here’s the thing, evaluating what you’ve done right, celebrating, and evaluating your feelings on the matter are critical skills as a leader. Why?

1) The leader who can’t recognize and sit with their own wins can’t genuinely recognize the wins of others. Nor can they grow from a win if they don’t ever “see” it. I think now I am finally embracing what my RVT used to do in practice. When either of us did something awesome or got something done well that used to be hard, she’d physically give herself a pat on the back, and she’d make me do the same for myself. We had this running joke that “if you can’t give yourself a pat on the back, who will?” And the older I get and the more leaders I work with, the more true it is. If YOU can’t even believe that you’ve done a good job or that you’re great at certain things, no amount of compliments or recognition will make a dent in your confidence or self-efficacy. And sadly, this almost always rubs off on the team you lead.

2) Measuring alignment with your vision for life is an important benchmark. If you go through life never watching a replay of a goal, or shooting at the goal with your eyes closed, you’ll get a lot fewer goals. Tallying up your wins is important to make the “right things” repeatable. AND, as we change and grow, our goal posts change a lot. My ideal day when I first graduated is much different than what I define as my ideal day now. If I didn’t re-examine what I defined as success, I’d be shooting and failing miserably at a goal I no longer wanted.

Celebrate with me: a special gift for you.

I’m incredibly grateful for you as a supporter of MKB Strategic Consulting. I bet if you go through your calendar for the year, you’ll be shocked at what you’ve achieved with your team, family, or organization. I have a 2 pack of exercises I use with teams and leaders all over North America to define and examine wins as a tool for team and leadership development, and I’ve put them into an easy to DIY format to use yourself or with your team.

Grab it now for free for this week only!

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