4.10 Why we should celebrate tiny silly wins

If you’re bored of reading people’s “I’m happy to announce…” posts on LinkedIn, where they only seem to celebrate big wins like “I got a new job” or “my paper’s published”, then this episode is for you. I’ll tell you why big wins aren’t as motivating as they could be, why we should look out for tiny wins, and why sometimes the sillier the win, the better! Join my tiny win revolution and share your silliest wins today! Post on LinkedIn or Instagram, tag me, and use the hashtag #tinywins, and I’ll pick my favourite post in November 2025 and give you a free 30 min coaching session! 

If you liked this episode, you should check out “why we should be more proud of ourselves and how to do it”. 

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now where I am in South Cambridge here. Autumn has hit. It is gray. I'm looking outta my patio windows over there. It's drizzly, it's gray. The clocks have already changed and so it is dark really early, and frankly, it's all feeling a bit murky now.

I'm not someone who gets massively affected by winter. I use it as an excuse to kind of cozy up and do more inside hobbies and things like that, but. It is tough to stay positive when it's a bit murky. Now, I know I've got listeners all over the world. Some of you might be struggling with other things. I have Australian clients who are moaning about the heat. That's legitimate too. All fair. But however you are feeling this November, I think we all need a little bit of a boost. A boost to kind of end this year strong so that we are not sort of just dripping into the end of the calendar year. And I [00:01:00] think that boost comes from celebrating wins.

Now you might listen to that and say, I don't have any wins. There are no wins. Or you might listen to that and say you've been spending too much time on LinkedIn, where everyone is happy to announce whatever it is they're happy to announce. Okay? That's not what we're talking about today. We are not gonna be talking about celebrating wins, like finishing your PhD or getting a paper accepted or getting a job.

These are all legitimate to celebrate, right? Let's do it. But that's not what we're talking about today. Today we are gonna be thinking about celebrating tiny wins, so tiny that they seem utterly inconsequential to anybody except you, but they feel like a win for you. And these are my favorite sorts of wins. So today we are gonna be thinking about why big wins aren't all there cracked up to be, why they're not sufficient to keep us motivated and engaged with our PhDs and even our lives, [00:02:00] frankly. And why celebrating Tiny Wins is a much. Much better idea.

I'm also gonna finish 'cause I'm feeling generous. I'm gonna finish with a bit of a challenge for you. I'm gonna tell you what I am gonna be trying to do throughout November of 2025. If you're listening to this live, and if you want to join me, you can enter a prize draw where you can win a one-on-one 30 minute coaching session with me completely for free. So make sure you listen to the end so you find out how to enter.

So, first of all, let's clear up what's wrong with celebrating big wins. And the first thing to say is. There's nothing wrong with celebrating big wins. If you have big things happen, I want you to celebrate them. In fact, in the membership, one of the things I do is really help people how to celebrate big wins.

That sounds really silly, but often we just sort of go, yay, that's nice, and don't feel quite as excited as we thought we would, and we don't really know how to go about celebrating it. So that's something I teach separately. Maybe I'll do a podcast on that at some point. But the problem with big wins [00:03:00] is firstly, they only happen from time to time.

Right? It's not like we're waking up every day going, Ooh, another papers accepted happy days. These things happen every few months at best, right? They can feel really few and far between and that means that they're not enough to kind of sustain us on a day-to-day basis.

Another issue with only celebrating big wins is that the joy of celebrating a big win never lasts as long as we think it's going to. So often people tell me, oh, I'll feel more confident once I've got my first publication. I'll feel better once I've got a full draft of my thesis. I'll feel better once I've got my PhD. But what actually happens is once we have achieved that thing, that thing we've been striving for, for ages, that thing that we've been telling ourselves will make everything feel better. What actually happens is we generally take it for granted pretty quickly. We often [00:04:00] discount it in some way. Oh, I was lucky. Oh, not many other people applied. Oh, it's a lower rank journal. Oh, my supervisor helped me loads all that stuff. Right? We discount it because it's somehow not in line with our perception of ourselves. So sometimes it's actually more comfortable to discount it than it is to accept, actually, maybe I am capable of doing things .

So we take it for granted. We often discount it, and because we are. Ambitious, interesting, curious people. We are usually pretty fixated on the next thing pretty quickly. In fact, there's a book, I'll link it in the show notes. There's a book called The Gap and the Gain, which I think I've talked about before, where it talks about how people are especially highly educated, highly intelligent people like you lot, tend to look at the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, much more often than the gain IE where they are now compared to where they used to be. And only [00:05:00] celebrating big wins is real reason for that. You'll find you're happy for a day or two, and then you are looking to the next thing.

