Be Your Own Cheerleader

by Bonnie Boots

I’m not a sports fan. I’ve don’t go to sports events. I don’t watch them on TV. In fact, I don’t even know if one of my hometown teams, the Devil Rays, play hockey or football.

I’ve never had the slightest interest in sports, and until recently I couldn’t understand why other people do.

All that changed on a recent Sunday.

I’d just finished a huge project, one that had more than the usual share of headaches. I’d sent the final files off to my client and then I did something I almost never do. I turned off my computer.

Wrapping up that project had been completely exhausting. I needed some rare time to be entirely removed from work. So I shut the office door, retreated to the bedroom, draped myself across a chair and turned on the TV.

Flipping from channel to channel to channel, all I saw were sports. Basketball, Nascar, golf, bowling, football. Disgusted, I turned the sound off, turned on the “heat and massage” feature in my favorite chair and prepared to vege out in front of a silent screen.

(Yes, on the rare occasions when I watch TV, I often turn the sound off. The dialogue I make up in my imagination is invariable funnier than what’s really being said.)

But as I half-dozed in front of a football game, something caught my attention. The camera was focused on the crowd and I saw a lot of people going crazy. Intrigued, I turned up the sound and learned that one of the teams had just won an important game.

Their fans were jubilant, jumping up and down, screaming, yelling, and congratulating the team and themselves for being Number One!

And suddenly…I got it.

We all work hard every day.

But in ordinary life, there’s no “end of game.”

There’s no cheering, no popping of Champaign corks.

There’s just one task rolling into another in an endless wave of work.

But not in sports. In sports there is a definite “end of game.” There is one singular moment when you know you or your team have lost or won. There is disgust or there is joy and jubilation. But either way, there is a moment of reckoning, a moment when you know the final result of all your planning and performing.

In contrast to sports, where winning and losing are well defined, everyday life is rather vague and unapplauded. We often don’t know from day to day if our efforts are moving us toward victory or defeat. And we don’t have fans and cheerleaders ready to shower us with applause every time we achieve even the smallest success.

Sports, then, fill a need to have defining moments, moments when you know, without equivocation, the outcome of your efforts. And that’s something I think any self-employed person can benefit from. But if you prefer not to do it by merging your identity with a sports team, how about forming your own scoreboard and cheering section?

How about, for instance, picking up the phone and making restaurant reservations when have your own defining moment of victory. Let’s say you’ve just finished a bog project or you’ve finally learning something you’ve been struggling to do on your computer. Doesn’t that call for a celebration?

Of course, you probably can’t run out to dinner every time you score, so how about some in-the-office celebration by making your mailbox sing out “Cha-Ching!” every time you make a sale?

Most email programs will let you assign all sorts of actions to incoming email. This is easily done in Microsoft Outlook by using the Rules Wizard. Rules Wizard can be used to set up “rules” that conditionally perform an action based on the content of any email field, such as subject, date, sender, recipient and so on.

To activate Rules Wizard, open Outlook. On the top menu bar, click on Tools->Rules Wizard. Click the “New” button to create a new rule. The wizard will walk you through the steps of creating a new rule.

(To deactivate a rule, select Tools->Rules Wizards from the menu bar. Highlight the rule you wish to deactivate and click the “Delete” button.).

If you’re not using Outlook, look in the help file of your email program for information or Google “how to assign a sound to incoming email depending on sender.”

I’ve put 2 sound files of the “cha-ching” audio into the web site for you to download. Click here to download a WAV file. (WAV is the default audio file.) Click here to download the MP3 file.

Download the audio files onto your hard drive. If you’re using Windows, your My Music folder would be a good place to store it. Once you’ve downloaded these files, set up a new rule in your email client that tells it to play the cha-ching sound each time an email arrives saying, “You made a sale!”

It’s also a good idea to form your own cheerleading squad. People already toiling online are most likely to appreciate the effort that lies behind the announcement, “I finally learned out how to upload a web site!” Many forums have a section set aside for people to announce their accomplishments, so make a point to post your own accomplishments. It makes you feel proud and gives other people hope that they, too, can accomplish tasks big and small.

Of course, there’s nothing like a cheerleader to make you feel like a winner, so I’ve created a special card for you to print and paste together. The “You Did It! Guy” is ready and waiting to jump up and give you a giant pat on the back. All you have to do is download the following PDF files, print  out on Part 1 and Part 2 on heavy card stock and paste them together.

Click here to download the "You did It! Guy", Part 1.

Click here to download the "You did It! Guy", Part 2.

Click here to download the "You did It! Guy", Instructions

The finished size is about 5 x 6 inches. Put him on your bulletin board or tape him to the side of you computer.

He’s one fellow that’s always ready to give you a big cheer for whatever you’ve accomplished. In fact, I think I’ll go print him out right now and tell him I finally got this month’s magazine out!

 
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