Sometimes in life you find that you lose the momentum that you once had. Your level of activity towards reaching your goals goes down. You lose that fire in your belly to keep pushing. If your goal is weight loss, your diet might start to slip or you might not be exercising as much. If it is for your business, you might not be dropping as many leaflets as you were or not making those calls that you need to make.
Normally it is from something stressful happening that knocks you out of your stride and you struggle to get back on it again. I know how this feels myself. I’ve had times when I stopped going to the gym and my diet was terrible. Changing that back round to having a healthy diet and exercising regularly after a month off was really hard work!
If you don’t have a routine yet, you need to create one. That is the first step for you. If you are focused on weight loss, you need to drink more water by planning how much you will drink and when you will drink it. You need to plan your meals out ahead of time so you can keep on track.
If it is cold calling, you can set your day up where you make 5 calls between 9am and 10am, then another 5 calls at 10:30am to 11:30 am and then repeat this for the afternoon. You need to make it a routine and make it a rigid one. Nothing else can happen inside of those times.
Little Victories
You need to make your day full of little victories. Pour your large glass of water that you are going to drink and make sure that you complete that within the allotted time. If you haven’t then you need to drink it up and chalk that off as a win. When I am on my group coaching calls, I start off by asking people what their victories are. It can be anything at all that you’ve done. I find that these not only allow the person saying it to recognise how well they have done but it also gives inspiration to other members that are struggling a bit themselves. If you’re having a really, really bad day then the fact that you’ve got out of bed and put your underwear on the right way round is your victory so celebrate that. It doesn’t have to be something huge. Just keep making little wins for yourself so that you can get into the idea of winning daily.
Rewarding yourself with food that is bad for you isn’t the way to celebrate. You need to reward yourself with something that is going to be good for you. So no fish and chips because you’ve eaten well all week. Instead go for a massage, buy a good book or book a reiki session. If it is a business reward you could take the team out bowling or some other type of activity.
If you do fall off of the wagon, don’t beat yourself up. Get back to what you were doing again and start over. It isn’t the end of the world if you smoke cigs one night or eat a bag of donuts. Just get back on the routine train again and start your mission over. Take the learnings that you’ve taken about why you folded and put that into an action plan for the next time. Our slip ups are often there to show us that we’ve missed something from our planning. If you had no plans at all, then that is the thing you are missing.
If you need to lose weight, go to the gym, get changed and just sit in the changing room for 10 minutes. Then get changed back again and go home. Now I know that this sounds crazy but there is a science behind this. There is something called Summit Fever. If you’ve never heard of it before listen to Podcast 16 from my podcast show to find out more about that.
If you need to make cold calls, get your call list ready. If you are using a script then make sure that you have practised it enough times that you can now say it without it sounding like a script. Get your telephone number ready and dial up to the last digit, take a deep breath and then press in the last digit and call them.
Once you get into the habits of creating these little victories and you start making these a habit you will start to get the results. Don’t try and kid yourself that it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. Your future self is relying on you doing this. So go out there today and do something that your future self will thank you for.