Page 71 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

thoughts written to themselves in their own handwriting brought the whole

seminar back to them. They felt a rush of excitement and a new commitment to
take action.

Are you willing to remind yourself to treat yourself to your own best
thoughts? Are you willing to set visual traps and ambushes, so you’ll always see
words and thoughts you know you want to remember?

50. Get down and get small

The fewer goals you set each day, the more you feel pushed around by
people and events that are beyond your control. You suffer from a sense of
powerlessness. Rather than creating the reality you want, you are only reacting
to the world around you. You have much more control over the activities of your
day than you realize. By increasing your conscious use of small objectives, you
will see the larger objectives coming into reality.

Most people participating in the free enterprise system have become

thoroughly convinced of the power of setting large and specific long-range goals
for themselves. Career goals, yearly goals, and monthly performance goals are
always on the mind of a person with ambition. But often those people overlook
altogether the power of small goals—goals set during the day that give energy to
the day and a sense of achieving a lot of small “wins” along the way.

In his psychological masterpiece, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to large goals as “outcome” goals
and small goals as “process” goals. The beauty of process goals is that they are
always within your immediate power to achieve. For example, you might set a
process goal of making four important phone calls before lunch. On a sheet of
paper you make four boxes, and as you make each call you fill in a box, and
when the four are made, you file the paper in your goal folder and go enjoy

lunch. Because you’ve earned it.

You can set process goals, for example, before a conversation with a person.
I want to find these three things out, I want to ask these four questions, I want to
make these two requests, and I want to pay my client one compliment before I
leave. Process goals give you total focus. When you are constantly setting
process goals, you are in more control of your day, and you feel a sense of
skillful self-motivation. At the end of the day, or the beginning of the next day,