Do you spend your time dreaming of doing something different but never actually getting round to it?
Do you have dreams of starting your own business, embarking on a great trip, creating a new garden or maybe changing something about yourself that you feel is holding you back in life?
Do you start each week with the best of intentions but find your enthusiasm wains or you just lose focus as the demands of the week seem to take over? Or perhaps you hear the little voice in your head telling you that you will never achieve what you are aiming for, you are undisciplined, not clever enough or just generally useless?
Is that really true? It’s easy to think that if we really want something if we persevere and give it our best we will succeed but we usually have many different demands on our time and energy. So how do we keep our focus and motivation so we achieve the changes we want to make?
One of the reasons that our plans fail to launch is because we don’t put in the time properly creating our plans and going through the key stages that will enable us to reach our end goal.
Choose
Strange as it may sound just choosing precisely what we are going to do is the first crucial step. We often have more than one thing on our list and sometimes we try put our energy and focus in multiple directions but it unless you have super self discipline it’s a real challenge to progress with more than one major project at a time. So make a list and decide what it is you want to achieve most. This might take a few days of list writing and mulling over, make sure you are choose the one thing you are most committed to and you may even end up with a slightly different end goal after you have spent this time deciding.
Research and Nurture
Now this is the key step we tend to skip. This is when we need to do some ground work and if we don’t it’s a bit like building something without foundations. You need to visualise, use your imagination and really spend some quality time thinking about how your idea needs to be developed, give it your full attention, make space in your day to do this. and really spend some quality time thinking about how your idea needs to be developed, give it your full attention, make space in your day to do this. You will also need to your research, find out information, put together quotes if appropriate and get real inspiration flowing. Use different resources, libraries, magazines, a trip to garden, and talk to people who have information that will be of use to you.
First Steps
Now it’s time to start doing something, taking those first steps and deciding how much time and when you can dedicate to the project. Schedule the time and commit to it and set some milestones and a regular time to review your progress.
Rev it up
It’s important to keep momentum, if you don’t stick to your plan and keep up consistent activity it’s very easy to let things go off the boil. It’s worth reviewing your previous steps and reminding yourself of all the exciting thoughts you had in those initial planning stages.
Review and Reflect
Now is the time to take a step back and think about how things are shaping up. You might need to re adjust, has what you have done so far really what you want you want. Perhaps you need to make adjustments. Are you happy with what you have created so far? Is it on track or do you need to alter things, even remove and rethink what you have done. It’s a chance to tweak and reassess.
Completion
Once you are sure it’s done and you have completed your final touches you can share your success and celebrate.
Good luck and don’t skip any steps!