Keep Score: Why Tracking Your Wins Changes Everything

The essence of a story is at its base a way to make people find commonality with you. The stories I always tell—the stories of my childhood, discovering opera, the transformative moments in my career—are interesting. But I think day-to-day voice victories are equally important.

You leave a meeting and think, "That went well." Perhaps it's a much bigger deal: clients landed, funding achieved, cases won. Or maybe something seemingly small like talking your teenager through their resistance and getting them to tackle their homework.

The ways your voice meets your needs and fulfills its promise are evident all the time. Yes, even for those of you who feel your voices are inadequate to the task. But positive moments aren't what we remember. We remember that presentation that sort of tanked. The lost prospect. Deep misunderstandings. Missed opportunities.

Don't believe me? Go ahead and list the communication areas where you failed this week. Now note at least that many positive interactions.

If that was hard, or feels impossible, then this blog is for you.

The Neuroscience of Why We Remember Losses

Your brain is always trying to keep you alive. Sometimes that's a problem. Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson explains that the amygdala—the brain region regulating emotions and motivation—uses about two-thirds of its neurons to detect negativity and then quickly stores it into long-term memory.[1] Meanwhile, for a positive experience to get into long-term memory, we need to hold it in our field of attention for at least 10-20 seconds.[1]

This isn't a character flaw. It's evolutionary biology. Research using brain imaging shows that negative information creates a greater surge in electrical neural activity than positive or neutral information.[2] Your ancestors who paid more attention to threats—the rustling in the bushes that might be a predator—survived longer than those who focused on the beautiful sunset.

The problem is that in today's professional world, this negativity bias doesn't protect you. It undermines you. When your brain defaults to cataloging communication failures while letting wins evaporate, you're training yourself to expect inadequacy. And what you expect, you create.

What You Focus On, You Increase

Neuroplasticity—the brain's capacity to change in response to experience—can have negative or positive influence at any age across the entire lifespan.[3] The same mechanism that allows you to learn a new language or master a technical skill also means your brain strengthens whatever you practice.

If you practice ruminating on failures, your brain builds stronger neural pathways for failure recognition and recall. If you practice documenting wins, you build stronger pathways for success recognition.

This matters for your voice and communication specifically because how you perceive your ability directly affects how you show up. When you believe your voice is inadequate, you unconsciously create the vocal tension, shallow breathing, and nervous system dysregulation that makes communication harder. When you have evidence—documented, reviewed, reinforced evidence—that your voice serves you well, you show up with the confidence and ease that makes excellent communication more accessible.

The research backs this up. A meta-analysis of 39 studies found that positive psychological interventions significantly improved participants' perception of well-being.[4] More importantly, each time you engage in positive thinking, you strengthen the neural pathways associated with optimism, and over time, these pathways become more dominant.[4]

This is the same principle that underlies all voice and communication training. Practice makes permanent. The question is: what are you practicing?

Start Documenting the Wins

Here's what I want you to do this week: start keeping score of your communication successes. Don't document the losses. Why? You increase what you focus on. Focus on losses, you get more of that. Nobody wants that.

The method honestly doesn't matter. What matters is consistency.

One of my clients went with a sticker chart because it makes her smile. She gets a gold star every time she successfully navigates a difficult conversation, delivers clear feedback, or speaks up in a meeting where she previously would have stayed quiet. The childlike simplicity works for her—it creates a small dopamine hit that reinforces the behavior.

Another client voice memos himself immediately after any meaningful communication moment, noting what went well. Every Friday evening, he plays them all back while having a beer. He tells me it's become his favorite part of the week—a ritual that both closes out the work week and reminds him why he's good at what he does.

I keep an analog speaking journal. After any presentation, difficult conversation, or meeting where I used my voice strategically, I write down what worked. Sunday evening as I prepare for the week ahead, I read back through the entries. It grounds me in evidence before I walk into Monday.

A director I worked with uses her commute. On the drive home, she speaks into her phone's notes app about one communication win from that day. Just one. By the end of each month, she has 20-25 documented successes. When she's preparing for a high-stakes presentation or difficult conversation, she reviews them. The evidence overrides the anxiety.

There are many different ways to do this. Voice memos. Analog journals. Digital trackers. Sticker charts. Shared accountability with a colleague. The format is less important than the practice.

What Counts as a Win

This is important: we're not only tracking the big victories. Yes, landing the client counts. Winning the case counts. Securing the funding absolutely counts.

But so does this: You stayed calm when challenged in a meeting. You asked a clarifying question instead of making an assumption. You gave feedback that was both honest and kind. You spoke up when you had something to contribute instead of staying silent. You ended a meeting clearly so everyone understood next steps. You managed your breath before a difficult conversation so you walked in grounded instead of dysregulated.

These small wins are the foundation of exceptional communication. They're also the ones most likely to disappear if you don't actively capture them. Research on relationships found that it takes about five positive interactions to counterbalance one negative interaction.[5] Your brain's negativity bias means you need multiple documented wins to offset the weight of a single perceived failure.

Keep the Score

This week, start documenting your wins. Don't get hung up on the method. If something doesn't work, try something else. Just keep score.

What you'll find—and this is backed by both neuroscience and my 20 years of professional performance experience—is that tracking changes what you notice. When you're actively looking for communication successes, you'll start seeing them everywhere.

And when you review your documented wins regularly, you're doing something neurologically powerful: you're giving positive experiences the extended attention they need to move into long-term memory. You're building evidence that counteracts your brain's negativity bias. You're practicing the perception of competence.

Your voice will follow. When you have concrete evidence that your communication serves you well, your nervous system relaxes. Your breath deepens. Your vocal mechanism functions with less interference. The wins compound.

Start keeping score. The scorecard itself becomes the practice that creates more wins worth documenting.

References

[1] MIUC. (2024). "Why Does Your Brain Love Negativity? The Negativity Bias."

[2] Psychology Today. "Our Brain's Negative Bias."

[3] Shaffer, J. (2016). "Neuroplasticity and Clinical Practice: Building Brain Power for Health." Frontiers in Psychology, 7:1118.

[4] Sin, N. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). "Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: A practice-friendly meta-analysis." Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(5), 467-487. (Referenced in Psychology Today, 2025)

[5] Psychology Today. "Our Brain's Negative Bias." (Discusses research on positive-to-negative ratio in relationships)

Much better! That reframe keeps the neuroscience accurate while acknowledging the brain's protective function rather than positioning it as an adversary.

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About Gina Razón

Gina Razón is a recovering opera singer, functional voice coach, keynote speaker, and founder of GROW Voice, a Boston-based voice and communication practice. She is recognized for being the calm voice of clarity as she helps others connect the intention behind their ideas with their desired goals. She speaks on the power of speaking and leading from a center of neurophysiological embodiment. Gina holds a BM from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MM from the University of Denver both in Voice Performance.  She is an Appreciative Inquiry facilitator, an associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework and trained in Somatic Voicework. She has served as the voice coach for TEDxNewEngland, and speaks at national and local events on the power of embodied voice. Gina is a member of the The Voice Foundation, the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, the National Speakers Association, and the Center for Appreciative Inquiry.

To see how Gina might help you design your communication infrastructure contact us.

For Gina’s TEDxCambridge talk click here.

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