Use Goals to Motivate Yourself

Life and business coaches all tell us that the best way to reach your big goals is to set smaller, easily achievable goals that will lead to the big goal.  But in addition to helping you reach your life or business goals, these smaller goals also serve as perfect motivational devices.  For most of us, there is a very satisfying feeling that comes from crossing that item off the list; yes, you’ve reached that goal. This is where the motivation comes from. The more steps you achieve towards your major goals (tasks completed), the more you will be spurred on to the next step/task.

This is why it is so important to list your goals in writing, as well as putting the smaller, stepping stone goals in writing.  As we all know by now, big amorphous goals such as “Earn $100,000 this year” are totally useless if you do not have a viable plan to reach that goal.  Every time you set a goal, ask yourself the simple question, “How?” The answers to that question will become the smaller goals you have to meet first.  Let’s take a big goal and work with it.

Goal: Earn $100,000 this year. How?

Build a successful website that earns $50,000.
Sell two e-books that sell $25,000 each.How?

In order to answer that question, you must break down each of the sub goals into tasks that need to be completed in order to reach that goal, and those sub goals into tasks and subtasks to reach that goal.  Working with a spreadsheet or table may make this easier, but even the basic pencil and paper system works just fine, as long as you leave room for expansion.

Goal #1: Successful Website
Sub goal:   Design website
                                Task: Research how to design website
                                                Subtask: Read design your own website by Joe Blow
                                                                -Buy or download book
                                                                -Read at least two chapters per day
                                                                -Contact web hosting companies
                                                                                -Make a list to research/contact
                                                                                -Perform an analysis for each one to help decision

And so on, with your other goals.  As you can see, using a spreadsheet makes this task list more and more expandable. Here is where the motivation is achieved.  Each task spurs you on to the next. You will find that you will read more than two chapters a day of the book, since you want to move onto the step of finding a good web host.  But, since you have a subtask of doing an analysis, your goal will be more achievable because you have also set yourself the task of researching and analyzing possible companies, instead of diving in without the proper knowledge.  You would become very disgusted, and therefore de-motivated, if you signed up for a hosting site only to find out that it took more work, money or time than you realized.

Set yourself achievable goals, and then break them down further so that each sub goal not only becomes a building block for the big goal, but also motivates you to keep moving forward to the next task and the next task, until you are at the final task, your goal!

Motivating yourself doesn’t have to be hard but sometimes it is. In some cases you have no choice but to hire a coach. Use this site to make sure anyone you hire is safe.