How to Stay Motivated to Succeed

© by Patricia Brucoli

One of the best things about working from home is the freedom.  It is great not to be under deadlines and pressure, all the more so if you have spent all of your adult life working for someone else. Of course you are still accountable to your partners and customers, but it’s just not in the same spirit as it was when you had a ‘boss’. 

The downside is it may be hard to stay focused at times. While there are some tasks you will need to perform, especially initially to get your business started, once it is up and running, you will find you have time on your hands. To some, that is the whole idea of having a home business!

Many mentors and coaches emphasize the necessity to ‘psyche’ yourself constantly about becoming a success in your own mind. To practice what will feel like to achieve your goals. This same method can be instrumental in keeping you motivated.

If you have goals, then you have set timeliness and possibly monetary or other milestones you want to achieve.  These can act as looming deadlines, if you find yourself getting lazy or feeling unmotivated. As well, the act of becoming successful, would necessitate taking the actions to reach your goals.

Scheduling your day is also helpful. You are free to take a couple hours for lunch, or even more for an outing from time to time.  If you really enjoy or need to have a loosely structured life, you could just commit to working for a certain amount of hours for specific tasks, which will help you reach your target. No one to say that can’t be in the evening or even the middle of the night!

I have always considered myself organized, in part because I had ‘to do’ lists and I really heralded this as the reason I was able to ‘multi-task’ and work under pressure without missing a beat.  The problem with this is if you have one list with everything you know you have to do, it is messy and disorganized once you start checking things off.  Not to mention what you don’t do that you were supposed to.

If you have more on there than you can do in one day, you start to feel you are falling behind. This is discouraging and stressful, because you are just not cutting it! You start to worry.  I never could understand before, why they always associate anxiety with depression. To me, one state is nervous and the other is a dull and sludgy feeling.  Now I understand why they go hand-in-hand. Think about it. It makes sense.

When I took a mini- course from a popular online mentor, I learned why a To-Do list can create the opposite effect than the one we would desire. I learned to have several lists. One list where I put all my thoughts down each day, including the things I need to do; One list that breaks out the things on the first list into manageable chunks by degrees – this week, this month, this year; Another list of things that need to be delegated, or which require interaction of some kind with someone else, and this list includes a ‘projected completion or deadline’ column; Also, there is a “wish list” of things that include long-range plans.
 
Finally, I have my To-Do-Today List. It is very important that I only include the things that I (think) I know I can accomplish today. Of course, I can’t fire myself if I don’t get a few things done, so these unfinished things would be crossed out and put on one of the other lists. The last list is kind of an archive – It isn’t today, it isn’t tomorrow, it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and will possibly never get done. I just put it in the archive for future reference and forget about it for a while.

What I have also learned is to take consistent action – no matter how small, toward my target goal. A closing to many of my diatribes to people who get discouraged when starting up a new business, is ‘transform the energy you are using to feel discouraged, into determination’. Then I say ‘keep pushing forward’.  I think this is good advice, and when you say it to yourself, it really does feel a lot like motivation.