Page 72 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

you can check your progress toward your outcome goals. You can adjust your

process goals to take you closer to the outcomes you want, and always keep the
two in harmony.

Let’s say it’s now the end of a long, hard day. You have a half hour before
you have to go home. If you’re not in the habit of setting process goals, you
might say, “I guess I ought to do some paperwork or make a call or two before I
go home.” You look at the pile of paper on your desk, or you mindlessly thumb
through phone numbers, and all of a sudden someone comes by your desk to
chat. Because you have nothing specific to do you engage in conversation and,
before you know it, the half hour is gone and you have to go home. Even though
you didn’t leave anything specific unfinished, you still have that vague feeling of
having wasted time.

Now what happens if you use that half hour to set and achieve a process

goal? “Before I go home tonight I’m going to send out two good letters of
introduction with all my marketing material included.” Now you have a process
goal and only a half hour in which to do it. When the person comes by your desk
to chat, you tell him you’ll have to talk to him later because you’ve got some
things that have to get out by five.

People who get into the swing of setting small goals all day long report a
much higher level of consciousness and energy. It’s as if they are athletes
constantly coaching themselves through an ongoing game. They are happier
people because their day is being created by the power inside their own minds,
and not by the power of the world around them.

51. Advertise to yourself

I often start the day by drawing four circles on a blank piece of paper.

The circles represent my day (today), my month, my year, and my life.

Inside each circle I write down what I want. It can be a dollar figure, it can be
anything, and the goals can change from day to day—it doesn’t matter. There is
no way to get this process wrong.

But by writing the goals down, I am like an airline pilot who is consulting a
map prior to takeoff. I am orienting my mind to what I am up to in life. I am
reminding myself of what I really want. We wouldn’t think, before an airline
flight, of poking our heads into the cabin and saying to the pilot, “Just take me