Learn to celebrate

Work hard and you shall be rewarded. I don't know where I got that idea, but that was how I operated for a long time. Turns out hard work does not count if nobody knows about it.

This is especially important during performance reviews. How do you let others know the good work you have been doing? To most of us, it is not natural to toot your own horn. But like most skills, it can be learned.

Step one: Reframe. Rather than viewing it as bragging, look at it as celebration. Celebrate your achievements, big and small.

Donuts

I really like how Lara Hogan does it. She gets herself a donut whenever something awesome happened in her career, and makes its significance known to those around her. Check out her Donut Manifesto!

I wrote about the donuts, and how political celebrating achievements can be for women. https://t.co/6KdyL5woHc 🍩

— Lara Hogan (@lara_hogan) August 18, 2015

The boring list

If donut is not your thing, you can do with the good ol' list. Send a weekly summary email to your team with a few bullet points of what you have done.

Weekly Plan and Weekly Status are useful whether you work from home or not. Visibility is everything! https://t.co/69hU47tnGr

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) December 10, 2015

Or you can take it a notch up and add some prose around it. I have started doing that with my newsletter, sending out about once a month, and it has been a great way to look back and take stock my accomplishments.

Celebrate now

End of year is an excellent reason to celebrate. Here is my list: blog.sqisland.com/2015/12/my-2015.html

Your turn! Write a blog post for your 2015 accomplishments (do it on medium if you don't have a blog) and post a link in the comments. Let's celebrate!