Celebrating Incremental Improvements

If you feel like you're never getting anywhere with your goals, try using a different metric

It's worth teaching kids the value of progress rather than focusing on getting a perfect score on a test, for example. It will serve them well in the future. Ground Picture/Shutterstock

If you ever feel like you’re struggling to meet your own expectations of yourself or reach your own goals, you may be too focused on the end result and not focused enough on the process. A simple way to feel much better about the direction you’re heading is to celebrate incremental improvements.

Reframe Your Progress

For example, imagine your goal is to pay off $10,000 in debt. You do the math and see that you can eliminate it in one year if you pay $834 each month. With some cuts in your budgeted expenses, you find that to be possible, and you send off your first payment. The next month, however, you experience some car trouble that requires a $500 repair. How discouraging! You couldn’t even make it through two payments of your plan.

You could look at this in two ways. You might feel so defeated that you deem paying off debt impossible and simply give up, going back to making only the minimum payments and thus living with the debt burden for a much longer period of time.

On the other hand, you might be glad that the car repair didn’t eat your entire budgeted debt payment and that you could still make progress toward your goal. You repair your car and still manage to send $334 to service your debt. This incremental improvement in month two is still one to be celebrated. You’ve made progress toward your goal and your trajectory is a positive one. Whether you make up the difference within the year or simply add a few weeks to your plan, you can still feel encouraged that you’re working responsibly toward your goal.

Setting goals is easy; predicting the ups and downs of life along the way is hard. If we’re too inflexible as we go about reaching our aims or establishing better habits, we may fail to recognize the positive trajectory we’re heading in, even if progress is slower or more imperfect than we originally envisioned.

When you train yourself to recognize and celebrate incremental improvements, you build into your life pride in your progress and the internal encouragement to keep going. Further, you allow yourself to enjoy the process rather than leaving the fleeting moment of final accomplishment to be your only point of celebration.

Celebrate Each Step

There are many ways to celebrate incremental improvements. You might maintain a journal consistently that allows you to look back in time and see how far you’ve come. You may devise charts and graphs to plot your overall progress toward a certain goal. You may institute a habit tracker in which you mark each instance of practicing a certain habit so that you can visually see improvement over time.

Celebrating incremental improvements is something worth teaching your children. The ability to continually move forward in life and dispose of any tendencies toward perfectionism will serve them well. Rather than focusing on not achieving the goal of scoring an “A” on a test, you might recognize how much of an improvement they made over the last grade. Rather than calling out the dishes that have been left on the counter, recognize the progress that they’ve been stacked neatly and cleared from the kitchen table.

Life is messy and imperfect and will continue to pose challenges in the face of your aims. Despite those challenges, remember to celebrate incremental improvements and forge ahead knowing you have what it takes to reach your goals—and to even enjoy the process of doing so.