Another reason why only celebrating big wins is not great is because. A big win often doesn't actually generate any momentum. A big win often comes with a bit of a crash afterwards. So if it's getting a paper published or something like that, often you are submitting your thesis is a big one. Often you've had this really big push of effort to get it done. You get it done, and then whilst you're celebrating, there is also this sort of energy and motivation crash afterwards where it's actually hard to start the next thing.

It is almost like, I love reading, right? And it's almost like when I read an amazing book, it always feels a bit at the end of like effort to start the next book. 'cause I loved that book and all I had to do was pick it up and just get straight back into it sort of thing. And starting, even just starting reading a new book feels like a bit of effort and I [00:06:00] often have a little bit of a lag after a good book, before I start the next one. Now, when it's stuff that you are actually creating, that's even more pronounced. And so these big wins are wonderful and we all want them, right? But they don't necessarily generate men momentum to do the next things.

So I am a massive fan instead of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny wins. And when I say tiny, I mean. Tiny, tiny, tiny. And in fact, when we do our quarterly review, so in the membership, we always do a planning session at the beginning of our three month period together and a review session at the end, one of the things that I encourage them to do is share the smallest wins they can think of. Things that feel unbelievably stupid, unbelievably tiny, and specific to you but somehow are really important to [00:07:00] you. An example that I always give when I'm getting people to do this is. Literally, every time I put my electric toothbrush on a charger, I'm like checking me out being a functioning adult. Look at that. Now, for those of you who just don't even think about putting an electric toothbrush on a charger, you just do it. You'll be like, uh, what? Why? Why would you celebrate that? I am somebody who has spent three, four months probably at times, brushing my teeth with a electric charger that is not charged. So it's essentially just a chunky manual toothbrush because every time I look at it, I go, oh, I should charge that.

Clean my teeth, put it down, don't charge it. Now that hasn't happened since I've been married 'cause my husband's an absolute superstar and if he notices it needs charging, he does it. But I still, if I clean my teeth and then notice the little red light and I go, I'm going charge it, I put it on the [00:08:00] charger. Look at me. I dunno why I break into Geri Halliwell there. That's not a reference that will resonate with many of you. Anybody old enough to remember? Look at me by Geri Halliwell. It's a pop classic. Anyway. Focus in Vikki Toothbrushes. That wasn't the point. Tiny, tiny wins is the point. Yours could be anything.

My husband loves Bin Day. This could make him sound very strange. I promise. He's adorable. He loves bin day. It's so he's, it's so satisfying. You just put the bin out and they take it away and you got an empty bin. It's so satisfying, and it sounds silly, but I bet the vast majority of you go, oh, gotta put the bin out. He goes, it's bin day. I'm gonna put the bin out and off he goes, right? These, celebrating these tiny wins, especially when they're really specific to you and the things that you find hard, they give you a boost way more than big wins.

When we decide that we are gonna celebrate [00:09:00] tiny wins, what it does is it makes us look for those tiny wins. And I wanna be really clear, this is not gratitude. So when we're talking about wins, we are not thinking about the things that we're so lucky to have in our lives. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of evidence that that's really useful too. But I want this to be things you've done specifically. So not, I'm so grateful my partner did this is, I'm so lucky to have a warm house or whatever. No, nor that, sir. The stuff that you've actually. Done. And when we decide we're gonna celebrate those things, we start noticing the tiny things that we do for ourselves. We're slightly more likely to do some of those. I charge my toothbrush much more regularly now 'cause I know I'm gonna have a little celebration when I do it. We're much more likely to repeat them and it reinforces the sense that you are someone who does these things, that you are someone who has tiny wins. So you are much more likely to go into the next thing with that energy as well. 

I'm gonna give you some more [00:10:00] examples. So over here I've got my chat document from. So in the sessions that we run in the membership, everyone's in the chat, chattering with each other, sharing their ideas and thoughts. So we had things like, I replied to an email I was anxious about without overthinking it.

Um. I asked people in my shared office to keep the chatter down a little bit, which I found really difficult. I'm proud, um, for following through. Um, somebody said I ordered a bunch of candles and stuff in advance the other day, said that I have birthday presents sorted for anyone whose birthday's coming up. Anybody who struggles like she and I do with remembering birthdays and so on. Genius. Love it.

