Whatever has served as the activator for you to establish your personal vision and goals in the first place, whether they are work based, life based, impact based or indeed all three! Its important to have a roadmap to keep you on track and allow you to keep focused on what really matters, so that you achieve what you want to.

Finding the motivation, building momentum and sustaining it in pursuit of your goals, is invariably not easy. Motivation plays a huge role in stating a goal in the first place and then developing the clarity and conviction to follow an actionable and achievable plan as you move forward. Critical to establishing clarity, is finding the drive you need to activate and help you as you progress towards your goals. For that, momentum is a key requirement, to keep you moving in the right direction, achieving milestones along the way, and have you feel like you’re making progress and that you will eventually make it to you destination.

Let’s explore some of the components that come together to help you sustain your energy levels, keep your focus and ultimately govern your ability to deliver; we’ll look at this in the context of a 4C’s model below:

1 – Clarity

This first C is the section where the planning takes place.  Reflection and interrogation of the proposed objectives, and what you will need to do to move forward with purposeful action, needs to take place before you start, so that you may visualise the road ahead…and ultimately the prize.

What can you do to help yourself when in this planning phase? Well, the first thing is to think clearly about what needs to happen and what it might feel like to work towards your goals. If it’s meaningful objective, with a requisite amount of stretch, its unlikely to be an easy task that you can achieve simply and quickly. Stretching and meaningful goals require careful thought and analysis about how you will approach each stage and what needs to happen throughout the process. Critical thinking is important. Think about what you have learnt in past that will help you in your quest to meet your new goals, that will help you to formulate your strategy and immediate approach and, eventually, what will this look like in terms of action as you move forward and work towards addressing the tasks required. Clarity is intrinsically tied to motivation. If an objective isn’t clear or understood, its tough to stay motivated as you work towards it.

2 – Courage

Or, to expand, summoning up the courage to get started and to make things happen.

By establishing what needs to happen and breaking it down into bite sized chunks it may become easier to identify how to move forward and which resources and support may be required. By quantifying these inputs, it can be helpful to think about how you will increase your chance of success before you run up against any challenges.

So to challenges and barriers and how, in using clarity in the goal and engaging courage to work towards it, you will have confidence to meet your challenges head on and overcome them. Some people like to crack on straight away and play what they see as issues come up, other people consider and identify potential barriers to a goal before they have appeared. Both approaches have their merits and come down to individual preference; but to ignore and not consider any potential challenges before kick-off is folly; by being best prepared to handle and overcome any barriers quickly (because you’ve thought about it in advance) is critical to building and keeping up positivity and momentum, when striving towards an objective or target. Barriers and challenges can hold you up; but planning can mitigate how long this happens for and how deeply it may impact your motivation and momentum in moving forward.

3 – Conviction

Or, if you prefer tenacity, coupled with the belief in what you are doing and that you will achieve what you set out to do, is critical in sustaining momentum. In order to stay motivated and ‘on plan’ it is important to keep track of your progress. There are lots of ways to hold yourself accountable; measuring your efforts and successes along the way. Accountability is a crucial part of the process, sometimes an accountability partner can help; in a corporate setting this may be a line manager or project manager, in other non-work settings it could be a personal coach, a personal trainer, a critical friend or even an IT based solution for example a fitness tracker if one of your goals is to get fitter; whatever works for you; but the principle is that there needs to be a point of reference that will not let you off the hook and keep you on track to achieve your goals.

4 – Celebrate

It is all too common to move from one task and straight onto the next without taking a pause and evaluating what has just happened; what has gone well and what hasn’t. It is also common not to think about celebrating successes along the way; either because we don’t judge them as important enough milestones or because we get onto the next task so quickly, the achievement just passes us by. However, celebration of ANY achievement (no matter how small the celebration is!) is a powerful tool in building and sustaining momentum and positivity when working towards goals. The journey and achievement of goals should be gratifying and, if possible, fun! Celebrate the wins as you achieve things that potentially in the past may have seemed out of reach. You’ll get there if you want to and will be convinced you have the staying power to do so. Don’t feel guilty about having fun, enjoy the journey as well as the destination!

To learn more about our approach to building momentum , please get in touch.