Continuously Celebrate Success
Success is not meant to be the result we experience at the destination of a journey; It is a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs our mindset along the way.
For the past three weeks, I have shared each component of my personal formula for excellence: Mindset + Emotional Work x Discipline = Success
In week one I talked about how Mindset sets the Foundation for Excellence. How our mindset sets the intention behind every action we take. That shifting the intention behind my actions from fixing myself to being in alignment with my bigger why led to not only achieving weight loss, it led to internal peace and harmony through actions of self-love.
In the second week of the series, I broke down how Emotional Work unlocks the resistance that holds you back. By doing the hard emotional work around my addictive tendencies with dieting and then numbing out with food I was shown the blindspots that were keeping me stuck in my weight loss journey.
Finally, last week I talked about how Disciplined actions are actually acts of love. When you are disciplined you take consistent daily actions out of a commitment of love for yourself. These consistent disciplined actions are the multiplier that manifests personal change.
Consistently aligning my Mindset to my bigger why, doing the Emotional Work of feeling and healing what has come up along the way, and taking daily Disciplined actions of self-love have led to my weight loss Success.
This week I am going dive into what Success really is.
But first, let me tell you what success is not…
Success is NOT about the result at the destination of a journey.
So if success is not about the result at the end what is it about then?
Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.
As I have progressed on my weight loss journey a critical element to sustaining my momentum and reenergizing my mindset has been celebrating my success.
It seems like universal synchronicity that this week, as write this article, I am hitting a major weight loss milestone of success.
I have lost ONE HUNDRED POUNDS! And this article is a form of celebration!!!
Throughout my journey celebrating my success and challenges along the way has been critical to sustaining my momentum. I have discovered that there are four critical elements of success.
It’s Not About the Destination
Celebrating Wins Sustains Motivation
Sharing with Community is a Must
Failures and Challenges are Where Growth Happens
#1 - It’s Not About the Destination
In my past weight loss endeavors I was always focused on attaining an outcome to fix what I viewed as wrong with me. My celebration of success was reserved for meeting the goal. Delaying my celebration of success had everything to do with aligning the intent of my weight loss efforts with achieving an agenda. An agenda that would have me feel good “someday” when I reached my goal.
Shifting my Mindset from fixing myself to aligning with my bigger why meant that the destination was no longer relevant. My focus was no longer on the distant future but right now in the present moment. Success was no longer about attaining a goal but cultivating a way of being.
When we fixate on a goal or outcome it becomes our prison. We outsource happiness and vitality to the future.
Freedom is found in the present moment, in choice.
I’m choosing actions not to attain some future outcome. I am choosing actions because they cultivate a way of being in the present moment.
If I’m choosing my actions to cultivate a way of being right now in the present moment, then inherently I can choose to celebrate my success at any given time.
Success is no longer something I’m attaining someday, it’s something I’m continuously creating right now.
#2 - Celebrating Wins Sustains Motivation
Celebrating my weight loss wins helped me to tie the actions I have been taking to be healthy back into my bigger why. It has fueled my momentum, which has kept me going.
Each time I celebrated a small win I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment. I felt the peace, love, and harmony that was the real objective of my weight loss journey.
Continuously connecting to the love behind my disciplined actions began to create its own motivation. Like an avalanche that gathers energy as it moves down the mountain, my discipline began to create its own force...
Celebrating my success daily fueled this sustaining force of disciplined energy.
My celebration of success took shape by creating daily rituals of celebrating the love behind my actions.
For example, though out my weight loss journey every night I have written myself a love note and left it on the fridge. I have done this for two reasons.
First, to encourage and support myself in moments of weakness, when I wanted a midnight snack. Second, and most importantly, to celebrate me for the win of the day.
I also made a daily ritual of every morning acknowledging that “I did it, I made it through another night” by taking the note from the night before and moving it from the sticky notepad to the top of the fridge.
