Happiness Comes In On Tiptoe: It’s a Quiet Thing

A client of mine was recently promoted to VP. She was pulled out of the middle of a department during a re-org and handed the whole thing. She knows she is exactly the right person for the job. It’s a bit dicier for her peers and the people who were literally demoted to report to her in this new structure. She has a lot of work to do: She needs to get clear on how she wants to show up in this role, she needs to figure out what skills she needs to shift from an individual contributor to department head, and she has to strategize how to navigate managing people who were her professional peers. The transition is relentless, the pressure is constant, and the well-earned moment of I did it has been completely swallowed by the demands of the thing she just earned. We're working on that part too.

I once had lunch with two guests from my first podcast. These two very successful women had figured something out that many of us haven't. Every time one of them got a new job or a promotion, she bought herself a fancy lady-bag. To the uninitiated, a “fancy lady-bag” is a gorgeous handbag that fits your laptop and everything else that you take to work. Not because she needed a bag, necessarily, but because she needed a marker, something that said: I earned this. I deserve it. This counts. I think about that often and tell other women achieving milestones, ”You deserve a fancy lady-bag!” I’ll admit I rarely do that for myself, and I’m noticing many other people don’t either. Acknowledging our own wins seems like a fairly simple thing to do, but we often don’t take the time to do it. 

There's a reason most of us aren't rewarding ourselves with a new bag, or even acknowledging when we’ve had a success or done something well. Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar coined a term for it: the Arrival Fallacy. It's the illusion that once we make it - once we hit the milestone, land the promotion, close the funding round, finish the project - we'll feel it. The crowd will roar, the angels will sing. What actually happens, more often than not, is that we feel it for about a minute and then start scanning for the next thing that needs doing. Our brain incorporates the achievement as the new normal and we start looking ahead to the next one, without ever taking the time to acknowledge and feel what we have accomplished.

Brené Brown's research on daring leadership names this pattern directly. She found that one of the markers of what she calls ‘armored leadership’ - the defensive, self-protective kind - is "working from scarcity and squandering opportunities for joy and recognition." Skipping the celebration isn't neutral. It's a choice, and usually a fear-based one.

Adam Grant admitted publicly that after finishing his second book he hadn't thought once about celebrating, he was already planning the third. He's since suggested a simple reframe worth trying: instead of measuring an accomplishment against where you are now, measure it against where you were five years ago. Pride and joy, he says, come from imagining how “me 5 years ago” would have felt about what you've done. I find this genuinely useful and also so simple, even though the problem is pretty complex.

I see it often in my coaching work. I have a client who just completed a six-month project of real consequence. It's done. It's good. He can't feel it because the environment he's doing it in is still hard, and the difficulty of the day-to-day has crowded out any room for acknowledgment. I have another client who founded a construction company that is billing over a million dollars a year, and he's not yet thirty. By almost any measure, this is an extraordinary thing. But his friends are on a consultant track with clear rungs on a clear ladder, and he keeps measuring himself against that ladder instead of against what he's actually built. He doesn't know when he'll feel successful. I don't think the answer is a number.

This is the part where I tell you about my ten-year podcasting anniversary, because it would be pretty rich of me to write this whole thing without copping to my own version of the problem.

Ten years ago this month I started a podcast called The Other 50%: A Herstory of Hollywood. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had to do it. I remember being afraid I would get fired from my job if anyone found out so I kept it a secret for about six months. But I got by with a little help from my friends. Yolanda Cochran introduced me to Ron Dawson who taught me what I needed to know to get started. My friend Eric Christensen lent me a proper audio recorder. I figured out how to edit on free programs, and Jonathan Lucas helped me lay in the music that Jay Roewe licensed to me for free. Everyone I asked to be a guest said yes, and then they told their friends and their friends told their friends and so on and so on, and the whole thing snowballed in the way that can happen when something is made out of genuine passion and the incredible generosity of friends. (It is not lost on me in the retelling that so many men supported this journey that was about elevating women. I love that.)

At the one-year mark I threw a Celebration Tea, sponsored by EP's Jennifer Bender and Joe Chianese, and close to fifty guests came. I have many photos from that day thanks to Jessie Baker. In one, I'm in the front row in a pink dress with a broken ankle, grinning, surrounded by many Hollywood powerhouses. I have such wonderful memories of that day, and the friendships that were formed, and this thing I had created.

I almost let this ten-year anniversary pass without marking it. Who cares, right? I don’t even make that podcast anymore. I’m working on a different podcast now, in a different city. That podcast never turned out to be Smartless, although I still get thousands of website visits and listens every year, and I think it was important at a very particular time in a very particular place. 

There's a Kander and Ebb song from 1965 called "A Quiet Thing." It was the first thing they ever wrote together, introduced by a nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli in her Broadway debut. The premise of the song is this: you thought when it all came true there'd be fireworks, a roaring crowd, bells ringing, a choir. Instead: happiness comes in on tiptoe. It's a quiet thing. That was my ten years of podcasting celebration. A graphic, a post, a moment of letting it matter and feeling a little proud of myself.

As I am thinking about this concept of celebrating milestones, both for myself and my clients, I’m getting the sense that the failure to celebrate isn't really about modesty, as some might suggest when telling you they’re not going to celebrate a thing. I think it's about worthiness. It's the story we tell ourselves  -  a phrase my podcast guest Dr. Matt Kodsi literally wrote a book about  -  that says the thing we did wasn't quite enough, or wasn't hard enough, or doesn't count yet because the next thing isn't finished. My VP client knows she earned her promotion. That's not the issue. The issue is that she hasn't been given, or given herself, permission to stand still and breathe in the  moment before being asked to run.

And there’s a consequence to not acknowledging the wins: it leads to burnout and chronic stress. I think we have plenty of that.

Deep Work Out Loud this last month accidentally supported this very journey. Dion Elliot Jensen talked about identity and how we’ve outsourced our personal worth to a third party - the job, the title - and when it all goes away we can be lost. Dr Michael Hein made the case that recovery isn’t a reward for performance, it’s the mechanism of performance. Celebration functions the same way - it’s a reset.  Louise Hansell talked about trusting your inner voice, your inner knowing. There is an inner form of acknowledgement and knowing that is different from external validation. In fact, Louise offers an experience called Claim Your Greatness, which could very well be the salve for this whole problem. I can attest it is excellent and worth your while. If the title scares you a little, it’s probably a sign.  

So here's what I want to ask you: what have you been letting pass unmarked? Not because it was perfect. Not because it was huge. But because you set out to do something and you did it. What's the bag you haven't bought yourself? I can tell you mine, it is a leather tote handmade by Artem the Artelier. But of course I don’t mean physically. I mean, what have you not celebrated that you could have? And what might be possible if you did?

If you find yourself reading that question and thinking I don't even know where to start with that  -  that's actually a really good place to start. If you're curious about what that might look like, I'd love to talk.

Julie Harris Oliver is an executive coach working with high performers making the transition to executive leadership as well as artists ready to do the thing already. She is the host of Deep Work Out Loud and has been podcasting for ten years, which she is now officially allowing herself to feel good about. You can find her at julieharrisoliver.com.