“When you’re trying to motivate yourself, appreciate the fact that you’re even thinking about making a change. And as you move forward, allow yourself to be good enough.”
~Alice Domar

Everyone has dreams they want to realize and big goals they want to achieve.  That’s often part of what keeps people from reaching their goals – only having the big, ambitious goals.  Absolutely, you should aim high and believe in yourself, but it can be easy to get frustrated and discouraged while on this long journey.  A few setbacks and you may feel like you’re never going to accomplish your goals.  You may even question if you’ve made any progress at all.  Worse, you may only be measuring yourself against this ultimate goal, and only be satisfied when you get there.  Everyone needs some encouragement along the way.

Marathons have mile markers for a reason.  It feels great to see your progress every mile!  Without them it would be much easier for thoughts like “I’m never going to get there” to creep into your head.  Like mile markers, you need goals along the way to focus on, work toward, and celebrate when you get there.

There are 2 main factors to accomplishing goals.  The first is developing good goals and a plan to accomplish them.  The second is putting in the work.  Putting in the work is all about consistency and motivation.  You have to consistently put in the work to progress toward your goals, and that means staying motivated to keep working and not give up.

There are many articles and blog posts that go over guidelines for writing good goals.  The basics on that are that your goals should be: specific, measurable, realistically attainable, meaningful to you, and are planned to be achieved within a specific length of time.  A common system for writing goals according to those guidelines uses the acronym S.M.A.R.T. .  You can follow that link for more information on that.  With this blog I wanted to focus more on the smaller goals on your way to your big goals, and keeping up the motivation to achieve them.  This is where you do the daily work that gets you there and where you build the positive momentum to power your progress.

If you have some big, ambitious goals, or even if you wrote out some good, attainable goals that are measurable and time-bound, I want to encourage you to break those down into smaller steps.  What are the steps you need to take to get to those big goals?  What can you accomplish this week?  Today?  Maybe even something you can accomplish in the next hour!  To meet any goal you have to start with your first step, and taking that step alone can be cause for celebrating an accomplishment!

Be your own cheerleader, not your critic.

Any little step can be a reason for celebration.  Focus on small victories and resist the urge to judge yourself.  We can try to motivate ourselves with an inner drill sergeant, thinking that will motivate use to do more than we even thought we could.  This can easily become a negative and critical voice, pointing out our flaws, belittling our accomplishments as not good enough, comparing ourselves negatively to others, and generally beating us down until we quit.  We most often do better by being a cheerleader for ourselves with a positive focus and encouraging words, reinforcing our efforts and successes and being more gentle when have set backs with encouragement to try again and keep working.  When you notice you’re judging yourself try to find the positives and offer yourself encouragement instead.

Part of celebrating our small steps of progress includes recognizing the accomplishments we take for granted.  We often dismiss things that we “should” do and don’t give ourselves any credit for doing them.  Sure, you might be expected to “just” shower regularly and to do the dishes, but the dishes don’t just wash themselves.  If you put the work in, give yourself the credit.  Especially if it was hard for you or you weren’t motivated to do it in the first place.  Celebrating these accomplishments can motivate you to keep doing them and eventually get the motivation and momentum to do more.  Maybe these types of chores are things you see as daily nuisances that are interfering with your working on your “real” goals.  To avoid these obstacles becoming excuses, take them seriously and focus on them until they’re done, giving yourself credit for your accomplishments and moving on to your next task.

Do you know what’s better than a “to do” list?  A “done” list.  What have you already done?  These are accomplishments!  Take joy in marking things off as done on your “to do” list.  I suggest even writing things in that you already did and marking them off.  We have a tendency to look forward at all of the things we have yet to do and not look back at what we have already accomplished.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged looking at everything you still have to do.  There you are, in the moment, looking at all this stuff that might take hours, weeks, months, even years to complete!  Of course you’re overwhelmed, you can’t do all of that stuff right now.  You can only work on one thing at a time.

Learn to take joy in the process of working toward your goals.  There may be other things that you’d rather be doing while you’re working on accomplishing your goal, whatever it may be.  However, you chose to work on this for a reason.  Thinking of that reason can be motivating.

Having trouble just getting started?  Planning to do something IS doing something.  You’ve already begun.  However, you should only think ahead when you’re planning, otherwise you can start getting overwhelmed and talk yourself out of trying.  Be in the moment and start and you’ll start to get some momentum.

Enlist Help

Sharing your goals, progress and accomplishments with others can be fun and motivating and give yourself the message that you are serious and your goals are real.  The support of others who care about us can be helpful and motivating, especially if someone joins you to work on your goals together.  And sometimes it is helpful to enlist the help of experts to accomplish your goal.  If you’re trying to learn a skill or complete a project, an expert in that field can give you advise or teach you the necessary skills.  If you’re trying to make change in your life, working with a change expert – a therapist, can help you make the changes you seek and reach your goals.