Chapter 6: Sustaining your Motivation for Long Periods of Time
Some of your goals might be achieved within a few months and others will take years. Some life goals might even take decades. Throughout all of that, you are going to have to preserve and keep going on your goal for long periods of time, and years may not seem like a long time now, but when you are trying to work towards a goal daily, the days, weeks and months stretch out there and seem interminable. That’s why you are going to need a strategy to help you stay motivated over the long term, and the perfect way to do that is with bite-sized goals.
Before we get started on that, you should be aware of something. Many people when they are setting goals and trying to get motivated set unrealistic goals. That is going to be a huge problem for your motivation because you will know inside that you can’t achieve the goal, or at least, in the time allotted.
For example, if you are trying to lose a hundred pounds, setting a goal to achieve that in a month is absolutely unrealistic. No one can lose 25 pounds a week, no matter what kind of a diet they are on, and even if by some fluke, a person lost that much, there is no way it could be sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it would be extremely unhealthy.
This is also true of other goals that you might be considering. If you are trying to become independently wealthy, you should probably give yourself more than six months to get there, unless of course, you plan on using the lottery as your method for achieving that goal. Good luck with that. If your goal is to be a pop star, you aren’t going to get there next week or even next year if your pitch is bad. You will have to practice and take lessons and many other things on the road to stardom.
Bite-sized Goals
In order to achieve your goals without losing motivation, you are going to need to break them up into bite-sized pieces. Have you heard the old adage; how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time of course. That’s the whole point here. If you think about all the steps involved in getting you to your goal and how long it will take to arrive there, you will probably get pretty discouraged. But when you break a goal down to bite-sized, you are able to basically just put one foot in front of the other without worrying too much about the destination. So, how is that done?
The first thing you need to do is have a plan from chapter five already completed. Since you know the major steps involved in achieving your goal, you can now break that step down into bite-sized segments. Let’s take the weight loss goal that we have been using throughout this entire chapter.
You have a weight loss goal section that says to lose 25 pounds. That might take two months, three months or even longer. No matter what your period of time is, that’s your goal segment – your point from achieving one milestone to achieving the next.
Now, if you wanted to break this particular weight loss goal down, you could make it simple: Lose 2 pounds per week, for a total of 12-13 weeks to achieve this goal. However, you don’t have to do it weekly if you would prefer not to. Instead, you can simply break the goal down into five equal segments of five pounds.
This is basically how bite-sized goals work and whatever goal you are setting, you can always break it down further and give yourself a much smaller, more manageable and ultimately more achievable goal.
The last Episode is on its way, see you soon.
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