Raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten really excited about a new, big, exciting business goal and then gotten about 20% into the project when you decided it wasn’t fun anymore.

*Me! Me! Me!*

Life is complicated. Things don’t ever go exactly to plan. It’s messy and complex and chaotic.

As creatives, you and I are prone to getting new ideas at the worst possible times and find it difficult to focus on a boring ol’ goal when there’s a shiny new idea on the horizon.

But as business owners, movers, and shakers, the only way we can realize the true potential of our ideas is by taking the boring, mundane, often unenjoyable actions that bring them to life.

 

“Action expresses priorities.”  

Mahatma Gandhi

It took me 2 years of running my business to start blogging consistently because “I didn’t feel like it.”

I was all about “going with my creative flow” and my creative flow was not a fan of blogging.

Frankly, my creative flow is not a fan of doing anything when it’s supposed to. My creative flow is still not a fan of blogging. Or recording videos. Or writing sales pages. Yet I still manage to do all of these things on a regular basis.

The so-called secret?

I got over myself and started taking the actions that I needed to take to have the business that I wanted to have.

Specifically, I started adding more fun and accountability into my daily responsibilities by creating systems that would make working toward my goals much easier.

 

 

Here are 6 strategies that I use every single day to consistently take action toward my goals even when I’m bored and uninspired:

#1 Stop being a perfectionist + start embracing things as they are

The key to happiness is loving the hell out of your current situation no matter how far away it is from your ideal life.

Frankly, nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever. This is actually my new motto and it makes me feel so much more free knowing that I don’t have to execute the plan exactly how it’s written down.

When working toward a goal, you need to remain agile. If your goal is to spend $100 on Facebook Ads to add 50 people to your list, but the ads are more expensive than you thought… you might need to change your strategy.

Ask yourself the following questions when your plan gets off track:

• What is the end goal?
• Is this action / strategy getting me towards my end goal? Is the effort / cost worth it?
• If not, what other strategies could I explore? In other words, what’s the backup plan?

“Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.”

Jack Canfield

 

 

#2 Stop working like a dog + start giving yourself 20% creative freedom

You just might be rebelling against your action plan because it’s choking you to death!

Us creative types love to complain about sticking to a specific schedule. We crave freedom and rebel against too much structure.

Knowing that about yourself, then, why would you assign yourself more tasks than you can possibly handle in a day?

Keep these things in mind:

• Every project will take longer than you think it will
• You can’t tackle more than 3 main priorities in one day
• You need freedom to explore new ideas even as you’re working towards your current goals.

Google famously gives their employees 20% creative time to work on personal projects outside the scope of their work. Why would you not do the same for yourself?

 

#3 Stop measuring results + start measuring actions

This is one of the biggest “ahas” I’ve experienced in the past 6 months: It’s better to measure the things you can control than the things you can’t.

You can’t control your revenue.

You can’t control your list size.

You can’t control your website traffic.

You can control how many leads you contact.

You can control how many blog posts you write with content upgrades.

You can control how often you post to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram…

Measure the actions you take, not just the results of those actions. You can’t control the results, but you can control your output.

 

 

#4 Stop setting long-term goals + start setting 12-week goals

Since switching to a 12-week goal setting system, my business has brought in consistent revenue every month of 2016 for the first time ever.

The idea here is that one year is too much time. Sure, you can and should set an annual revenue goal, list goal, etc. But doesn’t it seem really far away?

When you set 12-week goals, each week becomes the equivalent of one month. Here are some of my favorite benefits of 12-week planning:

• You can harness your motivation for a shorter amount of time.
• You get to move on to a new goal / project faster.
• It’s easier to stay focused on specific actions.
• You will quadruple your productivity.

Every successful entrepreneur who I admire uses 12-week goal setting. It took me a long time to figure this out because some of them call it quarterly, 3 month, 90 day. But it’s all the same thing!

Psst! The best resource to get started with 12- week goal setting is the book The 12 Week Year (affiliate link) by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. I read this book 2x over the holidays and have been implementing their strategies ever since. It’s BRILLIANT and ridiculously action-oriented (in fact, that’s the whole point!).

 

“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

 

#5 Stop doing it alone + start enlisting other people

Let me confess something: The biggest reason why I was able to start blogging on a regular basis is because I hired a team. In fact, I go over my team’s exact blog publishing process in this post.

We didn’t start as a team of three, though. It started with me being an unorganized business owner asking my new VA to help me get my blog post published every week. My systems were laughable. It doesn’t matter. We made it happen and constantly upgrade and improve our process.

Investing in a Virtual Assistant was a big deal for me when I did it. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could cover the cost, but I knew I needed to do it if I expected to take my business seriously.

Here are some ways to enlist other people to hold you accountable:

• Get an accountability partner who also wants to stay focused on her goals. You can find people in Facebook groups within the next hour.
• Hire a VA and start documenting the step-by-step process to publish your blog each week.
• Join a mastermind group where you will hold each other accountable every week to take specific actions toward your goals. You’re way more likely to follow through this way because you won’t want to let your fellow masterminders down.

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

Confucius

 

#6 Stop pursuing “shiny objects” + start using a backburner

In tip #2 I told you that you should give yourself 20% creative time to work on other projects.

This is the part where I tell you that you need to focus the other 80% of your work time on the actions that will help you to accomplish this specific goal.

What happens when you get a new idea or get inspired about something else you could add?

• Put it on the backburner. I learned this trick from my friend and mentor Natalie MacNeil. She had her new brand SoulSeconds.com on the backburner for 2 ½ years before finally launching it. This is a brand that she created in her 20% “free time” when she wasn’t working diligently on her main She Takes on the World brand.
• Keep a log of ideas in Evernote. I have at least 100 blog, product, and business ideas written down in Evernote. I don’t have time to work on these projects right now, but I want to record them so that when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up where I left off.

You are absolutely capable of sticking to the program and doing what it takes to hit your goals.

To help you implement the tips from this article, I’ve created an extensive workbook to help you stay motivated throughout the process and track your goals using the process that I personally use.

 

 

 

Tell me in a comment below: What’s the one most important goal that you need to stay focused on right now in your business?