September. Everyone back to work after summer. Hopefully, with a renewed sense of excitement and perspective.
We all know the saying “can’t see the wood for the trees” but how often does that occur? Do you get caught up in the day to day tasks and boring jobs and lose sight of the end, the Crazy goal? It is easy to get so bogged down with everything you forget why you’re doing it in the first place!
In Ben and Harriet’s book it explains how, although the team had the Crazy goal of winning a Gold medal, which when you think about is pretty exciting; having it put round your neck, standing on the podium with your team singing the National Anthem, making your country proud, etc etc., they still needed plenty of motivational strategies to keep them going. When you look at the day to day things Ben and the crew had to do to get to the Gold medal it’s pretty dull...getting up at 5am every morning for 6 years, doing painful weight training in a damp, cold boat shed, eating 7000 calories a day, getting enough sleep while your mates are all out having fun and the list goes on... So, it’s not surprising that sometimes they needed help to keep them motivated to stay on track!
Essentially, even Olympians need motivational strategies to keep them going. Just the glimmer of having a chance to win a Gold medal is sometimes not enough. And for you, the promise of achieving your goal at the end may sometimes not be enough – it’s so far away and it’s the daily tasks now that are the difficult things. In the book there are a handful of useful motivational tips, but one of that jumps out at me here is ‘make the journey entertaining’. You are on a journey towards your goal, you want to achieve your goal, so why not make the journey there easier by making it fun!? What could you do to make the day to day stuff a bit more entertaining? Examples we’ve seen include:
- Watching TV whilst ironing
- A retail store team doing a dance before they opened on Monday morning
- Sales teams having bingo competitions where you have to smuggle words into your next sales call
What could you do to make your journey more entertaining?
Sometimes having a break gives you the space and perspective you need to re-excite yourself with that Crazy goal, sometimes we need more. How often do you lose sight of where you’re going and, more importantly, why you’re going there? Don’t wait until your next break to gain perspective and get excited again!
Why not take 5 minutes every day for the next week to just sit and daydream about that vision, your Crazy goal? See what happens...
