2010 - The Importance of Identifying Your Personal Achievements and Goal Planning

By Sandra L Lee

Everyone is thinking about their "New Years Resolutions".

What if this year was the year you actually KEPT all your resolutions and achieved your goals?

Well, hang on to your hat. Because if your plan your goals and work your plan, you can do exactly that!

Creating and identifying your personal achievements is important to your business. Goals will help you stay motivated and help you break down what can be a momentous task into small manageable steps.

Here are some easy tips to help you create your own successful 2010 personal achievement plan:

#1 - Chart your goals. Keeping track of your goals is important. You may want to start by charting down all of your goals in one place where you can easily keep track of them. Give your goals estimated dates of accomplishment and reward yourself as you tick off your successes.

Keeping track of your goals in this manner will help you stay motivated and keep you moving in the right direction. Experts have agreed that we are more likely to stick to our plans if we have well-thought out and specific goals we're aiming for. Charting your goals helps you do that.

#2 - Overcome your obstacles. We all have road blogs we need to find a way around. In business, it may be balancing your family life with work, or perhaps squeezing in time to build your business around your full-time job. Whatever your current situation, it may help to write down your obstacles together with a resolution plan to help you get over them.

If part of the road blocks are with close friends or family, talk to them and reach agreement on how to create a win-win for all involved. With your goals actually achieved, typically many more folks than you will win. It part of the "prizes" for the prices paid for your discipline to act and complete your plans.

For example, if you have very little time to build your business, write a realistic plan to keep you on track. Make sure you have agreement within your family to support your plans. Enroll them in your process. Even if you only have four hours a week, it's much more realistic to write that down than to aim for ten hours and end up disappointed.

#3 - Celebrate your successes. Small and large. Both are as important. Many of us have goals which we strive for, but often times we only celebrate our big accomplishments. However, it's important to celebrate the small successes just as much as the big ones. It's all leading to the same end.

#4 - Get an accountability partner. A coach, a friend, a family member - but, someone who supports you and cares about you reaching your planned achievements. It's funny how we are often better at getting things done because of others expectations - than our own. The accountability partner helps to keep you on track, ideally week to week. Just make sure you choose a partner who wants your success, since some are judgmental, skeptics, critics, or even saboteurs of your biggest dreams. So, trust who you're sharing with!

#5 - Chunk things down. A good way to do this is to have smaller goals as well as large ones. Then chart down your progress and identify all of your achievements - big or small. It's always easiest to eat the elephant one bite at a time, versus choking and quitting on the bigger pieces.

Taking time to celebrate your small, as well as large, achievements will give you a sense of accomplishment which may help you tackle your larger goals more quickly. You can celebrate with small treats such as purchasing that handbag you've wanted for months, treating yourself to a spa day or going out for a celebration dinner. It really doesn't matter how you celebrate as long as you acknowledge your jobs well done.

And remember, goals change. It's like reaching a finish line. When one race is done, another begins when it's something you're passionate about. The planning, tracking and accountability pieces of achievement are just good practices to keep you at the front of your desires!

To your greatest success ever in 2010!

Sandra is an experienced mentor, life coach and business consultant in business growth strategies and practical small business marketing systems. Her target market is business service professionals intent on purposeful leadership and life balance in their respective fields. Learn how you can enjoy greater success personally with life and business success strategies with Sandra Lee at http://www.profitwithsandralee.com!

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com

Motivate Your Team! Eight Quick Tips To Motivate For Success

By Ed Sykes

Motivation is the key ingredient for success in any
organization. You can have all the technical skills in the
world; however, if you can’t motivate your team, you will not
achieve success. As a leader, a majority of your job is to
motivate others to succeed so that everyone’s goals are
accomplished.

The following are eight quick tips to motivate your team:

1. Everyone Has Motivation
Your employees are motivated on some level. It is your job to
find the level of their motivation and move your employees to
the next level.

2. Listen to WIIFM
I wake up every morning listening to a very important radio
station, WIIFM. I hope you do too. WIIFM stands for What’s In It
For Me? To truly be a motivator, you must always be in tune to
your employees’ WIIFM. Find out why it is beneficial for your
employees to do a task, etc. Once you find out the employees’
motives, you find out how to motivate them.

3. It’s about Pain or Pleasure
Motivate your employees toward pleasure or away from pain. You
motivate toward the pleasure by providing recognition,
incentives, and rewards for doing a good job. You motivate away
from the pain of a corrective action, losing a position, or
doing a poor job. The key to this motivation is to be consistent
with all your employees at all times.

4. Give Me a Reason
Do it because I said so! Well, with our educated workforce
these days, that doesn’t work anymore. Employees like to know
why tasks are being requested of them so that they can feel
involved and that the task has worth. Let your employees know
why doing the task is important to you, the organization, and
for them.

