Self-direction

Celebrating success

Celebrating success and feeling like you are making progress against your goals, challenges and objectives helps to strengthen your commitment to managing yourself. It doesn’t need to be a big or demonstrative thing you do – it is about taking a short amount of time just to acknowledge that you did well at something before moving on to the ‘next thing’.

Academia involves so much failure on the road to success for every academic, however junior or senior. To be able to celebrate your own successes and those of others helps to balance out the struggle to get published or gain grant funding.

It can be easy for our failures to dominate our successes. Constantly focusing on what we haven’t achieved can be resilience draining. Keeping a list of successes, or adding them frequently to our CV, can be a way of keeping both failure and success in perspective.