Achieving Your Goals Part IV - Staying Motivated

Welcome growth seeker from to Lieslnet .
Review this weeks featured book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness, rated .

“The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.” - Napoleon Hill

 

One technique that helps to shore up fading motivation is to make a list right now of all the benefits you will get from achieving your goal.

List the benefits 

For our example goal of losing 15lbs by Christmas, the list might look like this:
· I will look great for all the Christmas parties.
· I will get lots of compliments at family gatherings.
· I will be able to fit into my new jeans.
· I will feel more confident.
· I will feel proud of my accomplishment.
· Others will admire my resolve.
· I will be an example of what can be achieved when you stick to your goals.
· I will already have a healthy diet and exercise plan to counteract the extra pounds that I usually put on at Christmas.
· I will enjoy looking in the mirror.
· I will no longer dread putting on a swimsuit.
· I will enjoy a better love life with my spouse.
· I will enjoy making that horrid girl in cubicle 6 jealous of my new svelte figure.

The more benefits you can list the better. Don’t worry if they seem silly or shallow or not worthy of mention. Once you consider it a benefit then list it. This list will become a large part of your motivation when you are not feeling motivation.

Use this list when you need motivation

There will come a time when you are having a lousy day, your boss just yelled at you, the kids have the cold and the last thing you feel like doing is sticking to your goal plan. All you want to do at that point is reach for that chocolate cake and pig out. Well that is the point where you pull out this list. Something on this list will inspire you to stick with your plan. Something here will trigger in you the desire to achieve your goal – sometimes it will be because you want to feel more confident and other times it will be because you cant wait to see the expression on the face of Aunt “You’d-be-so-pretty-if-you-just-lost-some-weight”. It really does not matter. The important thing is that you get the motivation and the courage to stick with your plan when you are at your greatest point of weakness.

It is essential that you make up this list when you are excited and positive and certain that you will achieve your goal. Make it up and keep it handy. Keep a copy in your wallet, on your computer, on your mirror – wherever you might need it.

You are trying to change old habits and introduce new ones, and before you have fully achieved this, you need to use little tricks to keep you motivated and keep you going. Once you have a new diet and your exercise is routine you will need these sorts of techniques less often. The important thing is to have a plan for the moments when you wont feel like sticking to your plan to achieve your goal. You just need to make it through each of these moments to get back to the point where your motivation level is stronger. This list is one of the techniques that will help you.

Delay for success

Another technique is to delay. Tell yourself you will eat the cake next hour. You will just wait one hour and then you may eat the cake. Whats an hour after all? And in the meantime, many things can happen to distract you or renew your commitment to your goal. If that hour ends and you still want the cake, try delaying again, as often as possible. Or if your goal requires you to be industrious rather than avoid temptation, then try the 10 minute technique. Promise yourself  to do the required task for just 10 minutes. So tell yourself that you will get on the treadmill for just 10 minutes…after all 10 minutes is just a really a few minutes…no long at all. And usually once you start to do the task, you get into it and your want to continue and get it done.

Planning for loss of motivation

You may say well all these things sound like tricks. We are intelligent rational people after all. We should be able to do what we know we need to do in order to achieve our goals. It would be lovely if we could that all the time. But we all know that sometimes we lose our motivation, or become distracted or simply forget. So if we want to succeed then we must plan for those times when we are feeling at our most motivated.

If you find this article useful and would like to support LieslNet please make a donation here . Every little bit helps

Next article in the Achieving Your Goals Series: Change Your Environment

Related Articles: 

• Achieving Your Goals Part I - Goal Identification
• Achieving Your Goals Part II - Form a Plan
• Achieving Your Goals Part III - Make a Commitment
• Achieving Your Goals Part V - Change Your Environment
• Achieving Your Goals Part VI - Change Your Thinking
• Achieving Your Goals Part VII - Discipline and Vocabulary

Posted in A New Start, Goals |

New Feature: We have launched the new bookstore. Visit the Lieslnet Personal Development Bookstore.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under A New Start, Goals . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.