5. Let Me Understand You
Take time to show sincere interest in your employees as people.
Understand what your employees are passionate about in their
lives. What are their special passions? What are their personal
needs? What brings them joy or pain? What are their short-range
and long-range goals? Once you understand the answers to these
questions, you can move them to a new level of motivation,
because you cared enough to ask the questions and show interest
in their success. Once you understand your employee’s needs and
goals, they will take more interest in understanding and achieving your goals.

6. Make Me Proud
Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “A soldier will fight long and
hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Give your employees the
opportunity to be proud of their work. Reward team members
publicly for a job well done. Give them an opportunity in a team
meeting to explain how they accomplished the job. Have your
organization’s Director, President, Vice President, etc., give
recognition to these employees by personally sending a note,
recognizing them in an organizational or team meeting, or
creating a “Hall or Wall of Fame” recognition for employees that
really have gone beyond the call of duty.

7. Expect the Best
Expect the best and your employees will rise to that level. How
do you do this? You do it with the words you use. Are you
expressing positive expectations, or are you using words (kind
of, sort of, we’ll try, we have to, we haven’t done that before,
and that will never work) that communicate negative
expectations? What does your body language say about you? Does
it say, “I’m ready to take on any challenge, and I expect you
can also;” or does your body language say “Please don’t give me
another problem. I can’t handle it.”

Do our recognitions and rewards move our employees to do their
best? Do we consistently communicate our standards and
expectations for the best? Do we coach our team to always do
better?

8. Walk the Talk
Our employees model our behavior. If we are confident about a
major change in the organization, our employees will follow our
behavior. If we come in late and leave early, guess what will
happen? Remember, even when you don’t think someone is
watching…they are always watching. Set the example for others to
follow.

Apply these eight simple rules of motivation and you, too, will
have the skills to motivate your team to be inspired,
innovative, self-directed, and highly productive employees.

About the Author: Ed Sykes is a professional speaker, author,
and success coach in the areas of leadership, motivation, stress
management, customer service, and team building. You can e-mail
him at mailto:esykes@thesykesgrp.com, or call him at (757)
427-7032. Go to his web site, http://www.thesykesgrp.com, and
signup for his newsletter.

Source: http://www.isnare.com

Six Daily Motivation Tips

By Steve Gillman

How do you achieve a more consistent level of daily motivation?
Use the following powerful techniques, beginning at the start of
your day.

1. Start The Day Motivated

Have a morning motivation routine. Experiment a bit and see
what gets you going. If it has to be coffee, then so be it,
although there are probably healthier options. One thing that
probably doesn't work is hitting the snooze button on the alarm
clock. That just trains your brain and body to pay less
attention to the alarm. Try cold showers, energizing music,
exercise and anything else that might work for you. Once you
find a few things that help you get you ready for the day, work
them into a regular routine.

2. Have Worthy Goals

If you have nothing to get excited about, find something. Quit
your job, move to another town, make a goal that requires work
you will enjoy. You have nothing to lose in your life if there
is nothing in it that you want to be doing, so start making
changes. Start exploring the possibilities to see which ones
might inspire you and make you want to get going each day. Then
remind yourself of these important or inspirational goals every
morning.

3. Use Fear

We are all motivated by both fear and the promise of rewards,
but some of us respond better to fear. You can use this to get
yourself moving. In fact, you already do if you sometimes lay
there in the morning until the thoughts of what will happen if
you don't get up make you finally jump out of bed. Just make it
more conscious and planned. Imagine the bad things that will
happen if you don't do what needs to be done. This is a very
basic psychological technique. You link pain with not acting, so
you feel a strong urge to get busy working on your goals.

4. Have Daily Motivation Talks

Almost everyone gets excited and experiences a rise in energy
levels when talking about something that is truly important and
inspiring to them. This could be cars, self improvement,
politics, money or just about anything. Find the "hot" topics
that get you excited and start a conversation about them as
necessary. This works best if the person you are talking to
shares your enthusiasm, but try it with anyone who will listen.
Afterwards you should be able to carry that energized and
motivated state over to the work at hand.

5. Do Something

Though it may seem ironic, I started writing this article
without feeling too motivated (I write more than a hundred
articles a year). But I knew that if I just wrote a sentence or
two, there would be some momentum created. Sure enough, I am
writing easily now, and with some enthusiasm. The point: take
any small step. Do anything to start the project or task in
front of you - any action towards a goal - and you will feel
some degree of motivation building within you.

6. Go Beyond Daily Motivation Tricks

Learn how your brain and body works and you can easily apply
that knowledge through "tricks" like those here. However, there
is also a natural motivation which arises in us when we are
living in a balanced and healthy way. You may be skeptical of
the idea at first, but when you see clearly enough what needs to
be done, the energy is there. Work on that self awareness and
honest inquiry into ones nature, and more and more you'll be
able to tap into that natural state of seeing the truth and
acting. Then you won't need daily motivation "tricks" or tips.

About the Author: Copyright Steve Gillman. For more Self
Motivation Tips, and to learn more powerful principles that go
much further, visit:
http://www.selfimprovementnow.com/self-motivation-tips.html

Source: http://www.isnare.com

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