I have been a San Francisco Giants fan since I first moved to the Bay Area in 1990. It’s been incredibly fun to watch Giants fever take over as people change their work schedules around games, and break out their orange shirts and Giants caps. For me, the best part of having the Giants in the World Series, though, is seeing everyone celebrate wildly when they get hits, score runs, and win games. The sports bars are filled with people laughing, jumping up and down, screaming at the top of their lungs, giving everyone around them high-fives, and hugging perfect strangers. It’s just fabulous!

Why is it that we don’t carry this we’re-in-this-together, we-can-do-it, woooo-hoooo!!, yaay-us!, we-rock! energy with us into our daily lives? What would life be like if we did?

Ever heard the term tall poppy syndrome? It’s a term used in Australia, the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand to describe the jealousy and animosity that people sometimes feel toward people who are really successful. Were you taught to avoid being a “tall poppy” so other people wouldn’t try to cut you down?

I have a brother with disabilities, and my parents taught me that it wasn’t considerate or okay for me to celebrate my successes because it might make my brother feel badly. I definitely want the best for my brother, but wasn’t it kind of twisted to believe that by talking about how excited I was that my basketball team won a game, or how happy I was that I got an A on an exam, I would make him feel badly about himself?

I often see that phenomenon show up in some form with my coaching clients as well. A woman who is having difficulty conceiving a child feels badly when she learns that a friend or colleague is pregnant. A man feels jealous of someone in another group who gets promoted because he has been unsuccessfully trying to secure his own promotion. The divorcée can’t seem to muster the ability to feel excited for a friend who announces his engagement.

Feelings like jealousy show up for one of two reasons:

1. You believe that when someone else has something you want it somehow means that you won’t get what you want
2. When you hear about someone else getting something that you want, you focus on what is missing or not okay about your life

So many of us seem to feel as though it isn’t okay for us to revel in our successes and kick up our heels and celebrate when life is going fabulously well — because we don’t want to come across as bragging, because we’re worried that if we get really excited about all the good stuff, we’ll somehow jinx ourselves and the other shoe will drop. What’s up with that??

I’d like to propose a different paradigm, and a different set of practices. The paradigm is this:

• Celebrating your own successes – large or small – is not only okay, it’s a good thing! It promotes your health and well-being.
• Celebrating other people’s successes will bring you closer to others, and also closer to experiencing successes yourself.

Here are a few practices that can help you move into living this new paradigm:

Go Ahead and Celebrate Your Successes Out Loud!

• Look for the things you are doing well and the things in your life that are great and exciting. Find ways to celebrate them out loud.
• Pay attention to how you feel when you give yourself permission to jump up and down with joy. It’s a pretty good feeling, isn’t it?
• When you do celebrate your successes out loud, notice who in your life gets excited and happy for you, and who tries to curtail your enthusiasm or cut you down.
• I’d recommend you try to spend more time with the people who celebrate your successes with you and less time with people who try to dampen them.

Celebrate the Successes of Those Around You

• When someone you know shares good news with you, if you feel excited and happy right away, go ahead and hoot and holler with them!
• If you don’t feel excited for them right away, take a moment to put yourself in their shoes. Imagine how it would feel to get that raise or promotion, or fall in love, or sell your business, or sign the contract they just told you about. Let yourself feel those feelings. Drink them in. Then do what comes naturally.

Most of all, make the choice to celebrate anything!

Don’t wait for some major life milestone to start celebrating. What do you have to celebrate right now? Can you come up with something/anything to celebrate? Can you invent something? How about the fact that the sun is out, or that you are able to read, or that you have access to a computer and the internet? Why not celebrate the fact that you are able to see a world full of colors, or that there are people in the world who love you, or that you are capable of loving others? Go ahead … let yourself really relish whatever it is. Soak it in. Get silly! Feel the delight of it all. Let go of whatever conditioning has been constraining you, and CELEBRATE!!