The Art of Rewarding Yourself

The Art of Rewarding Yourself

What is meant by rewarding oneself? When should we reward oneself? Why should we do it at all? Where are the advantages of rewarding the plain old you? How should we proceed with that? These, are but the few questions that I would like to answer through this article.

First of all, before we begin, I would like to point out that I'm no psychologist and this is no study based on empirical methods and statistics, but instead it is a self revelation, something I noticed in practice with myself and people around me, that I would like to share with you my friends. 

Rewarding Yourself: We have learned over the years how there should be a direct relationship between effort and reward. Any effort, successful and non-successful should carry a reward of some type in order to keep people motivated. Indeed we all know that to pretty good extent, when it comes to rewarding another person, say employee, subordinates , errand-boy, family, friends, etc. No wonder we buy gifts for each other, for the effort spent on building a good relationship, indeed that sounds a bit odd, but if you think about it, its somewhat true. As we proceed with our lives, we often do reward the plain old oneself, with occasional boy's toys 'sports car', 'business sedan like Mercedes', ' expensive watch like Rolex'  or 'expensive bags like Gucci',  'fashionable heels', etc. 

But to my observation most of these have been:

• Unconscious Decision : Indeed we know that we are going to buy a car because we just got a big bonus, but other than that, we see no other reasons (usually) to buy it except for our needs.

• Unconsistent: We tend to keep waiting for that big year end or festival season bonus or a raise from our boss, or some other sort of financial gain in our position before starting to look for such rewards, making this activity (of rewarding oneself) unconsistent. 

• Uncontrolled: We tend to get driven by instinct on such occasion and go do that big splash of money on things we do not immediately need. We do tend to go overboard sometimes with these rewards, and then get depressed later on if we go back on them.

• In-tangible Achievements go Unnoticed: A very important point of this article is that we tend to reward ourself when we get a 'good score' or when we take up a opportunity that leads to financial gain like 'buying a asset at a cheap rate' or pulling off that big college bash successfully. All of these being tangible in the sense that they are happening in front of us, and have some physical association to themselves.  What we do tend to miss on is the gains we do mentally, like when we came up with a good idea, or solve a very complex math equation (from our own level) or won a war of words with our arch enemy, or something similar that isn't in front of our eyes. 

.... to be continued

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