Today, I’m at the Advancing Healthcare Awards, as I’ve been shortlisted for an award from the Academy of Healthcare Science. It’s so lovely to be considered, especially as this nomination was linked to this blog, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been considered for something linked to Girlymicro. That obviously means an awful lot. In all honesty I’m highly unlikely to win, and that is nothing to do with modesty. If you don’t know the other people listed below, they are all pretty epic, and I think are much more aligned with the judging category.

The thing is for me, it’s not about the winning, it’s about sharing in the success of others, and that’s what I’m really looking forward to. Now, you may roll your eyes at me, and say that I am just saying that as everyone wants to win. I acknowledge that I won’t refuse the award if offered, but I can genuinely say that I’m OK to be the person that cheers loudly for others. I’m lucky enough to have won a number of awards in my time, and I’m even more fortunate to have been considered for many more.

At the start, I really did think it was about the winning, but over the years my appreciation of just being in the room has grown. Now, I consider the fact that someone has given their precious time to nominate me the real win. Time is the thing that no one has a lot of, and for someone to use it on something for me means the absolute world. This isn’t just true for awards, however, my point of view and how I celebrate has changed for most things, from grant writing and papers, to goals in my personal life. Doing my PhD, and writing my PhD thesis, really caused me to actively think about what works for me. So, I thought on a day like today I would share my thinking in case it helps others.

What success looks like feels different at different times

As I’ve said above, I haven’t always had the same attitude to marking progress and success as I have now. I think undertaking a PhD, and trying to make my way as a clinical academic, where so much of what happens results in failure, really caused me to actively think about how I maintained my motivation and marked progress. This is especially true for long terms goals, including those career milestones which occur over years rather than months, and where there are likely to be a lot of peaks and troughs along the way.

It’s important to also know that success feels different at different moments in life. There have certainly been times in recent years where the successes I’ve marked have not been about the big things. They haven’t been about winning large amounts of grant funding or awards. My successes have been about getting through the week, and to be honest, sometimes they have been about getting through the day. The pandemic hit me hard and I think I’m still in recovery mode. At these times, for me, it’s about finding and celebrating the small wins and setting myself small targets, in order to feel like I’m still moving forward.

If you only celebrate the successes you miss out

I wish I’d learn to change my attitude to success earlier. I feel like, in hindsight, I missed out on enjoying some of the journey of my career by being so target focused, and only appreciated the big mile stones. I’ve always been the same though. When I was at uni or doing my A-levels, I was so focused on getting through the exams, I never had the energy to go out and celebrate afterwards with everyone else. I would just go home and crash out. Making the shift to celebrating the steps along the way has made such a change to my perfectionism by making me appreciate the building blocks it takes to achieve. I also think it has made me a better mentor, supervisor and leader, as I now encourage others to do the same. Don’t just celebrate when you get a paper accepted. Celebrate when you have finished writing it and you are ready to submit. Celebrate getting a first draft of your thesis written, not just the day that you pass. Celebrate completing a section of your training portfolio, not just the day you get the completion certificate. Celebrate the fact that you have done the work, shown up and made the effort. Not just the outcome, about which you may have little control.

Acknowledge the work done

There are days when you will not achieve. That is just the reality. There will be days when you stare at the screen and manage to eek out 300 words, rather than finding your rhythm and getting down 2000 plus. To try to persuade yourself otherwise will just set you up for failure. It’s important to work out where the benchmark for celebration is, and also to match the reward to the benchmark. For me, some days that’s rewarding myself with a bubble bath if I finish a blog post early enough to make the time. Some days, it’s saying if I can make it through the next 30 minutes of meetings I’ll reward myself with a biscuit and a cup of tea. Other days, it will be that I can buy myself the dress I want if I can get back to running a continuous 5K. Not everything is worthy of a reward, in my world, I still have to set and meet a target. It’s just that target gets flexed these days based on the reality I find myself in. I still have to do the work, there is no free pass.

Marking progress in any form is worthwhile

The reason I now adjust my benchmarks is that I’ve learnt the value of movement, and not being paralysed by the size of the task ahead or the pressure I’ve placed upon myself. If you only celebrate the big moments, the end points, then in the times in-between it can be easy to feel like this movement doesn’t exist, as it’s harder to realise the progress you are making. This could just be me, but there is so much value to psychologically feeling like you have momentum. That even if the way up the hill is slow and painful, you are still getting closer to the summit. There’s a figure banded around that only 20% of grant submissions are successful. Most of the essays that get submitted will not get A’s, and for every successful interview candidate there will be multiple people that don’t get the job. If you don’t acknowledge and notice the progress it is easy to get overwhelmed by the failures. So mark progress where it happens so that you don’t just see the ‘no’s’.

