Here’s an excellent piece of advice I got from small-business coach Mark LeBlanc: Whatever you are tracking–time spent during the day, exercise periods during the week, or sales during the month, make sure you reset your counter mentally at the end of the tracking period. Don’t let there be a mental carryover to the next period. That carryover has only one effect: to demotivate you.
If you did well, the carryover effect can demotivate you, because you feel like you can slack off. For example, after they have a great week in sales, salespeople often have a low week for sales. Ditto, if you put in 20,000 steps on your pedometer one day, you feel like you don’t need to worry about getting to 10,000 that day. It will average out.
What happens? You lose your momentum, and it’s harder to get going the next day!
That’s because, after a low, the carryover effect can demotivate you, too. You aren’t experiencing success.
Moreover, sometimes, you feel like you have to make up for the low. If you made no sales, you’ll feel like you need to make twice as many sales this week. But if you couldn’t do those in sales last week, how could you do twice as many this week? It can seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
When you set a target for a day, week, or month, you set a stretch goal, one that you think you can do, and will be proud to accomplish. A goal set at the right level of difficulty motivates you to do your best work. If you change that goal because the last period was high or low, you guarantee you will get worse overall results, because you will not be motivated to do your best.
So, how do you “reset the counter”? I do it with journaling. First, I look at what I did get done–high, low, or on target–and acknowledge it. Part of acknowledging it is recognizing that the time period is over. You can never increase the number of steps you took yesterday or the number of sales you made last month. If you missed your target, you will feel some grief. On the other hand–if you met or exceeded your goal, take a moment to celebrate. Experience that satisfaction.
It takes just a sentence or two to acknowledge what happened. And then one more sentence to shift to looking at the future. Today starts the counter anew. You can look toward achieving your stretch goal today, this week, or this month.
