The jar of success

These days many more people work from home. Celebrating success might be therefore more difficult both for teams and individuals. Working from home might give the impression that our work is not visible enough. There are fewer meetings, less interaction, and fewer opportunities to recognize people and acknowledge yourself. So how we can celebrate our achievements? There is a simple tool for that, the jar of success.

A jar is a container made of glass or pottery, especially one used for storing food. The word food is crucial here since achievements and recognition feed self- esteem and motivates us to work. How we can use it? Simply, by writing on a posted achievements we have made every day or week. I think we are not realizing that in fact, on a daily basis, we do a huge amount of tasks and since we are overloaded we are lacking self-reflection on them.

We need to look at our achievement in the right way. Depending on our personal goal, an achievement can be, for example, finishing your workout, preparing a healthy breakfast or from a career point of view, learning a new skill, successfully completed the project, or explaining in a clear way the process to your new colleague. The idea is those little things completed on a daily basis lead to great things in the future. That's why it's good to collect them.

I love the idea of the jar of success. First of all, it’s very simple. You just need a container. Moreover, it’s physical. You can see it, you can touch it and it has also little papers inside. It's a visualization of our success. My advice would be to put it in a visible place, for example, at your desk so that it’s easily accessible. Then you can fill it in with new achievements on posted and you know it's there. Once necessary you can open it and read what you wrote some time ago.

Second of all, it’s a tool to inspect and adapt. The jar can serve us for our own retrospective (using the language of Scrum). A retrospective is a meeting that finishes a cycle in which the team agreed for a certain outcome. It's a meeting to see what went well or what went wrong and how we can improve it. In terms of our jar, it can have similar usage. We can set up a calendar reminder to check the notes that we wrote there with our achievements and reflect upon them.

What is more, I think this can be a great tool for managers to gather the team achievements and also individual achievements in the team. On the posted, you can simply write a name in the corner. We are overloaded with things, so after some time it’s easy to forget what particular person did but if we have the proof of it we can not only recognize somebody but also we can see in which areas people working in your team are good at and push them for further development. This kind of recognition will be more valuable since it will be honest and backed with facts. People recognized at work are putting more effort into executing tasks that they were asked to.

This tool can be used also for building your self-confidence. I’m a facilitator of the #IamRemarkable initiative, which helps to empower women and people coming from different countries to break the modesty norms. You are collecting your achievement writing them down and then they can serve you when you have a bad day, just open it and read out loud things you have already done. You want to ask for a promotion in the company or you are applying for new jobs. Treat checking your jar of success as an additional point of preparation. “It’s not bragging when it’s based on facts”.

In jars, we usually store all the goodies to open them when we are out of the season in winter and we want to taste delicious taste of summer in a for example form of strawberry jam. The same is with our success jar. First, we collect, and then we store precious achievements to open the jar when we need it the most. I hope each of us will make some supplies.

The idea of jar of succes I encountered in different places, so actually I don't know who was the inventor, first time I learned about it here.