Experts believe that we are on the cusp of informational apocalypse,
As of the writing of this blog, there is an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes created every day. That’s 25 with 30 zeros or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes…
And that’s just one day…with all that information ideas always flowing in. And we as human beings keep consuming more information. That’s the biggest enemy of clarity. An endless, disjointed consumption of more and more ideas.
We typically end up worrying about the 20 possible ways of doing step 30 when we haven’t even done step 3 thinking that perhaps the next blog we read will have another possible solution to the problem that I have down the road.
Creating Bite-Sized Goals
However, simplicity breeds action.
And the best way to breed action is with bite-sized goals. Goals that are realistic, obtainable, and focused.
The first thing that I recommend that you do, every time that you set a goal (no matter how big or small), is to set an end date for yourself to accomplish that goal. This creates a deadline, and that when you have a deadline you stay focused on the task at hand and hurry to beat it. You have to be realistic with yourself! Too many entrepreneurs that I know set goals for themselves that are simply not achievable in the timeline that they’ve given themselves.
Consequences Spurs Motivation
When you fail to meet a goal you are creating a habit for yourself that not meeting goals is acceptable and something that you can brush off. You are literally creating a habit in yourself where you lose over and over again, without consequence. This is not good! You must set your goals up so that you can achieve them 100% of the time!
Give yourself a penalty for not completing your goal, and make it painful! In the mastermind group that I lead I have all of my students set goals for themselves for every single week. They also create their own penalty if they do not achieve those goals. Those penalties could be as simple as 10 push-ups, or as disruptive as cutting out coffee from their diet. Other penalties that seem to work really well are writing a check to a local charity or doing a physical exercise that you simply hate doing, like running or Burpees.
If you are aiming to be a higher achiever, a top producer, a leader, then you cannot allow excuses to take root in your mind.
Rewards Keep Us Moving Forward
In the same vein as setting up penalties for not completing your goals, you also need to celebrate your victories! I recommend that you set up a celebration/reward scale so that when you achieve small goals you get a small reward, but when you achieve your big goals you get a huge reward! A lot of what I am teaching in this blog post really comes down to mindset and how our mind works.
We work better when we have a deadline.
We want to avoid pain (so we create penalties for not achieving the goal)
We want to be rewarded.
If we understand how our mind works, then we can set up systems so that we can achieve our goals, meet our desired outcome and have fun doing it!
I would love to help you achieve your goals! Please reach out to me and let me know how I can support you!