#432 The Power of Small Wins: Why Every Tiny Victory Matters

Hey, friend! Today, we’re talking about something that has been on my heart a lot lately- the power of small wins and why they actually matter more than we realize.

We live in a world that constantly celebrates the big, flashy milestones- the promotions, the six-figure businesses, the book deals, the dream homes. And those things are great! But what about the small victories? The little moments of progress that quietly shape our lives?

In today’s episode, I’m sharing why shifting our mindset to celebrate small wins- whether it’s folding laundry the same day it's washed (yes, that counts!), drinking more water, or just showing up when it feels hard- can truly transform how we approach life, business, faith, and our relationships. Plus, I’ll share some practical ways to start recognizing and celebrating these moments in everyday life.

So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re falling behind because your wins don’t seem big enough- this episode is for you. Let’s reframe our thinking, embrace progress over perfection, and start finding joy in the little things!

1:52 – Reframing “Success” 

•    Moving away from hustle culture 
•    Celebrating incremental progress
•    The power of small wins 
•    How hustle culture can overshadow small victories  

9:23 – Practical Tips For Celebrating Small Wins

•    Keeping a gratitude or prayer journal 
•    Writing down one accomplishment a day
•    Texting a friend

11:27 – Takeaways 

•    Life is made up of tiny moments 
•    Examples of incremental progress 
•    Taking a moment to share a tiny win 

FEATURED QUOTES

“Things like social media and that hustle culture I was talking about, all of that has fed into why we don't tend to celebrate the tiny victories, the tiny steps, because we are constantly bombarded with everyone else's big wins.”

“Sometimes we have to remember that when we get to the end of the day and we have done the best that we can with what we've been given… that is a win.”

“Incremental progress, day-by-day matters, because here is the deal- our lives are made up of the tiny moments. Yes, the big milestones are great- the marriages and the having kids, the big career wins- they are wonderful, but they don't happen overnight.”

 

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About Can I Laugh On Your Shoulder?

Can I Laugh On Your Shoulder? Podcast is a weekly podcast where we have honest conversations about faith, business, life, and everything in between. Hosted by speaker and author, Molly Stillman, her mission is to make you laugh, cry, and laugh till you cry. She wants to create a community of people who are unafraid to be themselves and have honest conversations about the things that matter most. Her vision is to create a safe space for people to explore their faith and share their stories and gifts with the world.   

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
This is Can I Laugh on Your Shoulder.
Hey, welcome to Can I Laugh on Your Shoulder.
I'm Molly Stillman, and this is a podcast where each week I get to sit down with adifferent guest, and we have raw, funny, often brutally honest conversations about the
things that matter most.
And that's faith and business and life and everything in between, where we each learn howto be good stewards of the things we've been entrusted with.

(00:26):
And that includes our stories.
and how we can use those things to serve others and leave our families, our friendships,and our communities a little better than we found them.
I'm going to create a space where you are unafraid to ask the questions that the rest ofus are thinking, that you are unafraid to be yourself, that you are unafraid to use your
story to bless others and to serve others.

(00:48):
I am so grateful for you to join me this week for another episode of the Can I Laugh onYour Shoulder podcast.
I have been doing the show for eight and a half years.
are, you know, episode 432 or something like that.
So I've been around a minute.

(01:09):
I've interviewed quite literally hundreds of some of the most incredible people that I'vebeen able to have conversations with over the years.
And you know, the, the show has grown with me and it has been a labor of love.
And as you know, you know, usually I have a guest on, this week I actually wanted to dosomething different.

(01:32):
I know that some weeks on usually on like kind of the tens, I go without a guest and I dosomething solo, but as many of you have been probably who've been following the show for a
few years now, you know that sometimes I just like to switch it up.
And so this week's episode is actually called the power of small wins and why every

(01:56):
tiny victory matters.
And so in the short time that we're together today, I just want to talk to you about thepower of small wins and again why every tiny victory matters.
And the reason I'm doing this is because this is actually a conversation that my husbandand I have had pretty recently.

(02:16):
I've had this conversation with a couple of close friends recently and it's just somethingthat almost feels like
we're in this era as a culture, as a society where we're sort of on the other side ofhustle culture.

(02:39):
So if you know what I mean is I feel like in like the early 2000s, the early 2010s, wewere really in this hustle culture, the four hour work week, the hashtag hustle in every
day I'm hustling.
culture where it was like, we just have to be overnight successes.
Everything has to happen tomorrow.

(02:59):
It's like these get rich quick schemes.
And yes, we do still see some of that, but I think I've noticed just anecdotally that Ibelieve we are moving as a culture away from that because we're realizing that that hustle
culture, the get rich quick scheme, all of it, it's empty.