Somebody else found the changing rooms in their new place of work so that they could cycle to work. Um, somebody called five utility providers in one day 'cause they were trying to sort out house stuff, which I think is amazing. Somebody celebrated spending more time with their cats. Somebody celebrated actually spending the full two minutes cleaning their teeth rather than cutting it off early. Lots of things and some of these things you'll be like, [00:11:00] well, I always clean my teeth for two minutes. That's fine. That one's not for you, but for other people, that's huge. And the point is we celebrate the ones that are relevant to us.

What I love when I do this with the members, is it also sort of normalizes finding small things hard because if we celebrate when we achieve small things, that kind of implicitly tells us that these aren't things that we should just be able to do as normal adults. It normalizes, the fact that actually some of these hard things are hard for people. Some of these tiny things are hard for people but they are worthy of our celebration, and we feel so much better when we do it.

It also makes the people around you feel better because suddenly they can celebrate their tiny things. People always sort of pause a little bit when I ask for tiny celebrations, but then once some come up in the chat, people start noticing quite how tiny they are. For you, it might be things like taking a bag to [00:12:00] the charity shop that has been in the boot of your car for six months. That'd be, I think that's a medium sized win. That's not even a tiny win, but things like that, right? It can be. I opened the document that I'm meant to be writing, that I've been putting off opening for the last two weeks. I opened it and looked to what I needed to do. It can be as simple as that. So this can be life stuff, this can be PhD stuff, whatever it is. It doesn't matter.

We are gonna be spending November and hopefully going forwards, celebrating our tiny, tiny wins. So my commitment to you, I have decided. So you may have noticed I don't do much on Instagram. I'm at the PhD life Coach, if you wanna follow me. I don't do loads. Um, I have a kind of fixed, um, like, what's it called, the posts. God, I sound like such a grownup. The posts the main really bit. I have like a fixed one of those, but I do use stories, right? So my commitment is that for the month of November, 2025, I am gonna try and post at least once a day, a [00:13:00] tiny win. I'm gonna say what the win is. I may say why it's important, who knows? And i'm gonna use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. I know hashtags is not really a thing now, but it makes it easy for me to find stuff. I'm also gonna post some posts on LinkedIn, sharing my tiny wins, asking for other people's tiny wins.

If you wanna join me in this tiny win revolution and have the potential to win a one-to-one coaching session with me, what I want you to do is either follow me on LinkedIn, look out for those posts, and share your tiny wins when I post or share in your own Instagram stories or reels, tag me and use the hashtag tiny PhD wins. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick my favorite tiny wins. Okay, so the way you are gonna stand out, is it by being something that is so tiny or just really cute that you've done it, or that really resonates with me because it's a tiny win that I would find [00:14:00] difficult too, or that is something that we wouldn't normally share, but that I can see is a big deal.

Anything like that? I am gonna pick my favorite and my favorite will get a one-to-one coaching session at the beginning of December at a time that works for you. We'll do 30 minutes on whatever PhD type topic you want.

I do have another sneaky reason for doing this, and I'm gonna be open about it and I'm gonna ask for your help. That is my podcast is pretty amazing. I think there is so much really, really good content on it. I keep hearing from you guys how useful you find the podcast, how much things have changed for you, how you know you're using it all already, da, da, da. I want it to get to more people. It's already getting to a lot of people.

I'm somewhere in the 125,000 download area now. I love that. Which is amazing and super exciting. But there are a lot more PhD students in the world. There are a lot more [00:15:00] academics in the world and I would love for more of them to find and listen to and find my podcast useful. So I'm partly doing this 'cause I want us all to share oh, tiny wins. 'cause I think it'll be super fun. I'm also doing it because I want people to find my podcast. So anything you can do that also helps share your favorite episodes or anything like that, please, please do. Tell your universities about it. Tell them to link to it on their virtual learning environment or whatever it might be. Right? It's all, the podcast stuff is all free. It will always be free. So please do help me share that. But let's share these tiny wins.

So make sure you're following me on Instagram at the PhD life coach, so that you will see my silly stories, and you can share yours. If you share them, I will repost them on my stories and everything. So let's have a tiny win revolution and start celebrating all the little things that actually make our days feel so much better and [00:16:00] get the stuff done that we want to do. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.