How To Stay Motivated In Business

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey, Hey, welcome to this week's episode. And. As you may know, I come from a long background in corporate. And when I first started my business, I was kind of determined to prove how different we are as small businesses from corporate. I was super bitter about my exit and everything that had happened to me. And I didn't really want to take anything from corporate into my new world with me, but the more time I spend working on my own small business with other people's small businesses. The more, I realized that all business is fundamentally the same. Sure. The culture can be different. The, what you sell can be different. The how you serve can be different, but the actual DNA of the business remains largely unchanged. So today I want to take one of my favorite things from big business to help you stay the course in your small business so they'd start with a question. What do you think? The number one thing is the drives, how happy you are at work. in a Harvard study into employees in a work-life Teresa Amabel and Steven Kramer. Came up with the progress principle. They discovered that the number one thing, driving a happy inner work-life was not money or your colleagues or status or promotions, but simply progress towards a meaningful goal. Now I'm bringing this to you today for you, not for your team, not for how you get your quote unquote employees motivated. But to help you manage yourself better so that you can stay motivated and productive. Now, I think as entrepreneurs, the first requirement is pretty easy, a meaningful goal. We all spend an awful lot of time talking about our why, talking about why our why is very important to us. We visualize ourselves getting there. We talk about it in content. We put it in copy. We use it to connect with people. for the meaningful goal aspect of it, we've pretty much got that down. The second part of the principle though, is a little bit more complicated. It takes a little more thought, takes a little more planning. The problem with progress is you're not hitting huge goals every week. huge goals require you to have time to complete them. And even if you break it down into sub projects, you're still not hitting those sub projects every single week. So we need to find a way to keep our inner work self going and motivated and happy in between those bigger milestones that we're setting. And we do that by tracking even the smallest steps we make towards a big, meaningful goal. Even the smallest amount of progress will add to your work-life experience. So two, systematize this to make it a regular thing. I recommend you take 30 minutes at the end of the week, just to reflect on how that week went, but I'm going to give you five prompts you can use when you're thinking about your week. so first of all, how did the week go? What went well, what felt a little off and what went badly now? I know all the high vibe tribe out there, like, Oh, we don't want to focus on the negative. I want you to think about the last part about what went badly, because in the same way, progress helps you feel happier. The progress principle study found that Hassell had the exact opposite effect. So every time you were being pulled out of flow to deal with a firefight, every time you're being bugged with something small and meaningless, it is pulling you away from that motivation away from that happy in a work-life. So it's really important that you pay attention to it. So that you can try and prevent it in the coming weeks. This is not a let's stick our heads in the sand and pretend it didn't happen. Kind of place. Number two, did I stick to my priorities? Did I do what I said I was going to do? Or did I get distracted by the urgent instead of doing the important. This is a really good place to think about where you personally allowed yourself to step away from your priorities lace around. Okay. This huge thing happened. And therefore I had to step away from my priorities, but more where did I not step up where I needed to? Where did I not move the needle? Where I had promised myself, I was going to, this is really what you're holding yourself accountable to doing what you said you were going to do. Number three your time, where are you spending your time through the week? If you're not already tracking your time, you really should be. You need to have a real sense of where you are spending time on $1 activities instead of thousand dollar activities. Those $1 activities need to be automated or delegated versus the ones that really need you and your zone of genius that are the much higher ticket activities. Now, you're not going to remember that you got pulled into an hour of something or other. That was a $1 activity when you get to the end of the week. So this kind of tracking needs to be happening the whole way through the week. And then your end of week review is simply looking at what was the ratio of that? Where do you need to think about automation and delegation and before is your metrics. And this should go beyond. How much money did I make? You should have KPI's for any big goal that you're working towards. You should have KPIs for that progress. You should know. For example, if you have a sales goal, how many leads do you need versus how many did you bring in? How many sales calls did you have versus how many did you need? How many did you close? What does that percentage look like versus last week versus your goal? any kind of goal that you have said, KPIs are really going to help you map your progress. And finally, you should be thinking about next week, what's on deck. What needs doing what's important next week? What are your priorities and what will progress look like next week? For you to get to the end of the week and feel like, okay, I made good progress towards this meaningful goal. What needs to happen doing that kind of reflection for next week now really allows you to just set yourself up to win next week, rather than arriving. First thing on a Monday, putting your butt into a chair. And then, huh? What was I going to do this week already harder for you to get momentum? I would love for you to give it a try and come back to me. Let me know how you found your motivation changes over the next couple of weeks with this kind of progress tracking.


If your business currently feels like a marathon, you’re not alone. 

Key Takeaway

The key to a happy work life where you feel motivated and enthusiastic is being able to see progress towards your goals

In This Episode

  • How the Progress Principle applies to small businesses
  • Why progress is important as a CEO
  • How to track progress in your business

Leave a Comment





This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.