7 Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success

Have you ever had the experience of setting a goal for yourself and working towards it only to find yourself at a completely different destination than you originally chose?  If so, you’ll value these helpful tips and strategies for staying on track.

In Jacqueline Kelm’s book, The Joy of Appreciative Living, Your 28-Day Plan to Greater Happiness in 3 Incredibly Easy Steps, she describes these 7 Steps for Staying on Track to help you reach your goals.  I’ve paraphrased them here to share with you as they’re loaded with great ideas.  Enjoy!

1. Create Positive Rituals:  Rituals are behaviours we repeat automatically.  One way to create a positive ritual is to specify ahead of time exactly when, where and how we will do the positive activity.  By thinking ahead and planning where, when and how we will incorporate an activity into our lives, we are more likely to do it and repeat it.
2. Track Your Results:  Tracking our results allows us to see our progress and boost our enthusiasm about achieving our goals.  Reflecting on our overall experience, we notice changes and the perceived success will motivates us to continue the journey.  Results can be tracked by creating a checklist or spreadsheet that gets check off when a task is accomplished.  Or it can be as simple as reviewing past work and results and comparing them to today.
3. Reward Your Success:  When we experience the pleasure of a reward after doing a new activity, our brain secretes chemical neurotransmitters that reinforce the changes we just made.  To determine a reward, make a list of the things you enjoy, and then select one of them to use as your reward for a given week.  It can be as simple as enjoying a cup of your favourite drink or a round of golf.  The thought of the reward motivates us to do what we know we should and want to do.
4. Create Novelty: In reality anything we do for an extended period of time eventually loses its excitement factor.  Shifting or adjusting things a bit can keep them interesting and exciting. Get creative and find new ways to keep doing what’s important to you.  For example, try the non-dominant hand writing on your Friday mornings or spend part of the time with eyes closed visualizing your ideal (leadership, situation, upcoming meeting etc).
5. Get Inspired:  Inspiration comes from a distinctly positive source. (Whereas motivation can come from either)  One way to build inspiration is to create a future image so compelling that everything in you wants to make it happen.  Make your image of the ideal and describe everything about it as detailed as possible.  Visualizing the ideal inspires us to complete the activities we know will get us there.
6. Partner with Someone or Join a Group:  The key here is accountability.  Having either a program or a partner to hold us accountable to our goals will increase our probability of success. (Consider how this works with the major weight-loss programs).  One tactic is sharing our goals with another person – someone who will be supportive of our desires.
7. Do it Anyway: There are days when we just don’t feel like doing things differently; things we know will bring us closer to our goals.  We can revisit our ‘ideal vision’ for motivation or we can ‘just do it’, knowing it will bring us what we really want.