Keeping motivated when going after a huge task or goal can be quite challenging. Add in a lack of maturity, discipline, or other problems, and keeping motivated can be nearly impossible. A few examples that come to mind are helping girls in my troops finish their Girl Scout Silver Awards, helping girls finish their Girl Scout Gold Awards, and selling thousands of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. In other parts of my life, those goals are things like obtaining a certain number of clients in a particular amount of time.
Notice that in each case, there is a clear, measurable goal. It is easy to know if you have sold 2000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, if you are keeping track of how many you’ve sold. It’s easy to measure how many paying clients you have- if you just count up how many clients requested hours in the last week. The key is being aware of how many you have, and how many you still have to go. If you know that you have sold 1500 boxes, and have two weeks to go in the sale, it’s pretty easy to figure out just about how many hours of cookie booths you’ll have to do to get to your goal.
Once you know where you are, you have to decide- what is it going to take to get to the goal? How many more cookie booths am I going to have to do to get to this goal? How much more marketing? What else needs to happen? Sometimes, it’s easiest if the person who is asking isn’t mom or dad, but rather an objective third party. In the business world, that could be a mentor, or a manager, or a team leader. In the case of a Girl Scout Silver or Gold Award, it’s having an advisor who asks what you’ve done, and what you still need to do. They don’ t need to do it for you, but just remind you of the goal periodically, and check to see that progress is being made.
Keeping motivated is almost as simple as setting a goal, and measuring where you are in progress towards achieving that goal. If you have someone nudging you along, it’s even better. Sounds simple, and it really is. It’s just a question of just keeping on track until you reach the goal.
Can you do it? What are your goals? Are they clear, and measurable?