How to Stay Motivated to Make Your Goal

Today we’re continuing talking about deciding what you’d like to achieve and making a plan to achieve it.

This month’s True Character word is goal setting.

Last time we talked about setting a SMART goal — a Specific, Measurable, Attainable / Agreed upon, Realistic, Time-bound / Trackable goal.

A SMART goal is something we believe we can achieve, and we’ve put in a lot of steps to help us create our plan to achieving it.

But we need to begin with the end in mind. We need to have a vision of what it will look like when we achieve it.

We need to have a sense of the feeling that we will have when we achieve it.

We need to be able to close our eyes and picture it in our head.

For example, we can have a goal of earning our black belt. That’s our goal: earning our black belt. It might be a short-term goal — some of us may be blue belts. Or it may be a longer term goal.

What will that feel like?

Picture it in your head: the uniform on, the belt being tied around your waist, the people in the class and in the studio clapping for you, the pride that you will feel.

What will it feel like? What will your senses hear? What will you see? Put all of that together and imagine the end result of all of your hard work.

That’s how you stay motivated to make your goal.

That’s how you stay motivated to keep going when there are barriers or burdens or difficult times, by picturing what it will be like at the end, creating a vision board, creating that end result in your head so that you can continue to work towards that SMART goal that you have created.