How to Channel Your Motivation
How to stay motivated to achieve your goals
we’re going to talk about how you can channel your
motivation most effectively. You could have an amazing amount of
motivation, be able to overcome the obstacles that you’ll face with ease
and still not reach your goals, because you are channeling your motivation
into actions that will never get you anywhere.
It’s like the previous example that I used with the car. Channing your
motivation into something that isn’t going to help you is like revving the
engine on your car. You aren’t going to move unless you put it in gear, no
matter how hard you press that accelerator, and you know what happens
eventually? You run out of gas the same way that you run out of motivation
if you aren’t achieving results.
So, how do you know where to channel your motivation? Weight loss has
kind of been a theme throughout this book so let’s continue with the weight
loss example. Here are some ways that people spin their wheels and rev
their engines when they’re trying to lose weight, and odds are, you’ve
probably tried at least one of these yourself.
Fad Diets
Exercise machines bought from TV
Starving themselves
YoYo Eating (dieting one day and binge-eating the next)
The problem that many people have is that they have no idea how to direct
their motivation into something good. Often, people that are motivated work
towards something that has no chance of getting them to their goal, or at
least, will make it take longer for them achieve their goal, but they continue
working at it because they don’t know how to direct their energy elsewhere.
Take for example, someone who wants to start a web design business.
They are good at creating websites so they make several of them to show
to potential clients. After a few weeks, they have a dozen or so sites
creates, all on their own portfolio page and are ready to start getting
business.
Since they don’t know exactly how to get business, they spend their time
creating more sample websites. This is a perfect example of someone who
is motivated but they spend their time and energy doing things that won’t
further their success. The person in this example needs to do some
research on how to cold call businesses and sell them on a website, or how
to market himself online and get in front of people and get seen. It is likely
that if he continues to make sample sites, graphics and whatever else, he
is eventually going to get frustrated and give up.
Another example is a person that wants to write a novel. They aren’t sure
what the plot of their novel is going to be, so they start by creating the world
that their characters live in. They create this marvelous fantasy world, with
its own maps, continents and bodies of water, its own system of
government, rules of magic and much more, and at the end they might
have created an amazing world, but really what they needed was a basic
sketch of a fantasy land.
The bottom line here is that you need to have a plan for how you are going
to achieve it. The plan is like your roadmap in the car example. You might
have a destination and a car with gas in it, but unless you follow a
roadmap, your chances of getting lost along the way are quite high.
Making a roadmap is different depending upon what kind of goal you are
going after, but if you want to sustain long-term motivation, find a way to
channel it into something that is actually going to bring you success in your
endeavors. Here are some tips to help you do just that.
A great way to do goal planning is to follow a method that the United States
military coined: It is called backwards planning and it is one of the most
effective ways to plan out your goal-achieving strategy.
You need to clearly define your goal. You can’t just say, “I want to lose
weight” because that could mean anything, from losing a single pound to
losing two hundred. You need to either specify the amount of weight that
you want to lose or the amount that you want to weigh. Of course weight
loss is just an example. The point is, you need to create a clear goal with
an outcome that you can actual visualize and quantify, and put in a
checklist.
Now, here is where the backwards planning comes in. Determine what the
last thing you’ll need to do before you reach your goal. Here are some
examples
Weight Loss: The weight that you’ll weight in on your goal weight. You can
clearly picture the end result – stepping on the scale and seeing the
number that you have been working on for so many months – or years.
Publishing a Novel: The very last thing that you’ll do is approve the proofs
that get sent to you. This will be what happens after all the writing, editing,
rewriting and more editing.
Becoming Wealthy: Picture logging into your online banking and seeing
certain amount on your statement. The amount will different depending
upon how much you think it requires to be independently wealthy, and you
can either choose to visualize how much you have saved up, or how much
you are getting per month. Either way, it still gives you that end result.
What is the last thing just before that last step? You can look at the
examples there and determine which ones go with which step.
From there, the process is rinse and repeat. If you can see what you need
to do to achieve your goal, and the step before that, and the step before
that, before too long you will have an entire step-by-step plan on how to
achieve your goal. But it all starts with that very first, last, step.
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