Consistency is king when it comes to meeting and exceeding your goals. It does not matter if you are seeking to attain greater physical fitness, find the love of your life, or attain financial independence as a result of entrepreneurial activities. Success comes to those who are able to focus their attentions in a logical and consistent way which matches their energetic output with the goals they are hoping to reach.
Set Clear and Achievable Goals
If you are not working towards clear and achievable goals on a daily basis, you are simply spinning your wheels. It is not enough to simply dream of some advantageous future moment and hope that things will fall into place. Sure you might at times luck out but more often than not you will lose attention and fail to capture what you truly want. Instead of settling, maybe it’s time to finally reach and exceed all the marks you have dreamt up for yourself.
The clearest difference between the abstract landscape of dreams and the concrete one of goals is the presence of a deadline. Having a dream is an excellent starting point. To take things a step forward, match your dreams with a clear, achievable linear action plan in the form of deadlines. Deadlines force you to act in effect destroying apathy and reinforcing the necessity to achieve what you need to do reach the success that you have defined for yourself.
Dedicate Yourself to Process
Make the choice to celebrate consistency over all else. Whether you were up later than you planned or you slept soundly and got all the rest you needed, there is work to be done. Do not fall into the trap of only working towards your goals when it is convenient or appealing to you based on your mood. When you are working under a deadline, you don’t have the ability to neglect what needs to be done because you simply do not feel like it.
While imagining a gun placed to your head may be too dramatic for most, when you truly value the importance of the goals you are seeking to reach and the deadlines connected to them, you will not sacrifice precious time simply because you can. It will never be easier tomorrow unless you suck it up today. Everyone faces tragedy and unforeseen obstacles, everyone gets thrown off course and loses sight of what is really important. The difference between the most successful people in the world and those who are never able to achieve the outcomes the seek is simple: consistency.
Rinse and Repeat
Discipline is everything. Everyone wants to feel like they won the Super Bowl but how many of us are willing to train like a professional athlete? No one is going to do it for you, you need to decide that you have the discipline reach the success you desire. There is no easy way to the top. There is no simple path to glory. You will no doubt have to make sacrifices along the way. Accept this and decide once and for all: what do you really want and what is it worth to you?
Consistency is all about establishing patterns that become automatic. Right now, in your professional and personal life you likely have a myriad of things you are conditioned to do without thinking. When you can automatically work towards your goals without having to think about how or why, you are your way to achieving everything that you set your mind towards. You have conditioned yourself into the pattern of planning, evaluating and conquering your goals. You have transformed your abstract dreams into concrete goals and you have made a clear action plan for achieving them. You have begun to harness the power of habit to accept nothing less than the success you seek.
Track Your Progress Â
So even the best laid plans often go astray. For so many aspiring entrepreneurs, this is exactly what throws them off course and prevents them from reaching the goals that they hold dear. They are unable to pivot and to respond to new challenges as they arise because they are too beholden to the strategic game plan they laid out for themselves. This is why tracking progress is so important. It is really easy to be motivated in the beginning of any new project. You’ve done your homework, you made a clear and achievable plan but then slowly but surely, things start to unravel, you lose traction and the progress you made slowly erodes. To avoid this, as realistically as you formulate your goals, you must create a plan for assessing your progress.
It could be as simple as checking in with yourself multiple times a day, week or month to evaluate. You need to know your areas of strength as well as the areas to strengthen. The more you build tracking progress into the way you tackle goals, the more reinforced you will be for when things start to go awry. You will have less blind spots and a better sense of what needs to be done as problems arise. It is not enough to simply create goals, you must evaluate your progress.
Using deadlines is one clear way to achieve this based on time another could be schedule daily, weekly and monthly times when you take a good hard look at your strategic action plan and modify it in response not to what was but to what is. The world is always changing and the dynamics that were in play when you set out very well may have changed. If you cannot change with your challenges, you might succumb to them. Make a plan and hold it loosely. Be willing to pivot, to think dynamically, to get creative and to even abandon what may have felt so assured at some earlier time.
Be Resourceful
As important as it is to be responsible for reaching your goals, it is equally important to realize that you may not be able to do it all on your own. Some tasks may be within your wheelhouse and others might be better suited for others with more strategic expertise. Always be willing to ask for help, to consult the expertise of mentors who can guide you and help to take some of the burden off your shoulders.
There are many people who have already achieved exactly what you are struggling with. Instead of struggling, consider being humble and asking for assistance. You will save time and you will be better able to reach your goals. There is only so much time in any one day, week, or month. If you are getting held up and are struggling to reach deadlines, consider turning to someone who can help .
Perhaps you do not have a background in coding, instead of struggling to build a website from the ground up, consider either choosing an expert who can help to get your idea off the ground. Sure you could keep on trying and failing to create what you want or you could turn to someone who in a very short period of time could get you where you want to be.
Being successful does not have to mean doing it all yourself, it means being resourceful and securing every possible advantage you can to reach your goals. Work hard but realize that there are times when it is far better for your longterm goals to work smarter, not harder. In many cases, working smarter means being resourceful enough to know when you have bitten off more then you can chew.
If you are struggling, do not be afraid to turn to a mentor who can assist you. We are here and ready to assist you. All you have to do is ask!
