The Power of Daily Wins

Celebrating daily wins is one of my favorite rituals for mental health and maintaining motivation.

Years ago, I would only celebrate a win if I had a personal best in lifting or in javelin. The thing is, those accomplishments are only possible from consistent actions adding up.

When you work on a long term project but fail to aknowledge your daily choices and actions as valid wins

it harms your mental state, resilience, and sense of self.

Humans live in 24 hour cycles, and only so much can be accomplished within a day. When you sleep, you integrate each day’s events and update your sense of self.

Depriving youself of a pat on the back hurts your motivation - and the likelihood of you achieving your goal. It creates a subconsicous message that you’re not doing enough. If you feel this daily, this leads to identifying as a person who is who works hard but doesn’t accomplish anything of signifcant worth.

Aknowleding daily wins allows you to identify as a person who makes consistent progress.

It’s exciting and motivating to notice your actions adding up: instead of feeling like you’re grinding through a plateau, you feel like you’re navigating an adventure and problem solving as you go!

Tips on how to sensitize yourself to daily wins:

• Choose maximum 3 priorites / goals to focus on, in different areas. More than that becomes too much to focus on. I move between enhancing my vocation, health, social, personal growth, education, and spiritual connection.

• Choose 1 daily win per priority, and write it down in the morning. Make it easy to accomplish so that it can create momentum for other potential wins. (example: write X-important email vs. clear inbox)

• Check off and write down additional wins at the end of the day or before bed. Include “good luck” where things just went your way!

• Use a month grid calendar so that you can see you wins adding up! On the days where you don’t win as much as you’d like, this visual is a relief because you see that it’s just a blip in your consistent progression

Startegies for Working Smart

Working diligently towards any goal and then achieving it, is empowering and motivating - and euphoric.

In university, I always showed up to practice and worked hard, but adjusting to the pace and atmosphere of varsity life was challenging. It was SO frustrating seing my performances crawl forward compared to their leaps and bounds in high school.

This is when I started looking at how what I did off the track, affected what I did on it.

In 2009, I committed to a few minimal lifestyle changes not only did I shatter my personal best, I broke the Canadian Javelin Record for the first time, and became obsessed with high-performance habits.

Working smart funnels and accelerates your effort into unprecedented growth and results. 

It isn’t about doing more, but doing differently. The goal is to enhance training quality and recovery speed, without a an overwhelming lifestyle adjustment.

I noticed that when people decide to increase their commitment to a goal, they either:

• Work even harder (intensity, hours, additional workouts), but then might get injured, or burnt out.

• Take on a slew of complicated, time-consuming, and intense habits - but then get overwhelmed, and drop them.

• Look into Want to try new high-performance habits, but don’t know where to begin.

Consider these concepts before taking on a new habit or routine:

Get out of the red, before you make the green greener

Start with the biggest limiting factors in your foundation.

If your diet is ok, but your sleep routine is atrocious - work on sleep first.

If you’re underslept, under hydrated, or living off of highly processed food, you’re likely reaping a fraction of the growth from the work you’re putting in. Start here.

Start with high-yield, short duration, accessible habits

Look for the biggest bang for your buck, in the shortest amount of time, with the greatest ease to accomplish. This way it builds your experience of “being someone who makes change happen” faster. Then you can expand on that habit, or add another one later.

For example: many people try to overhaul to their diet. My advice? Pick one action, and once it’s second nature, add another. Once you identify as someone with a decent set of eating habits, then you’ll feel equipped to take on more.

My favorite habit to start with: Eat protein and carbs within 45 minutes of working out: it keeps your muscles insulin sensitive hours longer, and allows them to absorb more carbs to refuel and repair. Read: less muscle soreness, recover more fully for the next workout, and build more muscle (also increasing metabolism).

Aim for better, not perfect

If you only did your post-practice stretching routine ⅗ times this week, you still improved your mobility. 60% of something is better than 100% of doing nothing.

Acknowledge and celebrate daily wins. Being consciously aware of your growth makes the journey exciting and inspiring.

Set the bar for success at the minimum effective dose (MED).

Show up consistently before show up intensely. Like getting in shape to handle harder workouts.

If you know the MED of a habit, then you know the specific pay off you’re getting from a small time investment.

For example: Meditation starts to be noticeably effective at 1 minute: blood pressure and heart rate drop, cortisol drops if it’s too high from stress, and blood flow in the brain moves away from the amygdala (fear/ego) and towards the prefrontal cortex (rational thinking - the most evolved part of your brain). Inducing this state allows you to make better decisions.

Eventually you may meditate longer, but you know there's a significant benefit after 1 minute.

Here’s a New Habit Checklist:

1. Is this the right place to invest my time and energy?

2. Is this a doable commitment, and am I satisfied with likely return on investment?

3. Am stuck on perfectionism, or celebrating growth?

4. Am I aware of the minimum effective dose?

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Want to individualize and fast track your growth? Message me to book an exploratory call for 1:1 coaching!