How do you stay motivated as an entrepreneur?

 

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Click on the gif above to watch this video on YouTube or click play below to listen to the Podcast version

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Motivation! Ever have a day where you know what you need to do, but you just can’t make yourself do it? That’s where being motivated comes in, and it’s something you can control and work with over time. How do you stay motivated as an entrepreneur?

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:17 First place to look
• 00:50 First way that I stay motivated
• 01:26 One way to stay motivated as an entrepreneur (actually a short list)
• 02:05 Here’s what’s wrong with the question
• 02:42 How to stay motivated as long as possible
• 03:20 Setting meaningful goals that make sense
• 04:35 Quick summary on meaningful goals
• 04:52 WHY you need to know what achieving that goal looks like!
• 05:24 Staying motivated is easy IF…
• 05:55 The biggest mistake people make delegating work
• 08:17 Quick summary of what staying motivated is all about

 

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The transcript is below if you would prefer to read this yourself instead of watching the video!

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Hey! Welcome or welcome back. I’m Sandra B your Sidekick COO, and today we’re going to be answering the question, how do you stay motivated as an entrepreneur? 

Well? Probably don’t? 

In order to stay motivated as an entrepreneur, I’m going to assume that you are asking me specifically how I do it because there is a plethora of information out there about how in general, one might stay motivated as an entrepreneur or as just a human being in life.

So again, I would highly recommend a little Google search if you would like more information. There are books, there are studies, there are videos, there are podcasts, and there are articles. There’s every form of information you could possibly want and I am just gonna add my 2 cents on being an entrepreneur and how I personally stay motivated.

So the first way that I stay motivated is that I DON’T stay motivated!

I wasn’t really kidding at the beginning when I was saying you don’t. It’s not possible to stay a hundred percent motivated all the time. You have to give yourself some downtime. You’re gonna have some days where you’re just like, “Ugh, I’m just not doing it today. I just can’t do it today” and that is totally fine. The only time that that becomes a problem is when it spirals and when it continues for way too long and when you just can’t get yourself out of the rut and things like that. 

So one way to stay motivated as an entrepreneur is to have ways of reenergizing yourself, re-engaging yourself and getting yourself out of that rut. That means having people to talk to. That means for some of us, me included, it might be going to therapy. I highly recommend it to every single person. I think we all should have it. And that might be a tool that you use.

It might be just having some motivational things around your house that help you get out of that rut. It might be any number of things, but I think the ‘staying motivated’ question is, it kind of presupposes that you’re going to catch yourself before you are unmotivated and you’re not. Sometimes you’re just going to be unmotivated.

Let yourself be unmotivated once in a while. It’s totally fine. Let yourself recharge. Let yourself, you know, lounge for a little bit and then just have ways of coming back to it from there.

So that question would be like, how do you get motivated once you are unmotivated?

If you wanna stay motivated kind of continuously or as often as possible for as long as possible, then you’re gonna want to do things like actually set goals. Review those goals on a regular basis, and celebrate those goals when you actually hit them.

Make sure that those goals are motivating in themselves, and that you’re excited to reach them. And by excited to reach them, I don’t mean setting them so high that it’s unlikely that you will reach them. What I mean is, you set your goals so that you know you’re pretty much gonna reach them. It still needs to be a little bit risky that you still stretch yourself a little bit, but you wanna be reaching your goals more often than not.

You wanna feel those wins. 

So set yourself small achievable goals that you’re really excited to reach, that you understand what it means when you reach that goal. Understand where you’ll be when you reach that goal. What does reaching that goal mean to you? And a lot of times we’ll be like, “Oh I wanna, I wanna reach this goal of, I don’t know, making a million dollars a year”. 

Okay, why? 

Why does that matter to you? 

What does that mean to you? 

What does that look like? 

And I’ll tell you, if you are currently sitting at zero or a hundred thousand, setting your goal for a million? You might wanna scale that back a little bit. Unless you have the numbers and the data to prove to show that you’re gonna hit that million no problem, or you’re on track to meet that, then fine. But if you have never hit a million dollars before and you’re currently not on track to meet that million dollars, then pull that back, make a reasonable goal and you know, actually reach that one and celebrate the shit out of it. 

