How to stay motivated and accomplish your goals

What is a goal?

This could be a good time to have a think about how to accomplish your goals especially when you could be home working, furloughed or looking for another job. The goals could be around how you are going to cope over the next weeks ahead and moving forward when you are back in your usual place of work or would you prefer to work from home?

How disciplined are you working from home and not off doing other things when you should be working? It can be difficult as you know the washing needs to go on, you may need to tidy up and clean and the list can go on.

Your goal could be that you would like a change of job, promotion or improve your performance in your current job or you have had enough and want a completely new challenge.

Goals help us be more motivated and help us focus on what is important to achieve. They can have a positive effect on our performance helping us to be more confident and raise our self-esteem.

Research has shown that people are very likely to stick to a plan if they have identified their own goals.  A goal may be a short, medium or long-term one and can be from one week, one month to three months and then six months and a year. The best thing is to take one small step at a time.

By setting goals it helps you to focus on what is important and what is worth taking time to achieve.  It helps you stay motivated and accomplish your goals.

Goal setting helps to:

• Identify what you really want
• Help you to focus on how to get there
• Develop an action plan
• Keep going until the goal is achieved and then reward yourself and possibly move on to another goal

A goal is something that we would like to achieve; what is important to us and will help us to reach our goal within a specific time frame. You can have one or more than one goal if you feel that you can work towards them both. I always make sure that I have a goal and keep a note of it so that I can see it on a daily or weekly basis. Some people have an image as a screensaver to remind them on a regular basis.  

To get motivated, you need to make sure you sleep well and here are Top Sleep Tips 

Goals ideally should be SMART

• Specific – it needs to be specific to your needs rather than being generic
• Measurable – this could be the amount of times you carry out an action relating to the goal. An example could be if you wanted more customers then this could be measured on a weekly or a monthly basis.
• Achievable – it is essential that you are able to achieve your goal even if it stretches you slightly but not to such an extent that it is causing you to get stressed about it.
• Realistic – it does need to be realistic for you and what you wish to gain from it.
• Timescale – this will enable you to focus on when you should have reached your goal. Give yourself either one, three or six months initially. You can have longer term goals.

An example of a goal setting template is below but if you would like a template, please complete the contact form and one will be sent to you.

Write your goal here

My goal is to …………………………………………………………………………………

Steps to take to accomplish your goals

1.

2.

3.

Target date                                                                 Achieved date

More details about goal setting – ted.   https://www.ted.com/topics/goal-setting