What do you think is the key to achieving your goals? Why do some people succeed while so many give up? Motivation and willpower play a big role but ultimately, they’re determined by your overall mindset. Change your mindset and it’ll become much easier to achieve your goals.
Contents
Understand why you want to achieve your goal
So, you want to launch a new business, lose weight, get more sleep or just do that thing you’ve been thinking about for ages.
But WHY?
Do you want follow a passion? Have more energy? More time for yourself?
What’s the motivation behind your goal?
Write down a list of all the benefits your will get if you succeed. How will you feel? What will your life look like? Be specific and focus on the positives. Keep the list where you can see it or you can even write out your strongest motivations on Post-It notes and stick them in places where you’ll see them regularly.
This will help you when you’re struggling or need a little motivation.
Catch your negative thoughts
This is about being self aware. Often we don’t even realise how many negative thoughts run through our minds – it’s a habit we need to break.
If you find yourself procrastinating, or behaving in a way that doesn’t support your goal, take a minute to stop and pay attention to what you’re telling yourself.
Are you scared that you’re not good enough or are you feeling hopeless? Are you making excuses to avoid a difficult task?
These negative thoughts and stories that you tell yourself are holding you back and we need to change them…
Change the story
Once you’ve spotted the negative self talk and stories, it’s time to flip them on their head. Worried you can’t achieve your goal? Write down and tell yourself all the reasons why you’re fully capable. Again, be specific.
Even the act of recognizing your negative thoughts and accepting that they don’t serve you and aren’t true will help you push past them.
Focus on small wins
Set yourself up for success by changing the way you look at your big end goal.
Break down your big goal into several smaller ones. The break down those smaller goals. A huge goal can seem scary and intimidating and that’s not helpful when it comes to motivation.
Take the pressure off. What’s one small thing you can you do today that will help get you one step closer to your end goal? Depending on your aim, t might be as small as sending an email to a mentor, going for a 10 minute walk or watching an online tutorial.
If you acknowledge and celebrate your little wins, you’ll build momentum and motivation because you’ll feel and see success quickly.
Forgive yourself and get back on track – fast!
There’s a good chance that at some point you will stumble in your journey to success. It might be a bad day or week.
Instead of beating yourself up, forgive. Despite what social media might tell us, even those entrepreneurs and coaches we admire aren’t perfect. However, those successful people know that the trick to long term success is to forgive yourself when you stumble or make a mistake and carry on.
A really good and common example of this is diets. We decide we’re going to start a healthy eating regime. For the first few days or even weeks we do great but then… we slip. We give into cravings and have a blow out meal.
A lot of people take on the mentality of “Today is a failure, I might as well eat unhealthy food for the rest of the day and start again tomorrow”.
Why wait until tomorrow to get yourself back on track? One slip doesn’t mean you’ve failed to achieve your long term goal. Instead, forgive yourself, let your slip up go and ask yourself what small action you can take to get yourself back on track.
Resources we recommend:
- Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. Change your mindset by changing your fear driven thoughts.
- Grit: Why passion and resilience are the secrets to success by Angela Duckworth. A Times bestseller about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that (not talent or luck) makes all the difference.
- The Simplifiers Podcast with our CEO Mary, featuring expert guests! You’ll learn how and why changing your mindset is the key to simplifying and improving your life and business.
Have you heard our latest podcast episode?
Find all of our episodes hosted by our CEO – Mary Baird Wilcock, CSEP HERE!