(03:21):
It's an empty promise.
It burns us out and just the reality is, is that it's not sustainable long-term.
And so I think what, what's important for us to do is to reframe it and reframe our mindsaway from that.

(03:42):
And instead celebrate the small wins, celebrate the small progress because let's be real.
How many times have you done something just incredible?
Like sometimes I say for me, it might be something as simple as folding and putting awaylaundry on the same day.

(04:07):
Okay.
Am I the only one that sometimes just feels like I have conquered the world if I literallydo the laundry, fold it and put away all in the same day, but you kind of brush that off
like that little small wind doesn't count.
Well,
Today, the whole thing is that we are going to flip that mindset.
We're going to retrain our brains because we're going to celebrate all the small wins.

(04:28):
And I'm really here to convince you as to why this is something that can actuallyrevolutionize your relationships.
It is something that can revolutionize your, just how you go about your business or, oryour life or your parenting, all of it.
this is something that we're trying to do with our kids as well as just
incremental growth, incremental small progress.

(04:50):
My husband kind of described it to me earlier as like just staying on the path, the paththat you are on by just doing Emily P Freeman says doing the next right thing that's in
front of you.
So, y'all know that in a lot of questions or a lot of questions and a lot of episodespast, I have talked a lot about my fascination with

(05:17):
neuroscience and the brain.
feel like I've done a million episodes interviewing different experts on, you know, brainneural pathways and all those kinds of things.
But the reality is, is that, and again, I've talked about this on the show before, is thatwhen you accomplish something, when you check that, when you make the to-do list just to
check the thing off the box that you've already done,

(05:40):
What's actually happening in your brain is your brain is releasing dopamine.
It's that feel good chemical.
It's that that chemical in your brain that just is like, yes, this is this is acelebration.
This is a win.
It's what happens when you're on the algorithm and the algorithm gets you.
Your brain is releasing dopamine.
So again, like when you cross that thing off of your to do list that you've already done,but you did it just to make yourself feel better.

(06:03):
You're responding to the email you've been avoiding.
Your brain is rewarding you.
It's that
dopamine boost that is building momentum.
And so when you are making small progress, you're making small incremental changes, whatyou're doing is you're actually releasing a chemical in your brain that is telling you,

(06:25):
this is good.
I need to keep going.
And so what it is, is it's just a small series of these tiny consistent steps and not agiant leap, but instead
tiny, consistent steps.
So there's actually like science behind this.
But the reality is, is that things like social media, and that, again, that hustle cultureI was talking about, all of that, have fed into why we don't tend to celebrate the tiny

(06:54):
victories, the tiny steps, because we are constantly bombarded with everyone else's bigwins.
And so therefore we are ignoring
the small wins because everybody that we follow on social media is posting about how theyhave a six, seven figure business.
They lost all that weight.

(07:16):
They got married.
They had a baby.
They're buying a farm.
They're just doing all of these amazing things.
They wrote a book.
They're celebrating the big things, but nobody's out here like posting on Instagram.
Here's what I really want to see is I want to see somebody posting on Instagram.
Like guys,
I loaded and unloaded the dishwasher in the same day.

(07:38):
Okay.
I again did the laundry and folded it and put it away in the same day.
Okay.
I would like to see somebody celebrate that win on social media.
but again, it's a somewhere along the way we've just, we've, we've built it into ourpsyche and our, in our culture that only the big achievements are the ones that are worth

(07:59):
celebrating.
So, you but you end up feeling it, like if you're not running a marathon or you'relaunching some company or writing some book or celebrating some big milestone that you are
somehow behind, but that's not true.
Sometimes we have to remember that when we get to the end of the day and we have done thebest that we can with what we've been given with what is in front of us with that day,

(08:27):
that
is a win.
That is where we celebrate achievement.
Okay, so how do we actually begin to start to shift our thinking and celebrate these smallwins?
One simple way that I like to do this in my own life is actually through a gratitudejournal.

(08:51):
It can, this can look different for anybody.
I like to keep a gratitude slash kind of prayer journal.
but you, could be a note in your phone.
could be, like a pad of paper that you keep on your desk, but whatever it is, I'm serious.
If you take moments to every day, write down one thing that you accomplished, one thingthat you did that day that was moving in the right direction, moving forward on the path,

(09:21):
you know, maybe you finally, drank a gallon of water.
Like you've been.
setting out to do or you just drink water at all.
Maybe you're just like, you know what?
I just need to I should probably drink water.
Maybe it was doing the dishwasher or maybe in your business it was like I decided to signup for a course that I could get better at what I do for a living or if you if you've

(09:46):
dreamt of writing a book, if you've maybe actually set out to start working on a bookproposal or maybe it's just spending you know.
quiet quality time with your kids or intentional time with your spouse, whatever it is,like maybe you finally scheduled the dentist appointment you meant to do like six months
ago, whatever it is by celebrating those little small wins and writing them down in agratitude journal and just being grateful for the thing that you did that was right in

(10:14):
front of you.
Again, it's one of those things that it releases that dopamine and so it's, it feelsrewarding.
But another thing you can do is even just like
texting a friend and somebody that you trust and just being like, Hey, I just want tocelebrate this little thing that happened today.
Acknowledging it out loud is reinforcing to you that it matters that these little thingsmatter.

