Focus on your behaviours instead of your goals

Goals are important, in fact I’d say they are vital for growth. We need to have a goal to aim for. But often that goal is a big one or far away. And if we just focus on the goal, it is hard to stay motivated. It will make us feel like we deprive our selves of life in exchange of reaching our goal. It is very hard to constantly focus on something, when we know it will take years to complete.

But if we focus on our behaviours, we have much better chance to succeed. Figure out what are the behaviours that you can change, or alter today that will have an impact in the long run towards your goal. For example, if I write one verse or a chorus for a song every day, soon enough this will add up to a quite few songs. If I practice for one hour every day, soon enough I will get better. If I write one block post a day, soon enough I will have a website that people see as a resource for information and visit regularly. And while they are there, they will listen to my music, and maybe even buy some 🙂

You should figure out what it is you are going to do today, tomorrow and this week. Concentrate on getting all of that done, before you start to plan for the next week. If you have a big detailed plan for the next three months, too many things will change along the way for you to stick to that plan. And once you feel you can’t stick to that plan, you feel like you failed, and you give up. I call this the doughnut syndrome, where you are on diet for a week, then you slip and have one doughnut. Instantly you feel like you failed, and instead of continuing with your diet you go on a crazy eating binge.

It is a hard game at the best of the days and anything you can do to move the odds on your favour is a great help. So break that goal of yours to small blocks, and take on that first week block now. Think what you can do right now to make a change in you career, no matter how small that change might be. It is not the big jumps that get you to the top, but the small steps, and a lot of them.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE