Many of our most important goals cannot be accomplished in just a few days or weeks. Success often takes many months, even years, of determination, which can be very draining to even the most self-disciplined.  To stay energised and working towards your goals, you need the right fuel.

Here are a few practical ways to stay energised and motivated to keep working towards your goals, all year round.

Set Realistic Expectations

When setting goals, it’s important to keep realistic expectations, especially if your goals will require months or years of effort and hard work to achieve. The best goals are those that prompt us to grow.

They cause us to reach just outside of our comfort zone and skill level. They require some effort to achieve, but are neither too difficult or easy to accomplish.

When setting medium range and long-term goals, keep your motivation high by breaking larger goals into smaller ones. This allows you to more easily measure your progress and take corrective action if you need to along the way.

Define Your Why

When defining your goal, it’s important for you to understand your true reason for setting the goal in the first place. Important questions to ask yourself are why does this goal matter to you?

What do you hope to accomplish? What is the true, “higher” purpose that you are working towards by setting this goal?

Defining your why and keeping it at the forefront of your mind, will help to strengthen your resolve as you push towards your goal.

Hold Monthly Success Meetings with Yourself

One way to remain enthusiastic about your goal is to hold yourself accountable on a regular basis. Hold regular monthly meetings with yourself to review your performance.

Reflect on the progress that you’ve made towards accomplishing your goals during the past month. Have you had any big wins? Or Setbacks?

What could you have done differently to make more progress? Is there anything that you’ve learned in the past month that will help you as you move forward?

As you wrap up your monthly review, don’t forget to set yourself up for success for the next month.  What actions do you need to do, moving forward, to achieve your goal? Focus your attention and effort on those smaller goals to help you remain motivated and advance your cause forward.

Be Accountable

Another way to strengthen your resolve and make it easier to achieve your goals is to recruit an accountability partner. Enlist the help of a close friend, mentor or coach with which you can share your struggles and wins.

Simply having someone to listen to you is invaluable for remaining motivated over the long term. An accountability partner can offer you unbiased insight and advice, but most importantly they will encourage you and spur you on when you your energy levels fall and your motivation begins to flag.

Executive coaching in particular is a great way to find someone with the experience and background to  offer constructive advice to help you define realistic goals and keeping pushing towards greater levels of success.

Here’s to fuelling yourself to success!