(10:36):
Incremental progress day by day matters because here is the deal is our lives are made upof the tiny moments.
Yes.
The big milestones are great.
The marriages and the having kids.
the, the big career wins, they, they are wonderful, but they don't happen overnight.

(11:02):
You don't just meet a guy and marry him the next day, unless you're on like love is blindor, you know, 90 day fiance or whatever that show is.
the reality is, is it's building a relationship where you get to the point of gettingmarried.
It's the nine months.
of waiting, or if you have struggled with infertility, could be years and years of waitingto hold that baby in your arms.

(11:29):
Or like with me and writing a book, that was something that I started working on eight,nine years ago, and it came out last year.
And it was something I literally spent years and years and years working on.
we've been living on our farm for four years now and in four years,

(11:49):
We have by no means accomplished all of the things that we want to do on this farm.
But are we better today than we were when we first got started?
Yes, absolutely.
We are better today than when we first got started.
Because now we know how to raise our own chickens and we know how to butcher our ownchickens and we know how to raise and butcher our own turkeys.

(12:14):
We know that caring for bees is really hard.
We know how to care for goats.
mean, all of those things didn't happen overnight.
It's something that we have learned little by little over time, and we're making smallincremental improvements.
As we've tried to kind of really cut down on a lot of the processed food we have in thehouse and all of those kinds of things, I didn't learn how to make bread in five minutes.

(12:42):
So again, it's small incremental changes that really do...
add up over time.
And I was actually reminded of this even more recently when, so every night when we'resitting down at the dinner table as a family, one of the things that we do is we go around
the table and we often will do our pits and our cherries.

(13:05):
So the good thing that happened today would be our cherries and then kind of the maybe thebad thing that happened or the hard thing of the day would be our pits.
And you some days the kids are like, no pits, all cherries.
Or some days they're like, it's really hard for them to find a cherry and it's all pits.
Regardless is, I think it was a, like a week or two ago, we were sitting down at thedinner table and I asked one of our children, you know, what was your cherry of the day?

(13:33):
And she said, honestly, this moment right now.
And I said, honey, you know what?
Me too is my cherry of the day.
The good thing of my day.
The thing that I was just really grateful for was
that I got to just be with my kids and be with my family and be with my husband, betogether at the dinner table, eating a meal.
And it was, it mattered.

(13:54):
It just reminded me that, yes, like the vacations and the big extravagant moments and theover the top excitement or the milestones, like all of those things are great, but it was
a beautiful reminder that life is made up of the tiny moments.
those big things happen because of all of the hundreds of little things that came before.

(14:18):
And so today I want you to take a moment and celebrate a small win, a tiny moment.
don't care what it is, but I want you to celebrate that thing.
start with just writing it down on a Post-It note again, or texting a friend, or if youwant to share it with me, you can send me a DM on Instagram, or you can tag me.

(14:41):
I would love to celebrate those small wins with you.
So I hope that this was encouraging.
I just, like I said, this conversation has been happening a lot in kind of my circleslately is, what does it look like to
make incremental progress in your marriage, in your relationships, in your business, inyour job, in your walk with God.

(15:04):
That is the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus is not hustle culture.
The way of Jesus is not the big crazy things.
It is the little by little progress.
think I don't remember who I heard this from, so forgive me if I can't remember who Iattributed this from, but it was like you don't wake up at 70 and you're suddenly Mother
Teresa.
Okay, that is decades and decades and decades of little by little progress of followingJesus a little bit better the next day than you did the day before.

(15:34):
It's just one new habit, one new conscious choice to grow in your relationship with Him.
Again, I hope that this encouraged you.
If you enjoyed this episode, if you enjoy content like this where it's just me talking andhopefully encouraging you, I would love for you to share this.

(15:55):
Be sure to subscribe, leave a review.
It really does help more people to find the show.
But as always, thank you so much for listening.
Thank you to the team at Third Wheel Media for helping to produce this show.
And for you, I hope something this week makes you laugh till you cry.
We'll see you next week.
Bye.