As I continuously celebrated the small wins I started noticing that I didn’t feel the "have to's" anymore, I started to experience the "get to's"... I began to notice that each day discipline began to feel natural.
#3 - Sharing with Community is a Must
Sharing my weight loss wins has kept me accountable to my commitments and connected to my purpose.
Every time I share my journey I am called into action to continue to be disciplined. If I share my journey and I am not continuing to do what I need to do to be healthy then I am out of integrity with my word...
Sharing my journey has become an action that calls me to be in integrity with my commitments.
Every time I hit submit on my Instagram videos or share a link to a post on Substack about my weight loss journey I alter the trajectory of that day and week. I know without a doubt I am going to get up and go to the gym; I am going to hit my fasts and do my breath work.
All the noise of the excuses of why it would be okay to skip today become just that, noise, they lose their pull on me.
Additionally, if posting my writing and sharing videos of my journey on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram inspires just one person, including myself, then I am living my purpose.
Sharing my writing and videos is an action that calls me to be in integrity with my purpose…
Finally, sharing my wins directly with the people in my life keeps them connected to and invested in my journey. They are there for me when I need support because I have made them a part of my experience. They become the tribe that holds me accountable for my values.
I also get the opportunity to inspire them to take action for themselves.
#4- Failures and Challenges are Where Growth Happens
When we talk about celebrating success it’s easy to just focus on the wins.
In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.
When we have an opened-minded Mindset our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we needed to learn to grow.
Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we venture toward becoming more integrated human beings.
As I reflect back on my weight loss journey I can see that the most meaningful moments were the moments of failure and challenge. Specifically the moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.
Each and every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.
I’ll close today with a win I shared with the Men of the Alliance at the milestone of fifty pounds lost. It was a moment of not only celebrating a win but letting myself celebrate learning the necessary lessons of my weight loss journey. It was also a moment I experienced how necessary community and accountability were for success in my journey.
The first 50 pounds
November 4th, 2022
50lbs lost! I’m down from 316 pounds to this morning I weighed in at 266 lbs!!!
This image captures the essence of my journey with this…
Peeling back the layers of weight I put between the real me and the world… A wall to protect me from it [the world] ~ or maybe to protect it [the world] from me???
As I’ve dug into this work of healing the part of me that numbs with food, the universe has given me challenges and conflicts to test me.
Somehow I managed to take on my health and fitness at the same time I’m addressing a long-standing conflict.
The result was I was forced to feel things I didn’t want to feel. Many times the heat of the conflict happened on a fasting day. Forcing me to sit in the emotions without food to numb out with…
A couple of times the conflict dragged across multiple days, meaning it started on a fasting day and stretched into the day I was supposed to eat. This forced me to face another part, my controlling part, as I became aware of the fear of letting go of the fast during emotional turmoil and “losing control” with food…
Finally, I’m finding two critical tools I’m building to support me in this journey ~ Rituals and Tribe…
One day a few weeks ago I had just completed my morning ritual of going to the fridge and honoring that I made it through another night by pulling my nightly love note off the notepad on my fridge and placing it above the pad under a magnet.
Each night before bed I remind myself that the win of the night and day before is in the past by crumpling up that note from the day before and throwing it away. Then I write the next love note.
This particular morning it struck me that last night was a really big win. I wanted to cave in so badly, but I didn’t, something in me was stronger than that.
Then I saw the fear… “What if the fire dies down.”
In pure synchronicity, right at that moment I received a text from another man in the Man Talks Alliance asking me to be an accountability partner in an area he was working on.
That’s when I realized that’s where accountability comes in…
I committed to reaching out to him if ever the urge to cave in on my commitment to not snacking comes up. To reach out for support if life's emotions become overwhelming and check in regularly on how it’s going.
What I found interesting was that my weight loss successes had been found in cultivating rituals of self-love…
The timing of his text seemed to be synchronous for us both as if the next step before us was integrating tribe.
Creating tribe within our personal rituals of self-love…