Growing a successful business can be great fun, exhilarating and highly rewarding. It is also hard work. There will be times when you may feel frustrated, overwhelmed and demotivated. You may very well feel like giving up at times. Being in business can often feel like being on a rollercoaster and you may ask yourself at times why you gave up being on the hamster wheel in your last job for the rollercoaster of being in business.
How can you stay motivated to keep going to build a successful business? Here are 9 tips.
1. Get clarity on the purpose of your business
When you really believe in something, passionately, you will be inspired to take action, whatever that may be. Get really clear on the ultimate purpose of your business. Perhaps you have a product or service that can change lives? Or perhaps the purpose of your business is what its success will help you achieve in your personal life? This is what Simon Sinek famously calls your “why”. Why are you in business? If it’s not a big enough reason, it’s unlikely you will remain motivated when the inevitable tough times occur.
Once you’re super clear about the purpose of your business, make it visible as a reminder where you can see it often. Write it down or draw a picture.
2. Set goals
Once you’re clear about your reason for being in business, it’s time to set yourself some goals. Have a mix of long term and shorter-term goals. If all your goals are long term, it’s easy to put off the action needed to achieve them till some time in the future. Set yourself monthly, weekly and daily goals. Write them down and commit to them.
3. Celebrate
It’s important to reward yourself for all business successes, however small they may seem. Anticipation of a reward will help keep you motivated to keep going.
4. Learn from mistakes
Things will go wrong and you will make mistakes. It can be easy to blame ourselves for mistakes, feel negative and become demotivated. However, mistakes are valuable. We learn from mistakes. If we never made mistakes, we’d never learn anything. It might sound the opposite of what you feel like doing at the time, but it’s good to celebrate mistakes too because of the lessons they teach us. It’s crucial that we take the time to reflect and learn whenever we make a mistake. Learning different ways of doing things will help keep you motivated to build a successful business.
5. Raise your awareness
One of the most important skills for business success is to be self-aware and to take personal responsibility for everything we do. It can be easy to blame external factors of course. The fact is though that everything we say or do is a response to a thought we’ve had and our thoughts come from ourselves. Nobody makes us think anything. It’s therefore important to know what affects the way we think. Do we lose motivation, for example, if we feel rejected by someone, or does the feeling of rejection inspire us to act? When we are aware of what impacts our thought patterns and our motivation, we can take action accordingly.
6. Raise your energy
When we lose motivation our energy levels will drop. So, it’s important to keep your energy up or learn to recognise when some revitalisation is needed. Some easy ways to boost your energy are:
- Take some exercise
- Eat nutritious food
- Get out in Nature
- Meditation or mindfulness
- Do something creative
7. Change it up
There’s a risk of becoming demotivated if you spend a long time doing the same thing over and over, especially if you’re not getting results. If you spend all morning making phone calls, and don’t get to speak to anyone, that will probably cause you to feel demotivated. To avoid this happening, be sure to change things up a bit. It’s easy to get into habits that aren’t necessarily good for you. Do something different, even if it’s just starting work at a different time. Try new activities, especially something that scares you. When we do something that we’re afraid of, we get out of our comfort zone and our comfort zone immediately expands, helping us to grow on our way to business success.
8. Create the right environment
Be sure your working environment is helping to support your motivation. If it’s not an appealing place to be in, it will reduce your motivation. Maybe you need to change the space you work in. If you work with other people, do they motivate you or pull you down. Be sure to surround yourself with people who will help keep you motivated.
9. Accountability
Finally, if you find it difficult to keep yourself motivated, despite the steps above, then get yourself an accountability buddy who you get to report your progress to.
Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@thisisengineering
