What keeps us motivated?
Is it the strive for excellence?
Daily inspiration found in the weirdest of places?
Or perhaps an appraisal by our peers... followers... friends?
Probably all of the above, right?
But life goes in circles and it has its ups and downs, so what is that force that can keep you focused, feed your determination, the one that gets you out of bed on a bad day, keeps you going, doing whatever it is you are doing. Especially for those of us who are working from home without a boss to answer to or a manager to keep us in check...
Ultimately, this would be your big Why
The very reason for your being on this journey that you started. Your Why is your main motivator and the core of your Goal - the person you want to be, the life you want to live. Whatever it is that you are working towards, it comes down to reaching that Goal.
But there is something else instrumental to our progress, especially on a daily or weekly basis. And this the Target.
Very often our motivation can be crushed by an early failure, rejection of a kind, an overload of studies or tools that you need to learn from a scratch and so on.
Sound familiar? I know it first hand.
Like everything else, Motivation needs nurturing and continuous stimuli.
This is when we need to utilize characteristics like responsibility and competitive spirit.
Both are responding to targets and this is how Targets are a necessary nutrient to your Motivation.
A Goal can be rather unspecific, something like, "I want to have financial freedom", "I want to be rich", "I want to have a big house..." and so on.
Great goals but too loose and unspecific.
We need to find the stepping stones that build the stairway to these Goals.
These stepping stones are your Targets.
Each Target should have set limits for both the time and the scale (size) of the end result.
For instance, "I want to sell X amount of units until the end of next month". Now this will help you be more accountable to yourself and you'll be chasing every sale and reaching toward that target on a daily basis. Now your motivation is on fire and your focus is fixed, it is much more likely that you will hit that target (provided it was not a totally unreasonable one of course, common sense need not be abandoned).
Another example, this time for a mid-term target would be, "I want to get X amount of leads by the end of this quarter." - Now your deadline is not too tight, but the numbers would be higher and you should still be waking up 2 hours earlier and jumping out of bed to start your day. And you will be motivated by your own productivity and passion too.
A generic Goal won't do that.
Set some targets, keep consistent, hit your deadlines and you will find it very rewarding. Hard work pays off and pushing yourself definitely aids your success.
Let me hear about your recent targets and did you "miss" "hit" or "exceeded" them?