There is always value in feeling seen

I’ve written before about all the reasons I think it is important to nominate others for awards. A lot of the reasons why you should nominate for awards also hold true for putting people forward for other opportunities, such as membership of committees, or inclusion on grants and papers. It can feel very lonely when you are carving out a path for yourself, especially if you are not following a well trodden path. Nominating and putting others forward can help them feel recognised, but the same is also true for you. Opening ourselves up to risk of failure, of not being chosen, or receiving feedback that may not be glowing can be hard. The thing is, this is how you build networks and get seen. This is how your name gets known. You may not get that opportunity, but it may be that the panel remember you for a future one where you may be more suited. This one comes back to celebrating the things that are in your power to control. You have control over the submission, over the putting yourself out there. You don’t have control over how your attempt lands (other than making sure you put in the work), or who you are competing against. So the success to celebrate here is the courage it took to take a chance, and step out of your comfort zone. Celebrate rolling the dice on yourself.

Feedback can be the greatest gift

I’ve received some pretty hard core feedback in my time, everything from ‘you contribute negligibly to infection prevention and control’ to ‘there does not appear to be anything that demonstrates this applicant has anything exceptional or above average for their future career trajectory’. I’ve had documents returned covered in red, comments about the fact that I can’t write, and grant rejections where I’m pretty sure they didn’t even open the form, despite the fact I’d sacrificed 6 months of my life to complete it. Needless to say, it is these comments I remember rather than any of the ones that said anything positive or nice about my submissions.

Now, I’m not saying that I celebrate the harsh ones right away, I permit myself a period of processing. This period of processing is easier and shorter if I’ve allowed myself to celebrate the work it took to get the submission in. After this period of processing/mourning, however, I make an active choice to go through and find the learning. I find the commentary that is based in fact, no matter how uncomfortable. The commentary that is actionable, and I reflect on how to make the change/improvement. I try to learn how to be better for next time. I then celebrate my engagement with the process. It may not be a party. It may be a ‘thank god that’s done’ drink, but I mark it. I mark the learning and I mark the fact that I had the courage to do the work that was hard/unpleasant. Celebration shouldn’t just be about joy. For me, it’s about acknowledgement of significant moments, and that includes failure as long as there’s learning.

Any journey worth taking is filled with moments of tantalising closeness

Traditionally, success is often seen as moving from point A to point B. In reality, in my experience, success is more like a series of concentric circles where improvement is cumulative, and often based on iterative improvement. Therefore any journey actually has a lot of near misses with success before success actually occurs. It’s actually important to notice when these near misses occur, rather than just discounting them as failures. These near misses represent huge steps of progress in themselves, and therefore deserve to be acknowledge as an important part of the journey. Not least because, by celebrating them, it can make it easier to take on and include the learning they provide, rather than discounting them as just another failure. The lens through which we see these moments can have a direct impact on how quickly we move from near miss to direct strike. Attitude is everything, and so make sure you embrace these as the opportunities they really are.

Sometimes the moments between successes can be protracted

There are things in life and professional practice that are the work of years, rather than weeks or months. Even if a project is over months, there can be moments when it is hard going. Writing a big report can feel soul destroying when you are on draft 54 and everyone has given conflicting feedback. Undertaking a professional portfolio can just be draining when you can’t get anyone to give you the time needed to sign off competencies or review sections. Then there are things like a PhD which run over years and are comprised of numerous stages, all of which are likely to rely on other people at various points, or to practice skills you are only just learning. All of this means the time from commencement to completion can be long, causing relying on internal motivation alone to be pretty hard going. By acknowledging that these bigger pieces of work are comprised of segments, and celebrating completion of these parts instead, can enable you to visualise progress made as well as to celebrate the learning gained along the way. It can also help you to regain momentum when you lose it.

The real learning occurs long before the end point

Talking about celebrating learning, this is an important point for me. It’s taken me a while to really stop and reflect on what ‘success’ really means. For a long time if you’d asked me I would have said it was the completion of something, but I’m not sure I would any more. The certificate at the end, or the gateway is symbolic of that completion, but for me now it’s more symbolic of the learning and change that occurred within me as part of the process. It’s the hard won changes, in either knowledge or outlook, that have been gained that are the real marker of change linked to the activity. This learning happens as you are involved in the process, and there is normally a fairly steep learning curve at the start. It therefore makes less and less sense to me to just celebrate at the end. Celebrating during the toughest moments, where the maximum learning is being gained, no matter where along the process that occurs, now makes the most sense. For me, success is getting to the point where I feel I do something better than I did before, be that decision making, leadership, or a practical skill, and so I celebrate when these breakthroughs occur, rather than relying entirely on an external evaluation of my progress.

Share the moments

This photo was taken at another Advancing Healthcare Awards lunch, many years ago. You can see all the smiling faces of people still involved in my life even now. The thing is, I didn’t win, but that is not what I remember about the day. I remember a glorious afternoon and evening with people that I admire and care about. I remember laughing so hard that one of us fell over. I know that we still talk about that day even now. I don’t even remember what I was nominated for, because it is the people I remember, not the lack of a win.

All of this is to say, it is the people in our lives that make life worth it. It is the people who pick us up and put us back together. It is the people that celebrate our successes and cheer us on. So why would I want to have less of that, and restrict my access to these moments. Share the joy, share the progress, and share the moments that matter in making us who we are. Life is short, so seize it.

All opinions in this blog are my own