Happy Fri-YAY, ladies! I hope you had a fabulous week! Can you believe it’s already December? I’m losing my mind over here! This year has been a bit of a shocking back and forth, good and bad. But I think it’s a big swing for good. I’m already dreaming about next year, and feeling the inspiration flood in. At the same time, I’m worried about living up to the goals I set. Luckily, the biggest lesson I learned this year was how to find inspiration, how to recover from the lack of it, and how to get motivated to make real progress in my goals. So for today’s post let’s talk about how to get inspired, and how to implement your dreams. TLDR; hit up the end of the post for a free Inspiration to Implementation checklist, too!

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HOW TO GET INSPIRED

There’s a few lucky people in the world who just stumble upon inspiration without looking for it. But for the rest of is, getting inspired should be a part of your daily checklist. To do that, you have to understand why you aren’t inspired to begin with. This can be different for everyone, for me, it has a lot more to do with how I spend my time, particularly who with. When you understand your why, you can start to fix it by correcting the cause.

In the meantime, you can address your problems by confronting them in a new environment. I struggled for almost the entire year with building my Instagram and creating a cohesive feed. Then I spent the morning talking about it with someone who had no idea what I was talking about it, and, in simplifying the problem, I found the solution.

You’ll find something similar happens when you approach your blogging challenges from a new perspective. You can use the same strategy I did, by talking to someone outside of the industry and explaining it so they understand. You can also try just approaching the problem in a new physical location – if you always work at home, try a Starbucks or a Greek cafe or someplace totally different. Or approach the challenge at a new time, if you don’t usually work early in the morning, try it. Or try staying up a little bit later. Generally, you want to keep a consistent schedule in your daily life, but when inspiration is ceasing or you’re dealing with a problem you can’t find a solution for, the change will jolt your body and your mind to find one.

Keep in mind…

Speaking of schedules, though, except for the occasion diversion to seek out the benefits change brings, you should keep one. As much as change is inspiring, so is consistency. Knowing what to expect every day lets your mind focus on other matters besides making it through the day.

HOW TO KEEP IT UP & STAY MOTIVATED

So you’ve approached your problems (content creation, marketing strategies, branding) in new environments, and found some ideas to get you going. You’ve got big dreams and you’re ready to accomplish them. So you get started – and then you get tired. You have a long day at work and don’t feel like working today, or tomorrow. Or next week for that matter.

Actually, getting inspired is not your biggest problem, even though sometimes it feels like it. The biggest problem is staying motivated. And it’s no easy problem to solve. Realistically, it takes months, even years, of self-discipline to really stay motivated. But there’s a few things you can do to help it along.

One of the major reasons why we lose focus is that we feel it is too hard to make progress toward our goals. They’re too big, too impossible. But that’s too untrue. The reason why we have a hard time reaching our goals is not that they’re too big, but that there’s only one. You should have a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal, but your BHAG should be comprised of much smaller goals. Every goal should be a measurable goal. If your goal is to be a successful blogger, you must first define what success means for you. Does it mean you’re blogging full time? Or just making enough to pay the associated costs?

THE SECRET IS IMPLEMENTATION

So keep your dreams, but break them down into the smallest possible bite sized goal pieces. Instead of your goal being 10k Instagram followers this year, shoot for growing your ‘gram by 60 quality followers in the next three weeks. That’s a much easier goal, now you need to figure out how to accomplish it. How about leaving quality comments on other user’s photos and engaging them in casual direct message conversations?  That’s easy enough. But also easy to put off, so make your working goal to comment on 15 photos per day and direct message two new people per week. Consistently, over time, you will see growth. And what’s even better, is you’ll see immediate success, when you make a new friend or reach that 60 goal, that will help motivate you to continue working toward that BHAG.

Take a look at your schedule and determine how much time per week you have to work on your goal. Then set smaller goals for what to accomplish in that time. For example, say you have 4 hours per week to work on your blog. Don’t plan to get 6 hours of work done in that time. Keep it manageable, and quit multitasking. 4 hours is enough to plan out and schedule a month of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook posts if you buckle down and focus. Set a timer.

The key to growing your blog or business is having goals that can be broken down and implemented. Dreaming will take you far, but implementation is the only thing that can make you cross the finish line. But I’m happy to say I can help with that just a bit! I developed a implementation checklist for myself to help me reach my goals for next year. But I’m 100% going to share it with you, too! My goals may be different than yours, so you’ll find that I left a few blanks for you to fill in yours!

You can get the Inspiration to Implementation Checklist for free, just by signing up for the Chic in Seconds newsletter right here!

What are your blogging goals for next year? Share in the comments below so we can support each other and share our tips!

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