How Celebrating Wins, Tracking Lessons Learned and Identifying Priorities

Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

On episode 6 of Elite Achievement, I share the details of one of the most sacred practices in my business…the Friday Ritual! If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you know how much I believe in the Friday Ritual. (If we are not connected on insta, let’s change that! You can follow me here.) Early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I knew I needed something to keep me focused on the positive.

I remember back to my first week on my own – I was excited, but also nervous. On that initial Tuesday; I was no-showed and canceled on and I remember an overwhelming amount of negativity starting to wash over me. That week was the week that I (without knowing) established the Friday Ritual! 

I wrapped up my week and thought, gosh, I really want to focus on what I did well this week instead of what went wrong. And on some of the critical lessons that I learned. And lastly, how to process all of my tasks and projects. 

I needed a way to systematically organize everything I was thinking about, so I could continue to move my business forward. With that, the Friday Ritual was born. 

Here are the three parts that make up the Friday Ritual. 

Number One – weekly wins. 

Number Two – lessons learned. 

Number Three – intentional priorities for the next week. 

The Power of Weekly Wins

It is critical that we celebrate our wins on this goal achievement journey. I think so often we are hard-wired to wait until we fully achieve a goal to celebrate. But the reality is that it can take a while to achieve a goal. We’re going to face setbacks along the way, and it might take us longer to achieve our goal than we expected. When we give ourselves permission to celebrate progress along the way and focus on the things we are doing well, we create a ton of momentum to keep moving forward.  

I remember very vividly working with a woman, who would share with me all the things that weren’t going well in her business every time we got together for a coaching conversation. She had a list of ideas she wanted to implement and things she wanted to change, and it dawned on me – wait a minute, we never celebrate the things you are doing right!

I started bringing weekly wins into my coaching conversations because focusing on how we’re not good enough and what we still need to get done feels super demotivating. I encourage my clients, my Instagram followers, my podcast community and you to identify your wins each and every week. It helps you make massive leaps towards your goals. And it reminds you that even if things aren’t exactly where you want them to be, you’re still making progress, bit by bit, step by step. 

When you consistently pursue progress, you’ll ultimately be more poised to achieve your goal. 

Tracking Lessons Learned

The second part of the Friday ritual is to identify the lessons you’ve learned. Anytime you do something new or take a risk – like growing a business, selling a product or offering a service, there are times when you don’t get it quite right. 

You might send an email like I did in my early days, marketing coaching services without a call to action. No surprise, I didn’t get a lot of responses. You might hesitantly ask for a referral and learn that you need to be more confident. You might say yes too much and bring on a lot of the wrong clients before you figure out who gives you energy and who you want to work with. These are all lessons that we learn along the way. 

By taking action, we start to learn the type of work that gives us energy. I needed a place to capture all of these lessons I was learning and a system in my business to make learning normal. I also wanted a way to make sure I didn’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So, at the end of every week, after I celebrate all the ways that I won, I make note of the lessons that I learned. Sometimes, they’re small lessons. Sometimes, they’re big lessons. Sometimes they’re lessons that shift the trajectory of my business!

Setting Intentional Priorities 

The final part of the Friday ritual is to identify priorities for the next week. One of the things that I learned very quickly in my entrepreneurial journey is that there is no end to the workday. There is always more you can be doing to grow your business, more ideas you can implement, more individuals you can contact, more content you can create. The list of things you can do is endless. 

I wanted a way to end my work week and go into my weekend, able to enjoy time with my family. I needed a way to pause the end of one week and create a plan of execution for the next. Since I’ve started my Friday Ritual and list out my priorities for the next week, I can truly enjoy my weekend. I’m also able to start my Monday, ready to rock and roll. I know exactly what I want to accomplish, and I have a plan in place. 

So, there you have it, the three parts of the Friday Ritual!

Number one, celebrate your wins. Number two, note any lessons you learned. And number three, identify your priorities for the next week. 

Here are a couple of nuances I’ve learned about the Friday Ritual that may help you integrate this practice into your weekly routine. 

I like to write everything down. I know we live in this age of technology, but I physically write down my Friday Ritual in a journal. 

I love writing things down because it helps me commit my thoughts and ideas to memory. I’m also creating this written record of my journey and my first year in business, which is super exciting. 

Keep it up, even if you don’t have a consistent work schedule. I work with some clients who don’t work on Fridays, and they’ve shared that they have better results if they do their Friday Ritual on Thursday before they go into their weekend. I call it a Friday Ritual and I tend to do mine on Fridays, but if you’re going to be out of the business, or you’re going to be traveling, engage in your ritual on a different day of the week. 

Take time (and use the following prompts) to build a Friday Ritual habit.

Sometimes identifying weekly wins is pretty obvious. But sometimes you might need a little coaching to identify these wins, especially if you are used to focusing on all the things that didn’t go right.  

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help:

• What can you celebrate this week? 
• What gave you energy this week? 
• What progress did you make towards your goals? 
• Where did you excel this week? 

When you think about the lessons you learned, both big and small, ask yourself:

• What do you need to improve next week? 
• What did you learn about yourself this week? 
• What did you learn about your processes this week? 
• Was there an area where you felt like you failed? What do you want to do differently the next time you’re in the same situation?

When you think about identifying your intentions for next week, don’t list things that will become another laundry list of to-dos. It’s going to be really hard to prioritize 20 or 30 tasks. You might start by listing all of those tasks, but then when you identify intentions, I recommend you start with a few. 

As you become better at executing and more consistent with following through on your commitments, you can increase the number of intentions you set per week. But I recommend three – one that is a follow up from the week that just ended. One that is related to a due date or a deadline for the next week. And one that is directly connected to your most meaningful goal. This might be a strategy or action that you need to take to make progress towards your goals. 

A lot of times, we lose sight of our goals and we don’t make as much progress as we desire because we spend too much time working reactively. By identifying your intentions, at the end of every week, it allows you to work proactively in the direction of your goals. 

Ask yourself:

• What is incredibly important to achieve next week? 
• What is something you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t dedicated the time to do it yet? 
• What will move you closer to your goals? 

Lastly, like anything, this is going to require consistency. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “I got it, Friday Ritual. Check.” Then you do it for one week, maybe two and don’t see any change or results. That’s ok – don’t give up. It requires consistency. It requires showing up, continually practicing, celebrating your wins, identifying your lessons and being intentional. 

After you do this for a couple of months, you might notice a change in your mindset, that you’re more willing to take a risk or that you feel a bit more organized when it comes to your work. These are changes that can happen as you’re more consistent with the Friday Ritual.

I cannot say enough positive things about the Friday Ritual. It is one practice that has totally changed the direction of my business. And it is allowing me to achieve goals and take risks in ways that I didn’t even know were possible at the start of the year.

So, until next time, goal achievers, celebrate those weekly wins, identify those lessons that you’ve learned and work intentionally in the direction of your goals!