Here is something I have noticed about myself, and I am not proud of it.
Every time I hit a goal, the goalpost moves.
I set the goal. I hit the goal. And instead of stopping for even one minute, my brain immediately says okay, what is next. No pause. No dinner out. No moment of standing there going, huh, I actually did that.
I have thought about why, and I think I finally understand it. I do not celebrate hitting goals because somewhere in my head, hitting them was never optional. It was required. It was the bare minimum. And you do not throw a party for doing the thing you were supposed to do.
That sounds reasonable when I say it out loud. It is also completely backwards, and it is a fast road to burnout.
The part nobody warns you about
When you never stop to acknowledge what you have done, your brain loses the ability to register progress at all. Every win becomes a baseline. Every new goal starts from zero. And after a few years of that, you can be running a business you would not have believed was possible five years ago and still feel, on a random Tuesday, like you are failing.
I know that is true because I live there.
I have hit goals in this business that I would not have written down in the beginning because they would have felt ridiculous. Not only did I hit them, I passed them. And I still have days where I feel like I am not doing anything.
I am not telling you that to be humble about it. I am telling you because I think a lot of you are in the same place and you assume it means something is wrong with you. It does not. It means you never built the habit of stopping.
What this week actually looked like
Since I am asking you to be honest with yourself, I will go first.
A technician quit this morning with no notice. It caught us off guard. We are doing an exit interview because we genuinely want to understand what happened, and because we think highly of this person and want good things for them.
But it still rocks you. You go straight to the questions. What could we have done differently? What could my team have done differently? Where was I lacking as a leader that this felt like the only option?
Maybe the answer is nothing. Maybe they are moving on and that is the whole story. Maybe there are circumstances we do not know about. It does not matter. You still sit with it.
And before that, we spent most of the summer pleasantly overstaffed. That is a good problem on paper. In practice it was stressful, because in our world, if your people are not working, they are not getting paid. We grew fast and hired ahead, and the marketing needed time to catch up. So every single day we were working the schedule to make sure our people were taken care of.
Our schedules are full again now, which is a great place to be. Which means it is time to ramp hiring back up. It is a hamster wheel. It does not stop being a hamster wheel because you got good at running.
That is the same business that hit the goals I was talking about. Both things are true at once.
Measure the gain, not the gap
Here is the thing I keep coming back to.
Most of us measure ourselves against where we want to be. The gap. And the gap is infinite by design, because you keep moving it.
The measurement that actually tells you something is the other direction. Where were you six months ago? A year ago? Two years ago?
Not where did you want to be by now. Where were you actually standing.
I would bet almost anything that you are further along than you were. Maybe not in the way you planned. Maybe the business is not where you wanted it, but you are a better leader than you were. You handle a hard conversation better. You do not panic at things that used to wreck your whole week.
That counts. That is the gain. Nobody hands you a report on it, so you have to go looking for it yourself.
So celebrate something
I am genuinely bad at this part, which is why I am asking rather than telling.
It does not have to be big. A dinner. A day at the beach. Something you have been putting off buying. A vacation, if you are the kind of person who actually takes them, which I am working on.
The size is not the point. The acknowledgment is. You have to let your own brain register that the thing happened, or you will spend a decade hitting goals and feeling like you never did anything.
And if you did not hit the goal this time, that is allowed too. Look at the gain anyway. It is still there.
So tell me, because I could use the ideas: how do you celebrate a win? And what is the goal you are chasing right now?
Jen