How to Stay Motivated to Achieve Your Goals - Part 2

The first step to staying motivated to achieve your goal is to ensure that you are truly committed to the goal. The last blog post goes over how to determine if we’re fooling ourselves about our goal. You can read it here in part 1. Below, we look at how to stay motivated and focussed on a goal that we are truly committed to.

In a busy life it can be easy to lose sight of our goal. To stay focussed on our goal we need to remind ourselves of the goal, the purpose for creating the goal in the first place, and the benefits of achieving the goal. This provides us with direction and motivation. Create a practice or routine of reviewing your goal regularly to keep your goal in mind. This could be a daily or weekly practice to review the goal and to determine what actions you will take that day or week to move things forward.

Large goals can seem intimidating or too big to mentally grasp when it comes to practical actions to take. In these situations, break the goal into milestones and tasks that are small enough to be easily for you to relate to and to manage. When a goal or milestone is too big, it’s hard for us to see the beginning, middle, and end. Breaking the goal, milestones, and tasks into smaller ones make it easier for us to grasp the beginning, middle, and end of each milestone and task. This makes it easier for us to take the actions and to complete the tasks.

The more we keep taking actions and completing the tasks and milestones, we make progress and build momentum. This progress and momentum provides encouragement to continue. If the tasks are repetitive, they can become habits.

Life is imperfect and plans rarely go perfectly. Your goal and direction will stay the same however your pathway to achievement is likely to change because unexpected events and challenges happen in life. Some of these unexpected events and challenges will be external such as the economy or internal such as discovering that we’re afraid of a particular task. The key is to adjust, adapt, identify new actions, get help where needed, and to execute the new set of actions. You will need to make adjustments to your plan as needed along the way to achieving your goal.

All results are produced by someone taking actions or a series of actions. When actions stop, the goal is in jeopardy. The most important aspect of achieving a goal is to keep moving forward by taking actions. The actions can be tasks that contribute to achieving the goal or the actions can be adjusting your plan to get back on track so that you are going in the right direction. All of this is a form of making progress. Consistent progress builds momentum which makes achieving the goal easier. Starting and stopping the action and progress takes more effort than consistently moving forward just like pushing a car that has run out of fuel. Once you are moving, it’s easier to keep going.