In order to stay motivated as you work on your goals and dreams, you need to keep your confidence in your ability high. One way of doing this is to continually evaluate your progress. Moving forward or being successful will increase your confidence and your motivation.

But being blocked or finding out you have taken a misstep will rob you of your motivation. When things aren’t going well, you need to be open to the possibility that you have made a wrong turn; don’t just keep moving forward, just to prove that you didn’t make a mistake.

In my next two blogs I write about the when of evaluation. In the following blog I write about the how.

There are two times when you need to do an evaluation, on a regularly scheduled basis, and on an as needed basis.  You should do both. In today’s blog I explain what is meant by an evaluation done on a regularly scheduled basis. In my next blog I will explain what is meant by on an as needed basis. 

An evaluation done on a regularly scheduled basis

The reason you want to have a regularly scheduled evaluation is that you won’t always recognize when you are engaged in mindless motion. Sometimes you will not want to admit you are not getting any closer to your destination.  You need to overcome that reluctance.  By the same token you may not automatically realize that there may better ways to achieve the same results with less effort.

You need to decide how often you will do the regularly scheduled evaluation.  Will you do it weekly, or maybe monthly?  Will you perform a mini-evaluation every night and then a major evaluation every week, or perhaps you would prefer a mini-evaluation every week and a major evaluation every month?  At the regularly scheduled evaluations you review your work over the previous period to see what you have accomplished, and take time to appreciate your accomplishments.

I do a mini-evaluation every night.  Every night, as I lay in bed, before I drift off to sleep, I review my day.  This review is very short.  There are three aspects of my life that I address:  physical, intellectual and spiritual.  I review what I did that day to further my growth in each of these three aspects of my life.  Generally I have meditated, so I meet the spiritual aspect, or, if it’s Sunday I have either gone to church or done some spiritual reading. If I have worked out in the gym, or gone for a run, I meet the physical aspect.  If I have worked on my book or my workshop, or gone to Toastmasters, I meet the intellectual aspect.  Usually I have done at least two aspects, so feel kind of good about myself.  Then I tell myself what I am going to do the next day for each aspect.  I am always gentle with myself.  Even if I only do one thing that day, I just promise myself that the next day, I will do better.  Even God rested on the Seventh day.

Come back and read my next blog on Monday, the as needed evaluation.

1. Always know where you are headed. As Steven Covey, and many others before him said, “Keep the end in mind.” Write down your goals. Until they are written down, they exist only as dreams. Writing them down is the first step toward making them come true.
2. Build good habits. Although it is generally wise to be conscious, we all need to operate on automatic. Many things don’t require our constant attention. This is lucky for us, because when we get busy or overwhelmed, there is no way we can be conscious about everything we are doing or need to be doing.
   You probably do this already with many things in your life. Like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. Like putting on your sox before you put on your shoes. You don’t need to think about them.
   So expand habit making into other parts of your life. Make it a habit to start every day reviewing your goals (see tip #1), and writing down the things you need to get done that day. Make it a habit to end each day reviewing that day.  Ask yourself, “What did I do today that moved me closer to achieving my goals?”
3. Expand your social environment. Your social environment is the people and organizations that surround you and are available to you as you work toward achieving your goals. Anything in your social environment that has a positive impact is a resource; all the positive things together are your support system. Make sure your social environment is having a positive impact on you.
4. Make sure what you want to be motivated about is important to you. This is so important if you want to be motivated to achieve any goal, or make any dream come true. It has to be important for you, or you aren’t going to be motivated to do the work necessary to make it happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s important to your mate, your boss, your family or your friends. It’s got to be important to you. You can be doing it for someone else, that’s fine, so long as it’s important to you.
5. Take control of your motivation. No one else knows you well enough to motivate you as well as you can motivate yourself. The best way to take control of your motivation is by creating a plan for motivation. If you don’t know what a plan for motivation entails, I urge you to sign up for my free monthly self motivation newsletter, by entering your email address in the box to the right of this blog. It will teach you all about self motivation and how you can achieve your dreams.

In my most recent blog I shared the strategy espoused by Mark Twain, and many others since, that one way to boost your motivation when facing a large challenge is to break that challenge into many smaller challenges, and then get started on the first one. As I explained, when you do this you increase your motivation in two ways, in what I call the front end and the back end.

At the front end, as you are facing now much smaller, less imposing tasks, you feel more confident, more assured that you can do each task. This increases your confidence. At the back end, after you have completed each smaller task, you feel successful and therefore more confident and motivated to continue on with a new task.

I was asked in an email whether I had used this strategy, and if so how. My response is that it has been a very important strategy in my successful progress toward achieving my dreams.

Those of you who have been following my blog posting know my dream is to become an author and professional speaker, and to help people make their dreams come true. In the language of the model for self motivation, this is called my vision.

My vision is complex and overwhelming.  Had I just focused on it, I would have been unmotivated because of this. So instead I followed the advice of Mark Twain, and broke my vision into its component parts, or what we call in the model for self motivation, my goals.

Three of my goals were:

• 1. Find my niche, the topic on which I would write and speak
• 2. Become the author of a popular book in my niche
• 3. Become a proficient speaker.