Okay, I feel like I got off track already. 

Setting Goals:

Setting goals, and really understanding what those goals mean to you. Having a million dollars, yeah, fantastic, but that’s only good if it means something to you. You need to see what, understand what the benefit of having that million dollar year would be. Okay?

Understand what having that million-dollar year looks like cuz what you don’t want is, you don’t want to build this million dollar year and then get there and go, “Whew, that was a lot of work! Oh crap, I have to do it again in order to keep hitting a million dollars. I don’t, I don’t wanna do that again”.

So you need to make sure that whatever you’re setting up to reach that goal, especially if it’s gonna be a continuous goal, you are okay with doing it. Okay? So you don’t want to set yourself up for a goal that you’re gonna absolutely hate every single minute of trying to get there. 

Other than that, I would say that staying motivated really is easy if you are actually paying attention to all of the benefits that you’re getting from the things that you’re doing. So if you’re finding that your motivation is starting to lack with even just showing up to work, then maybe you need to reevaluate what you’re doing. But also maybe you need to actually just look at what you’re accomplishing already so that you can, you know, be excited again and be reinvigorated again.

Make sure that you’re actually doing things that you wanna do. 

Delegating

One thing I wanna say is, especially when it comes to delegating things in your business because I’ve seen people do this where they delegate out the thing they actually wanna be doing. Virtual assistants who really, really like helping people out in other people’s businesses. They want to be working in other people’s businesses, they like to be that indispensable person, they like to be name-dropped and they like to be, you know, that epic VA that everybody’s talking to and everybody wants to work with and they really, really wanna do that.

Then they think that “in order to expand my business, I have to stop doing that work and I have to bring other people in to do it and then I have to do this other thing”.

Well, that’s not necessarily the case.

The same as if you were a baker. You might love baking. You start your bakery and you’re really excited and it’s the small little bakery that you have going and then you decide you wanna open another location, you wanna expand. And then the natural inclination is, well now I have to stop baking so that I can run these two businesses. 

Whereas if you took some time to think about it and plan and maybe take a little bit longer before opening that next store, maybe you might be able to just hire somebody to manage those two stores and you get to just keep doing baking. Or maybe you decide you wanna teach others how to do your process. Maybe that’s the thing that lights you up. 

So when you are looking to scale your business, when you’re looking to grow your business, when you’re even bringing in new offers for your business or expanding your services or whatever you’re doing, just make sure that you keep in mind:

• What are those things that actually light you up? 
• What are those things that you actually really enjoy doing? 

When you’re thinking about those things, don’t think about what you think other people think you should be doing or the value you think that that work has, or whether you think that that is high-level work or low-level work or whatever kind of work. Just worry about what it is that you really love to do and then once you have that, you can start building a business around letting you do that. There are ways.

You don’t have to sacrifice the things that you like doing in order to actually scale your business. You just might have to be a little bit more creative about how you scale your business.

Staying Motivated:

Staying motivated is…

• Keeping your eye on a goal
• Understanding what that goal means to you
• Celebrating those goals when you get there

Also not let go of the things that you like to do for the sake of growing your business fast. Or growing your business in the way other people have told you to grow your business. And then also letting yourself have those down times, having those unmotivated times and being okay with not being motivated all the time. You don’t have to be productive all the time.

Being okay with that and then having ways of getting yourself back on the horse. Or back on the wagon. Whatever you wanna say. When you are ready or when you know you have to but taking some downtime is totally okay.

Being unmotivated once in a while is totally okay just as long as it doesn’t snowball into something bigger. 

If you were listening to that and you were thinking, “yes, that is me”. “I need to make sure that I am setting my goals and understanding why they matter to me”. If any of that resonated, make sure to like and subscribe to the video. I have more stuff like that for you coming out.

If while I was talking, you were thinking, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like Pete or my best friend or this other business owner I know”, take a second and send them the link. Share this with them. I’m sure they’d appreciate it. 

I know I’d appreciate it!

And remember, as always, together we thrive. 

Take care.