Celebrate the wins.
Especially the small ones.

There are the obvious career wins.

The promotion. The new job. Passing the qualification. Getting the pay rise. Being asked to lead the project.

Those are easy to recognise. They come with announcements, congratulations and, if you are lucky, cake.

But what about everything else?

The meeting you were dreading that actually went well.

The senior stakeholder who specifically asked for you to be involved.

The piece of work that came back with hardly any comments.

The junior colleague who finally understood something because of the way you explained it.

The moment you pushed back when normally you would have stayed quiet.

Or simply the Friday when you looked back at a fairly horrible week and thought, Actually, I handled that pretty well.

Those count too.

Professionally useful. Personally complicated.

There may be something about working in financial crime that makes us even worse at noticing our wins. Our professional brains are trained to look for what is missing. We review controls to find weaknesses. We investigate anomalies. We challenge explanations. We look at something that appears perfectly reasonable and think, Yes, but what have I missed?

Useful professionally.

Slightly less useful when you turn that same scrutiny on yourself.

You can deliver a piece of work with 97 things right and three things that need changing. Guess which three things your brain will be discussing with you at 2am?

Moving the goalposts

We also have a habit of immediately moving the goalposts.

You wanted the promotion. You got it. Great. Approximately eleven minutes later, your brain has decided that everyone else at your level seems more confident than you and perhaps the promotion was some sort of administrative error.

You wanted to pass the qualification. You passed it. Excellent. Now apparently that does not count because loads of people have it.

You handled a difficult situation really well. Well, obviously. That is your job.

We are remarkably creative when it comes to explaining away our own achievements.

Keep the receipts

That is why I think we need to get better at deliberately noticing the small wins.

Not because every completed spreadsheet requires champagne and a LinkedIn announcement. Please do not do that.

But because those little moments are evidence. Evidence that you are learning. That you are improving. That people trust you. That you dealt with something differently this time. That you are probably doing considerably better than your internal performance review would have you believe.

One of the simplest things you can do is keep a record of them. Call it a wins folder, a brag file or a good-stuff note. Choose whatever feels least cringe-inducing.

Save the nice email from a client. Screenshot the message where somebody thanked you. Write down the meeting where you finally said what you thought. Add the presentation you were terrified of giving but gave anyway. Keep the feedback from the person who told you that you helped them.

Because six months later, you probably will not remember half of it.

On the days when work is difficult, when your confidence has taken a battering, something has not gone well or you are wondering whether you are actually any good at this, you will have something more reliable than whatever your brain happens to be telling you that day.

You will have receipts.

Your career happening in real time

Careers are long. If we only allow ourselves to feel successful when something enormous happens, we can spend years waiting for permission to feel proud of ourselves.

So yes, celebrate the promotion. Celebrate the new job, the qualification, the award and the big career move.

But also celebrate the meeting you handled better than you would have a year ago. The boundary you finally set. The question you asked even though you worried it was stupid. The person you helped. The mistake you owned and fixed. The day you did something difficult even though your confidence was not particularly interested in joining you.

They are not consolation prizes.

They are your career happening in real time.

And they are worth noticing.