Once you’ve started your journey towards your goal, it is key to stay focused. While in the first week you’re still excited about your goal, this feeling gets less and less. While this feeling starts to lessen, other goals start to become more appealing… Yet if we keep to change goals, then we will never actually finish one. There are ways to combat the loss of excitement and to continue the pursuit.
Aim Low
Nothing defeats motivation faster than failure. When starting your goal, you’re fully motivated and willing to dedicate lots of time. However, after a short period of time you start to realize this isn’t sustainable. Therefore you should set low standards for yourself. Instead of running 10km every day, start with putting on your running shoes every day. It’s easy to overshoot this and you should, but at least you don’t have the feeling of failure if you ‘only ran 9km’. The momentum you gain with all the small wins will keep you going for longer.
Build Habits
Reaching your goal is the product of daily habits. Sitting down every day to get the work done is the habit, while what you’re making is the outcome. So focus on the habit of sitting down and focus. Eventually you will reach your goal.
Use habit trackers to track your progress regarding this habit. This tracking gives a small dopamine boost every time you tick a task of in the habit tracker. Try not to break the consistency of doing the habit because if you break the consistency, you’re much more likely to give up on your goal.
Assess Regularly
Assess how it is going regularly, ideally around once a week. Ask yourself questions like; what did I do last week? How did it go? What can I improve for next week?
Every time you assess your goal and you notice that you made progress towards your goal, a little bit of dopamine is released. This dopamine gives us the feeling of motivation again for the next interval.
This assessment moment is also ideal for thinking back what you’re doing it for. Reassess whether it is still high priority in your life to achieve what you set out to do, and if so, continue with greater spirit.
Write down your goal in Strive Journal and receive reminders and exercises to assess your progress.
Visualize
Let’s start with an example. You’re trying to stop smoking, what visualization do you think would motivate you more to not touch the cigarettes? An image of healthy lungs, or an image of unhealthy lungs?
As it turns out, we humans are much better at moving away from fearful things than towards things we want, and this makes sense regarding evolution. Therefore it motivates us more to keep moving towards a goal when thinking about what happens if you don’t.
Accountability
Keep yourself accountable or find an accountability partner. Reward yourself or punish yourself when succeed or fail to embrace the positive and discourage the negative behavior. If you fail, you could for example give $10 to your accountability partner. And when you succeed, you get to spend that $10 on whatever you like.
Focus on the process and not the outcome though. Even if you put in all the hours of work that you’ve thought would lead to a successful outcome, this isn’t necessarily the case. Therefore there is no need to punish yourself on the bad outcome even though you’ve done all you good during the process.
Be careful with who your accountability partner is though. Your accountability partner should judge your progress, not who you are. For example, your mom will always say that you’re doing a good job, but things isn’t helpful to motivate.
Find friends or other people to keep you accountable on Strive Journal