One of the key factors in successfully reaching your goals is motivation. It’s your motivation that you’ll be drawing on to make sure that that you hit each milestone on the way to your short and long term goals. However, as most people know, how ever good your intentions, however much you have planned and committed to achieving your goals you can suffer from dips in motivation which can throw you off course. This can be very discouraging, so what do you do about these dips?

Expect dips

Although it might appear that some people are always highly motivated, most people suffer dips in their motivation from time to time. If you expect them, you can think about what you might do when they happen. Think about strategies you might use to kick start your motivation such as rewards.

Accept dips as the norm

There’s nothing wrong in suffering a dip in your motivation. It happens , so there’s not point in wasting time beating yourself up about it and indulging in a whole lot of negative self-talk about being a failure. You’re not a failure! Accept that dips can happen to anyone and use one of the strategies that you'd planned to get moving again.

Acknowledge your progress

When you suffer a dip in motivation, instead of criticising yourself look back at where you started and acknowledge how far you’ve progressed. Don’t tell yourself it’s not far enough. The fact is you will have made more progress towards achieving your goals than if you’d sat back and never started.

Review your goals

There’s nothing wrong if you have a dip in motivation to review your goals. You should be doing this on a regular basis any way. If you have a dip work out what changes you need to put in place and alter your action plan as appropriate.

Don’t give up

The worst thing you can do when you have a dip in motivation is to give up. I have a friend who is currently trying to increase her fitness by walking 15,000 steps a day. She had been surpassing that target easily until she had a sudden dip in motivation. She couldn't work out what had happened and was ready to give up. After discussing it she came up with a plan to revive her exercise regime again and start increasing her walking each day until she was back to her original target. It’s important to remember that it really doesn’t matter if you take a few steps back as long as you don’t give up and start moving forward again.

Accept there may be no reason

Sometimes it might be very obvious why you have a dip in motivation: boredom, laziness, fear, difficulties .... However, sometimes you just can’t work out what the reason might be My message to you is don’t worry about it. This takes you back to accepting that dips can happen and concentrating on what you’re going to do to refresh your motivation. Remember negative self-talk is destructive and a waste of time.

Summary

When you’re working towards any goal accept that there might be times when you suffer dips in motivation. There isn’t always an obvious reason why this happens and rather than focus on feeling a failure acknowledge the progress you have made and concentrate on what strategies you’ll use to get moving towards your goal.