“You never finish anything!” she said. The words still echo in my head to this day, a relentless reminder of all my mistakes and missteps along a path to success that has been anything but straight and narrow. Twisting and turning, dipping and plunging, it seems like an endless maze at times, complete with cracks, potholes, and the traffic-causing construction crews who never seem to fail to schedule road repairs at times when you’re in a hurry to get there. to where you want. you go

And, in a way, that’s my biggest problem: I’m always in a hurry. My mother’s words, as frustrating as they may have been at the time, were correct: She wasn’t finishing what I started. Partly due to impatience, and partly because she has possibly the worst case of attention deficit disorder I’ve ever come across. My mind knows it’s going to lose interest soon, so it looks for the fastest path to success, and if it doesn’t find it, it writes it down as another dead end on the mental road map that is my mind.

And while rushing and ADD may be your problem, I think we all share one thing in common: our path.

It’s not that the goals we create for ourselves are unrealistic. Is that the way to them is. We set goals as a step, go from “here” to “there” action plan, and start with all engines revving. We are working hard, moving towards what we want and things are going very well. And then we make a mistake.

Unfortunately we are human, and mistakes will happen. Suddenly, we’re like a guy sitting alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight for miles around us in every direction. How far did we go? How far do we have to go?

As we know? It is easy. We apply the ladder technique and learn to use micro and mini goals to achieve long-term goals. Imagine your goal as a ladder. When you look at a staircase, your brain automatically knows that it has to individually climb each of those steps. You wouldn’t try to climb all the stairs in one jump, would you?

Some goals may require 5 steps, while others may require 50. Becoming a famous actor will probably require more steps than losing 30 pounds (unless, of course, your last name is Spielberg). But almost no goal will require only ONE step, or else it’s probably not even worth acknowledging as worthwhile in the first place.

When planning to get fit, don’t set your goal as, “I want to get fit.” It’s too broad and undefined a goal, and it’ll take you 10 different ways to your result before you end up giving up in frustration that you don’t really know what you’re doing. Instead, imagine (or even draw) it as a ladder and write down the mini-goal for each step. It may look something like this:

Step 1: Clean eating habits.

Step 2: Join the gym.

Step 3: 15 minutes of cardio a day for a week.

Step 4: 30 minutes of cardio next week.

Step 5: Include a light weight lifting routine before cardio.

Step 6: Increase weight lifting, 60 minutes of cardio a day.

Ladder visualization is good for 2 reasons: Not only does it give you small, realistic steps toward your long-term goals, but when you make a mistake or lose motivation, you can look back at what step you’re on and see the progress you’ve made. done so far. This is very important to keep motivation high. If your goal requires a lot of hard work over a long period of time, you will lose motivation at some point. It’s just natural. Life happens. You are going to have a bad day, or your mind is going to be distracted by other things going on in your life, etc. You need this gauge of how far you’ve come, how far you have to go, and how far you’ll fall if you give up now.

Think of something you want to achieve. Now draw a ladder with 5 steps that you can take to get closer to it. Now see if you can break those 5 mini targets down into 10 micro targets. Honestly, I think the smaller the steps, the better, because the feeling of constantly moving forward will keep your motivation revving to the max.

Always be working to climb the next step. Don’t worry about the top. You can’t get to the last step if you can’t even get to the third. Stay motivated. Because remember, while you can’t GO UP an entire set of stairs in one jump, you can certainly GO DOWN one.