As change agents, we must make it a top priority to motivate our clients to take action on their major goals every day. (OK, we’ll let them take the weekend off!)
Perhaps your client has drafted up a huge idea for a long-term goal or project and declared it a top priority. That’s fantastic! But long-term goal setting is just the beginning.
In order for your clients to successfully achieve their long-term goals, they must set daily goals.
How to Set Daily Goals
You can help your clients stop procrastinating and start taking action by teaching them these tactics for daily goal setting.
Then, write that daily goal into your task planner. A great task planner that I suggest is the Opus Domini for Mac. I use it both as a task planner and long-range goal setting and tracking tool, and I love it
Reward Yourself – don’t “Pre-ward” yourself!
Start with the hard stuff. Don’t “warm up” by reading your email! That’s what members of my Writing Club call “pre-warding” instead of rewarding. Knock the harder tasks off of your list first, and then reward yourself with the easy tasks, like reading email.
Another wonderful reward of using this tactic is how great you will feel. Take it from a commenter on THIS Pick the Brain blog post: “By making sure you take action on your project at the start of the day, not [only] have you reinforced its importance by giving it first priority, but you have that wonderful feeling throughout the rest of your day because you did something that was important and meaningful to you.”
These incredibly simple ideas can help your clients stop procrastinating, move them from long-term goal setting to action-oriented daily goal setting, and reward them with actual results.
How do you make sure that you take actions toward your long-term goals daily? What are your favorite methods you use to teach clients how to set goals? Please share by leaving a comment!