Feeling accomplished is a vital part of feeling good about yourself, and being proud of what you do. It’s the essence of why we do things and what we gain from our hard work. As fulfilling and great that feeling of accomplishment is, feeling accomplished can be just as enormous, in a negative way.
More often than not you end your day thinking all these hours you worked and yet you go home with the feeling that things were left incomplete. It’s a pretty horrible feeling. And that’s just the effect of one day. If you leave work feeling unfinished 3 out of 5 days in a week, it’ll really weigh heavily on you. It’ll break down your confidence, morale, and motivation. Pretty soon you’ll wrap yourself around that miserable feeling of hopelessness and start belittling and demeaning your abilities. It’s a sad place to be in.
So how you do you end the day feeling accomplished, confident, and brimming with excitement for what’s to come tomorrow? Try these 4 ways to help you get by every day.
- Celebrate Little Milestones
The unfortunate resultant of feeling unaccomplished is that you’ll question everything you did today. The more you think about not meeting your goals you’ll feel you wasted your time, ran around in circles, and just didn’t get things done. But you know that’s not true. You did get some things done. But you know that’s not true. You did get some things done. It wasn’t as if you sat at your desk twiddling your thumbs, sipping tea, and swatting flies. No you did get some work in. You were productive, even if it wasn’t up to your standard or potential.
Rather than feeling hopelessly unfinished, look back at what you did do. Did you reach 80% of a task? Did you complete 45% of a report? Great! You managed to get this far, right? It wasn’t all at zero. So, grab whatever little victory you can. Though these aren’t completed tasks or projects, there was progress and steps taken forward. Celebrate this fact and build up from here. Celebrating little milestones will help boost your morale and confidence. Do this frequently andyou’ll soon find yourself reaching 100% completion (most days).
- It’s Not About Them, It’s About You
Feeling accomplished is really a subjective and relative term. It means different things to different people and there’s no one way to measure it or weigh it. Feeling fulfilled is so closely tied to our needs, desires, ambitions, and drivers that it becomes a personal feat. It seldom is equal for everyone. One person’s feeling of accomplishment could very easily be someone else’s walk in the park or something they checked off years ago.
Once you understand that your achievements aren’t comparable to anyone else’s you’ll realize that there’s no reason for you to benchmark your personal success with someone else’s. And with this realization you’ll stop beating yourself down for not being able to complete things. You may not have been able to do what others did, but you did something that no one else could do – you accomplished YOUR goals.
- Set a Theme of the Day
You know how there’s an overarching resolution that we all come up with for the year? It sets a theme for us to aspire for, drives us in a particular direction and it keeps us improving ourselves. In some ways it’s our purpose of the year. Resolutions are great. However, they’re often too broad and require the course of the year to complete and reach the point of feeling fulfilled.
So what happens during the year even as you strive for that resolution? You end up feeling unaccomplished on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. So let’s break it down by setting a theme of the day for yourself. These could be simple, easy to achieve and even repeated. Things like “make 5 people smile today”, “suggest two new initiatives this week”. These are the little “feel-good” themes that can help you get a quick burst of feeling accomplished. Think of it as a caffeine hit from a shot of expresso!
- Appreciate and Value Yourself
Quite often when we’ve half done our work, we beat ourselves with guilt, feeling inadequate and sometimes even doubt our capabilities. We dwell too long on what we didn’t do, how we could have done things better, recounting our mistakes and simply overanalyzing all that’s negative. Honestly, you’ll find yourself pondering on the negatives far [sic] much longer than is healthy for you. And that’s precisely the trap you don’t want to fall into.
Stop here and think about yourself. Who you are, why you’re here, what it took for you to reach this far in life and all the awesome strengths and capabilities you have. Yes, when you’re feeling unaccomplished, it’s time to stop everything and appreciate and value yourself. You are capable, why you have the job that you live and enjoy doing. You can do it, you’re still employed and valued as a team member. Now that you’ve pumped yourself up, divert your focus on what you need to do to start feeling accomplished again, and get cracking on them!
© Paul Keijzer. All Rights Reserved.