Set short term goals until you reach your long term goal.

This is a game you can play when your brain tells you to stop’. Let’s say you have a big goal, completing 35 minutes on the treadmill. But after awhile you want to stop. A way to motivate yourself is to set a smaller goal you can reach quickly.

People do much better when they make regular progress toward a visible, well defined goal. For example, if you ask people to hold up their arm as long as they can they’ll hold it up for a much shorter time than when they are asked to hold their arm up for 10 minutes. There’s something about not having a specific goal that allows people to give up earlier.

So make little goals. Instead of thinking about your big goal, make a pact with yourself to reach a little goal, like just one more minute, or just reaching one more blinking dot on the treadmill display. Whatever works for you.

To reach the little goal, you can use the Repeat Your Power Phrase (available on the website) or Bring Your Goal Picture to Mind strategies. When you get there, set another little goal. And just keep setting little goals until you reach your big goal. Before you know it, you’ll have reached your big goal without giving in to your unwanted thoughts to quit.

You can change each little goal too. You can say I’ll do this little goal at a sprint or a higher treadmill elevation. Change up anything to make it interesting and different.

I use this strategy all the time. One of my favorite examples is a hike I take up this scary steep hill. Walking it is like inching up a flag pole. But it’s not straight up. It undulates like a rock armored snake. Each rise up the snake’s back is about 100 yards. At the end of each rise is the arch, which levels off for a few yards. It repeats this pattern all the way to the top. Going up the hill is a constant cycle of hiking up the long rise, resting a little in the flats, tackling the next long rise and praying for the next flat to finally come again.

To get through the hike I make it a game of Big Goal Little Goal. The big goal is to get to the top. But five minutes into the hike I am breathing hard and I don’t care about the big goal anymore. So I make a little goal of hitting the next flat. About half way up a rise I get so tired I quit caring about getting to the next flat part of the trail. Remember, this is a steep hill! So I make an even littler goal of just taking the next step. I eventually get to the top one step, one rise, and one flat at a time. It’s not heroic, but it works.