In our last few +1s, we talked about the fact that CELEBRATION might just be the next big thing.

Mindfulness? Science says: It’s powerful.

Gratitude? Science says: It’s powerful.

Celebration? BJ Fogg tells us that soon science will appreciate JUST how powerful it is and that it’ll take its rightful place on the pantheon of simple practices with huge gains.

Recall: “If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.”

He even gives us a new word to describe that feeling of celebrating our success.

He tells us: “What might surprise you is this: In English we do not have a perfect word to describe the positive feeling we get from experiencing success. I’ve read piles of scientific literature on related topics, and I’ve done my own research in this area, and I am convinced that we are lacking a good word. (The closest label is ‘authentic pride,’ but that’s not an exact match.) So, with the encouragement of three of the world’s experts on human emotion, I decided to create a new word for this feeling of success.

Ready? I call this feeling Shine.

You know this feeling already: You feel Shine when you ace an exam. You feel Shine when you give a great presentation and people clap at the end. You feel Shine when you smell something delicious that you cooked for the first time.

I believe my celebration technique is a breakthrough in habit formation. I hope you can see why. By skillfully celebrating, you create a feeling of Shine, which in turn causes your brain to encode the new habit.

If I could teach you Tiny Habits in person, I would start our training by focusing on celebrations. I would help you find celebrations that are natural and effective for you. We would practice them together and it would be a blast. I would train you in celebrations before teaching you about the Fogg Behavior Model, or the power of simplicity, or Anchors, or recipes for Tiny Habits. Celebrations would be first—because it’s the most important skill for creating habits.”

That’s from a chapter called “Emotions Create Habits” in which we learn how to Celebrate.

Let’s review the how to…

When do we celebrate? Immediately after we do the tiny habit.

How do we celebrate? With joyful intensity.

Enter: A feeling we all know captured in a new word: SHINE!

One more time: RIGHT after we do the TINY thing we said we’d do, we give ourselves a little fist pump and “YES!” or whatever it is you naturally do when you do something awesome.

(Take a moment and think about what you do when something awesome happens. Then, DO THAT as you install your Tiny Habit!!)

One more time: When we do that IMMEDIATELY after taking action (not in a month after a bunch of little wins lead to a big win but RIGHT AFTER WE DO IT), we hack our brains to give us a little burst of dopamine that activates our reward centers and makes our habits much more likely to stick (and stick at a much faster velocity).

So, there ya go.

That’s Today’s +1.

Let’s Celebrate the tiny things and get our Shine on.

T.O.D.A.Y!!!

Shine #1209

The Result of Skillfully Celebrating our Successes

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