A system to wrtie down your wins

When I talk about techniques to handle fear and to inspire confidence in my speech communication and sales presentation work, I cover the point of writing down wins and the good things that happen to you, and reviewing those wins.  I call these ‘Win Notes’.  Most participants in my programmes report they more often remember things that didn’t go well (for example, the project approval or promotion they didn’t get). They say they can often forget the things that have gone well.

That’s why it important to write down your wins – even small wins. And they can be about your work or about your life outside of work. For more than 15 years I’ve written down my wins in my diary (I still use a hard diary). I often review my wins from the current year’s diary and when I do review them, I ‘relive’ them. That is, I replay the event in my mind – what I felt, what I heard and what I saw. Doing this amplifies their impact.

Sample recent ‘Win Notes’ include: helping a business friend’s daughter with a job interview, a comment a client made about a result they were getting because of my consulting and one of my sons spontaneously saying, ‘I love you’.

This review of your wins will make you feel good and it will help you produce more wins. It can also help boost your confidence when you’re  having a negative feeling or when something negative happens. (The idea of replaying the event, as if you were watching a movie of the event, comes from Jack Canfield’s excellent Maximum Confidence CD programme.

I file successive, prior year Win Notes in a binder and review them periodically. In addition to the above benefits, from reviewing prior year win notes, for example from 1999, I remember ideas that I had forgotten that can be applied to make me more effective today.

The ‘how to’ for this post is to write down your wins, and regularly review and ‘relive’ them.