How To Achieve Your Goals (When You Have No Motivation)

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Let me describe a scenario to you:

You first decide you want to start a business (whether that be a blog, an online shop, a consultancy, whatever it may be).

You’re pumped; you can’t wait to get started and finally be able to quit that job you hate, or start your own empire. You’ve been dreaming of this moment for a long time and now you’ve finally built up the courage to actually go for it.

But a month in and you feel drained. Nobody is reading your blog posts. Nobody is sharing your stuff on social media. Your phone isn’t ringing off the hook with people dying to buy your product or work with you, and your inbox isn’t blowing up with requests.

You slowly stop caring. You stop writing as many blog posts and you stop spending as much time on social media promoting your stuff. You just need a break from it all.

Who’s been here (FYI my hand is raised).

We’ve all experienced this type of burnout and as a result we totally lose our motivation to want to keep going. It’s fine to have moments of self-doubt, but it’s important to learn how to avoid burnout before it actually happens (because let’s face it, being burnt out is not beneficial to your business or yourself).

Let’s talk on the things you can do so you can keep achieving your goals, even when your motivation is slowly slipping away.

Let me describe a scenario to you: You first decide you want to start a business (whether that be a blog, an online shop, a consultancy, whatever it may be).

You’re pumped; you can’t wait to get started and finally be able to quit that job you hate, or start your own empire.

You’ve been dreaming of this moment for a long time and now you’ve finally built up the courage to actually go for it.

But a month in and you feel drained. Nobody is reading your blog posts. Nobody is sharing your stuff on social media.

Your phone isn’t ringing off the hook with people dying to buy your product or work with you, and your inbox isn’t blowing up with requests.

You slowly stop caring. You stop writing as many blog posts and you stop spending as much time on social media promoting your stuff.

You just need a break from it all. Who’s been here (FYI, my hand is raised). So today, I’m going to outline the ways you can stay motivated.

Create a list of SMART goals

I remember learning about SMART goals in an intro-level business class and the idea has never left me since. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based. Lots of times you feel like you are failing because your expectations haven’t been met by the reality. But have you ever actually sat down to define what your expectations actually are?

If you haven’t, than you don’t have SMART goals lined up.

It’s no secret that having a larger list of smaller and attainable goals (to help you reach your end goal) is way  more motivating than just having one huge goal for 2 years down the road that you feel like you’ll never be able to reach.

Try to break your overall goals into smaller, SMART goals that you can achieve daily, weekly or monthly.

Organize your life

I’m a pen and paper kind of girl. I write down everything in my notebook and if I don’t write it down, it likely isn’t going to get done.

The stress of having to try and remember what I have to do each and every day clutters my mind and leaves me feeling more stressed out than I need.

Start some way to organize the tasks you need to complete each day (in order to achieve those SMART goals) and by the end of the day instead of feeling like you’ve failed, you will have a list of all the things you accomplished. Trust me, this makes a huge difference.

Find a book to motivate you

There is nothing like reading a motivational read from someone who was in your shoes at one point! I fell in love with the book She Means Business. I felt as if Carrie Green was speaking directly at me and knew exactly how I felt when I was first starting out. Check out the quote below to see what this book is about:

More and more women are starting to feel like there are so many opportunities out there to turn their ideas into a reality, build a successful business and do what they love. The problem is that they don’t really know how to go about it, and so they set off on their entrepreneurial journey and quickly feel out of their depth, overwhelmed, confused and like they’re crazy for even thinking that they could do it. The purpose of this book is to inspire and empower these women to take back control of their mind, their ideas and businesses, and to provide strategies for them to make it happen. – She Means Business

Carrie Green took the words out of my mouth because on those days when I felt like I was totally in over my head, her book provided me with strategies to overcome that doubt.

Stop worrying

(This is specifically written for me, aka the biggest worrier on the planet).

Successful entrepreneurs know that worrying isn’t going to help them with anything and use the stress of running their own business to turn it into useful energy. Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but letting stress negatively impact your work is.

Take time off before you burn out

It’s really important to be able to recognize when you are about to burn out, and quit while you are ahead. There is nothing wrong with taking the night off work to let yourself and your mind relax in order to avoid getting burnt out.


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