You can see that even though I broke down my vision into its component goals, those goals were still complex and overwhelming. Consequently, I broke each one of these goals down even further, into their component tasks.

As an example, I broke down “becoming a proficient speaker” into the following tasks:

• 1. Getting training on public speaking by joining Toastmasters
• 2. Practicing speaking in church and in civic organizations
• 3. Take seminars on the business of speaking
• 4. Listening to better speakers
• 5. Enter speaker contests
• 6. Judge Tropicana speech contests

Any goal or task that is overwhelming you, can be broken down by you, just like I broke down my vision.

But don’t forget the last part of Mark Twain’s quote – and then get started. Sometimes getting started means doing this exercise – breaking your goal down into its component parts.

It’s a really good start.

Mark Twain wrote, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

This secret is a secret of motivating yourself. It you face a complex large goal, you will often find yourself overwhelmed and scared. You will not be confident that you can achieve such a goal. The model for self motivation teaches us that those feelings are not conducive to feeling motivated. You are simply not likely to attack such a goal.

And so you need to whittle that goal down in size. And the way you do that is just follow the advice of Mr. Twain, break that large overwhelming goal into its component tasks.

And if any of those tasks are overwhelming, break them down into even smaller,  subtasks, until you feel confident you can accomplish them. And then you start in on the first one.

Who am I to fine tune the master’s advice, but I think I am up to the task. The first fine tuning is for you to write down the results of the breaking down exercise. I can flat out state, in nine times out of ten, if you don’t write it down, it isn’t done. So get out the pen and paper and write down those tasks.

The second fine tuning is to prioritize the tasks you end up with. Don’t just attack the first one, because it ended up first on a list. Instead, make a conscious decision about which one should come first. Your decision might be based upon which one is easiest, or which one is more fun. Getting the first one completed will boost your confidence and increase your motivation to start on another one.

Your dream, that change you want to make in your life (I know you have one) is probably overwhelming. This might be the reason you haven’t yet made it come true. So why not start today with figuring out all the tasks you need to accomplish to make that dream come true?

You might consider making the first task signing up for a free subscription to my self motivation newsletter. It’s a simple task that you cannot fail at. Simply enter your email address in the box to the right of your screen and follow the simple directions. Start today on making that dream come true.

So many of us “go it alone.” There are be many reasons for this. For some of us, we don’t think anyone can do it as well as we can. For others, we are too shy to build our own community or even enter into a pre-existing one. Others of us are just “too busy” putting out fires to even think about being in a community. Whatever the reason, it’s not a good one.

Your social environment, the people and organizations that surround you, plays a major role in your motivation. The right social environment will give your motivation a big boost.  Joining a community of like minded people means you will be surrounded by people who can encourage you, with whom you can share your struggles and your successes, and from whom you can acquire the skills you may need to achieve your goals.

But joining a community is only the first step. You need to actively participate in it to get the advantages. Joining and not participating is like moving into a neighborhood and not meeting your neighbors. Would you do that? Yeah, me too.

So there are three steps to community building to increase your motivation:

Step one: Find your community

Step two: Join your community

Step three: Participate in your community

Computers are making community building a lot easier. All three steps can be done online.

For me, LinkedIn seems to be a great way to build my social environment. I am in one LinkedIn group for motivation, and another for public speaking. Once I retire from being a lawyer (really soon) and am able to put my full professional energy into my new career, I promise myself I will engage in these, and perhaps other LinkedIn groups.

But I also think in person communities are very important for me, and they may be for you, too. As part of my retirement I am relocating to California. When I get there I will be using meetup.com, a social website, to locate like minded persons in my new city. There are over 400 groups in the city I will be living in!  Will I join a group of authors? A group of public speakers? Maybe both?

I’m looking forward to having company on my path to success as a speaker and an author, and the help and support such company can bring.

I will be making my social environment boost my motivation. I urge you to do the same.

In today’s blog I write about the third factor in the model for self motivation. For those that haven’t been following me, the model for self motivation is a tool you can use to help you learn and apply the skill of motivating yourself. With the model for self motivation, you take charge of your motivation, making sure it stays high.

Keeping your motivation high means you will do the work that is required for you to achieve your goals and make your dream come true.

There are two elements to environment, there is the physical environment and the social environment.

Your physical environment is the place you do the work you need to do to make your dreams come true. Your physical environment varies depending on what you are trying to accomplish. For example, if your dream is to lose 25 pounds, your physical environment will include your kitchen. Two ways to make it enhance your motivation and the likelihood of achieving that dream is to make sure you have healthy, non-fattening food in your refrigerator, and buying a nice knife so preparing healthy meals is easier and more fun.

Your social environment is made up off the people and organizations that surround you and are available to you as you work on your dream. If your dream is to lose 25 pounds your social environment would include your family, whom you could enlist to work with you as you diet. It would also include organizations, for example, Weight Watchers, where you get encouragement and learn skills to help you in your pursuit.

Too many of us have great dreams that we aren’t making come true. Learning the model for self motivation and implementing it in your life will make an amazing change in how effective you are in going after your dreams.

If you are interested in learning all about the model for self motivation, and how it can make a difference in your life, I encourage you to sign up on the right side of your screen for a free subscription to my monthly self motivation newsletter.

It will make all the difference in your life.