Maintaining Progress

We’ve set our goals. We’ve found a coach that helps us continue growing. Now let’s talk about keeping forward progress. If we are working toward a goal that we’ve set and have a plan for it, it may seem like we’ve done everything to keep ourselves going. For many people, this is not the case. It can be easy to become demotivated along the way for a variety of reasons. Maybe we’ve lost track of our goals? What if we hit a stumbling block in our path? And so on.

There’s many things that can be important to how we maintain momentum, and some of those things are personal to us. Some people need another person to check in on them to keep them focused. Others need to have privacy during their process.

One consistent key that I’ve noticed is keeping track of what we’ve done. By maintaining a record of our starting point, our process, and our progress, it can help us maintain our awareness that we have grown and learned. Our memories are unreliable, and they can leave us feeling like we haven’t done anything or forgetting where we’re at in our process. By having it recorded, we can have a more reliable measure of ourselves that can keep us centered even when we’re frustrated.

This can also help us find areas in our process that we can improve whenever we hit a stumbling block. Often, when we hit a wall, it’s because we are taking the wrong approach. By having a record of how we’ve been approaching our problems, we can more easily figure out alternatives to try.

Keeping a record also lets us share our progress with the people around us. For some of us, this sharing and getting positive feedback can help keep us feeling good about the work we’ve done and less alone. Practice and progress can feel lonely. The answer is having a safe and clear way to bring others in to support us without it being another hassle to consider.