How You Can Stay Motivated When You’re Not Seeing Progress

Sometimes, the most difficult thing to do is to keep at it when the results are not coming.  You’ve been hitting the gym, but the results aren’t coming quickly.  The blog you started hasn’t reached your expected readership.  Maybe that job you took, hasn’t awarded you the promotion you deserve just yet.  How do you stay motivated when you’re not seeing progress?  We can all think of a scenario or situation where we’ve been challenged by a perceived lack of forward progress.  These obstacles can at times prove impassable, and sometimes the hardest thing to do is to stay motivated and push on.

No one likes working tireless on something without seeing results or success.  I would suggest, that the first question to ask is – are you really not getting results?  Often times, when this first question is asked, the response reveals either an unrealistic expectation or un-noticed results.  In other words, we’re comparing ourselves to a future state that is completely incomparable.  Followed by small, minor transformations in our work or desired pursuit.  Changes, which, if action continues, would undoubtedly make huge results long term.  The problem is often short-sited.

So, how do you stay motivated when you’re not seeing progress?  Here are three simple takeaways that I’ve applied when I feel discouraged (which happens more than I’d care to admit):

1. Do Something – Do something, anything, I’m serious. I’ve heard this reiterated time and again by successful entrepreneurs and businessmen and women.  The goal when we’re stumped is forward motion, period.  Take action.  Send those networking emails, write that one last blog post, one more rep, a last mile, whatever, just take the next step.  We are too easily paralyzed by planning.  Planning never gets anybody anywhere – ever.  Action does.  A famous Vietnam general once said, “When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.”  Yes, strange saying, but the takeaway is quite obvious, making steps forward is how a goal is reached.
2. Look Backwards – Before you make the final conclusion that you’re not getting anywhere and might as well quit, take a look behind you. Looking in the rearview mirror is a reminder of the progress we’ve made.  It reinforces “why” you’re doing this to begin with, and serves as a benchmark of how you started.  It could be the weight you have lost, college classes you’ve passed, Instagram followers gained, etc.  When you think you want to quit, look back to the start, and remind yourself that you’re moving forward.  This has saved me from bad decisions countless times.
3. In the end, just keep moving – Little bit of a tag team on number one above, but under no circumstances should you stop (unless you plan on quitting). The halt of progress is a metaphorical death sentence.  The minute you resort to pausing your progress or dropping your plan of attack, is the minute you gave up on your goal.  Start-stop, start-stop, over and over and over is not a game plan, it’s a disaster.  Even if you write one chapter of your book a month, you’ll eventually finish a book (Michael Hyatt had a similar strategy).  People are far too terrified of progressing slowly, so they opt-out and take the short term fail instead.  Then they go back and tell all their friends with a smile, “well, that didn’t work out,” but deep down inside they’re crushed.  We’ve all been there.  I am such a firm believer in grinding it out.  Starting anything of value is a lengthy process, but if there is progress, by all means, keep going.

In closing, a saying that I write out regularly is “minimum daily action”.  No idea if someone else came up with it, I doubt I originated it, but I like it.  At an absolute minimum, take daily action, no matter what.  Think about some of our excuses: too tired, overslept, it’s late, I’m hungry (maybe that’s just me), I don’t have time, I don’t feel like it, blah, blah.  Now, multiply all those excuses by even 265 days (we’ll lax up on the weekends), and just think of all you would have accomplished in place of those lame excuses.  You got this – just keep moving!