You know what it is like when you are driving a long journey that you really must take… you start by dreading it and really think Is it worth it?

Or what about if you are trying to lose weight and you have target weight but three weeks in when you are eating a lettuce leaf and would kill for a mars bar… or maybe just kill! what can you do to keep your motivation up? Say more affirmations? Just try harder?

What about if you congratulate yourself on what you have done so far…. driving a long journey promise yourself a coffee break 2 and a half hours in or when you’ve driven so many miles. Or maybe with the diet give yourself a treat when you hit a smaller milestone… maybe losing 5 pounds… and no the treat doesn’t have to be chocolate!

Similarly in business. If you have been following this series of questions you will know that you need to have a clear view of where you are going and a detail of what you will achieve within a creation time frame and you will have broken that down into annual goals, next month goals, next week goals and finally today’s tasks.

You have been doing that right?

If not, maybe you need to ask yourself how committed you are to really make a huge shift in your business… and if you have been doing a different way of keeping yourself motivated great… maybe you would like to share it in the comments box on the blog it is always useful to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t and suggestions for improvements.

Maybe you have been beavering away doing all those things… but how do you keep yourself motivated looking into the future with the goals as far away as ever? One way to motivate yourself is to take stock of where you have been and what you have achieved to date. We are so good at criticising ourselves ( and others) about the things we haven’t achieved that we forget to celebrate what we have done so far…

In order to celebrate what we have achieved to date we need information. Hard facts and figures that we measure and can compare against.

To know when to stop and take a break we need to know how many miles we have driven and how many hours we have been driving and we measure those with the odometer and a watch.

To know how we are doing with our diet we may weigh ourselves our calculate our body mass index or maybe see how many inches ( or dress sizes) we have gone down within a period of time.

Similarly in business we need to look back and see how much profit we have made, how much cash we have in the bank, how many satisfied customers we have served and compare that with what we thought we would have by now.

Ok so I am going to do my magic trick.

I would like you to answer this question:

Have you made as much profit as you planned and got as much cash flow in the bank as you anticipated?

Ok and hear is the magical answer…

You just said “no” in your mind.

Hmm sorry you are right it is not a magic trick, but there is a serious point…. we very rarely get the outcome we expect ( and if you are one of the 1% who did congratulations.. can you repeat the same or better results next time?).

Sometimes we get there but it is delayed, sometimes we get knocked off course.

The first step though is to be really clear on where you are.

How far have you come down your business road?

To answer that you will need to put together key information for your business and I recommend that you state that not just in terms of sales but also in terms of overall profit and cash-flow. If you are unclear of the difference between them do contact me about my Business Learning resources.

Good luck!