Go Ahead and Pat Yourself on the Back - You Deserve It
Goal setting is a vital part of business planning. It helps to keep us on track and measure our progress. Meeting goals makes us feel good and keeps us motivated. But it is still important to reward ourselves when we achieve the things we have set our minds to.
That's not to say that you have to buy yourself a new car for every goal you achieve. That could get rather expensive. But the reward should be appropriate considering how lofty the goal was and how much achieving it impacted your business.
Small Rewards for Small Goals
Every goal doesn't have to be a huge accomplishment. Smaller goals keep us motivated until we can reach more significant milestones. This is especially important when getting started. It may take a while to build the momentum necessary to attain loftier goals, and we need to reward ourselves for the smaller things in order to remain focused on achieving the larger ones.
Smaller goals can be the steps necessary to achieve a larger goal. For example, your big goal may be to have a certain number of clients in 6 months. Breaking this up into gaining 1/6 of that number each month could give you a monthly goal to work for.
Deciding ahead of time what your reward will be can give you an extra incentive. For small goals, you could pick out a purse or a pair of shoes you've had your eye on. Putting a picture of the reward up on your office wall will serve to remind you what you can look forward to if you meet your goal.
Big Rewards for Big Goals
When you reach your larger goals, you will have even more to celebrate, so your reward should be a big deal. Think of a big-ticket item that you have wanted for a long time, or perhaps a trip for yourself and your spouse or family.
The larger reward will require some advance planning. It's important to be sure you'll be able to afford it once you've achieved the goal in question. If you reach the goal and are not able to get the reward you had your heart set on, that will lead to disappointment. And disappointment does nothing to motivate or boost morale.
Once you've determined that the reward is feasible, you could put up pictures to remind yourself of it just as you do with the smaller rewards. This gives you incentive to work harder to achieve your goals in both the short term and the long term.
Setting goals is important to a business, but rewarding ourselves for attaining them is equally important. By giving ourselves something to look forward to, we can motivate ourselves to reach for the stars. Once we get there, we will be ready to aim even higher so that we can continue to reward ourselves.