You may have read our Newsletter last week talking you through how to set your resin goals for 2022 if you haven't set yours already. If you missed it, simply head through the questions in the image below to set some, it’s never too late to do this.
If however you have set your goals and you did that straight away in 2022, you may be entering this second week in January thinking why! Why did I bother to set any goals, I’ve already fallen/thinking about falling off the wagon and not working towards them.
Setting goals can be a great expertise to do to lay out what you’d like to achieve in your year, they can really help us to get clear and focus on what’s important to us, but they can also be very easy to set and then not think about them again till the following year when you remember you didn’t actually do anything about going for them at all.
Setting goals is a good thing to do, as the quote below says, if you don’t set a goal what are you even working towards?
But how can we stay motivated, keep our creative juices flowing and stay on track with our goals in 2022?
First of all everyone is motivated by different things. Understanding what motivates you personally can be the difference between success and failure when it comes to sticking to your goals.
Motivation is an internal thing, an external force can’t keep you motivated, they can help, but only you can do what it takes to motivate yourself each day. Having an accountability buddy who you share your goals with can help, but they can’t do the work for you.
All motivation comes from the self, self-motivation.
The more you understand yourself the more effective your efforts to self motivate will be. Spend some time in 2022 getting to know you, take a curious approach to the things you dodo, the habits you unconsciously do, what thoughts you have. Be a student of yourself so that you can learn what drives you, what you love to do and what you don’t love to do, what makes you fly out of bed in the morning, and what makes you hit the snooze!
Here are some strategies you can try to help yourself stay motivated and on track all year:
1 - Understand your why.
Your why is what drives you, its the reason you picked up your first bottle of resin, the reason you chose the mold you did, its the purpose behind what you’re doing.
Why did you start working with resin in the first place?
What’s kept you working with it?
What does it bring to your world?
Being clear about why you do what you do, or why you want to do what you want to do, will help you stay on course. If you ever wake up and want to hit the snooze on your goals, your why will bring you back to your purpose and propel you to get up and get back on it!
2 - Define your goals.
Knowing and not doing, is the same as not doing!
If you know what your goals are, but you don’t have a clear plan of action to help you to understand what you need to do to reach your goals, then you won’t reach your goals.
Put steps in place, daily actions, schedule them into your calendar for the year, work out how you get from where you are now, to where you want to be with this plan.
The gap between where you are now and where you want to be can sometimes seem like such a big gap that the fear of this paralyses us into inactivity. If you break it down over your year into small, manageable, achievable steps then all you have to do is concentrate on waking up the next day and doing these small tasks - Not the giant main goal!
3 - Create a clear vision.
If you set a goal but you haven’t got a compelling vision of you achieving that goal then the chances of you making it are slim. You need to picture and imagine yourself achieving those goals, even if they are gimungus and you have no idea how you’re going to do it.
Your vision needs to be something you can relate to and resonate with. Get your creativity flowing by creating a vision board or a vision video of what you want to achieve.
Add your goals to this board/video, add images, add your face to them, add music to it that pumps you up, add colours to your board that bring you joy. You can only achieve that which you can see yourself doing, so get clear and specific on your board and don’t just hide it away in a cupboard afterwards, display it in a location that you can clearly see it and spend time looking at it every single day.
4 - Concentrate on the bigger picture.
We will often as humans do more for others than we will for ourselves. Focusing on who else you achieving your goals is going to benefit will really help you to see the bigger picture.
You might think, but I’m only creating resin art, it’s not exactly solving world hunger, who am I helping with my creations?
But the ripple effects of you creating resin art flow far wider than you may think. For example:
By you creating resin art, you’re creating beauty for this world. You’re creating that perfect design for someones home that they may then look at and smile at every single day. You might be creating a piece of resin jewellery that someone will gift to their best friend, what a thoughtful loving gift that will be.
By creating resin art you might feel more grounded, less stressed. You might come home from work completely wound up by what’s happened in your day, but before when you might have taken that out on your family, resin might give you the time to focus on something else, unwind and relax. You’re giving your family the gift of a calmer, more present and loving you.
By having a resin business and wanting to achieve sales goals with that business, you might then be able to afford to take your family on holiday in 2022, or take the strain off the bill payer, what a gift that would be.
So what’s your bigger picture?
5 - Keep it positive and fun.
Positive thoughts lead to positive actions. How you think, and feel this year will lead to how you act. And positive thoughts are habitual, manning that the more positive thoughts and external cues you pick up on, the more you want in your life and seek these out. This also works for the negative unfortunately.
If you do set a goal and then think negatively about that goal, or yourself, I have to put in so much hard work to achieve that goal, am I even good enough to reach that goal. Will either of these propel you to move towards the goal? Nope!
On the other hand, I’m going to have so much fun working towards this goal, I’m good enough to achieve all I desire in my life. Now do you see how these would move you forward towards your goal.
We’ve talked about thoughts in blogs before, you can change your thoughts, they aren’t static, you can create new more empowering thoughts any time you’d like to. But the key to this is reinforcing these new thoughts through repetition.
If you normal create resin art while listening to music, could you switch it up and once a day listen to a positive, inspiring, self motivating podcast instead?
6 - Stop multitasking and don’t let distraction get the better of you.
The ability that we as humans can multitask is a total myth. It creates the illusion of efficiency but actually achieves the opposite. Your brain cannot give all of its attention on more than one thing, and so what happens when we try to multitask is that we only give the tasks a percentage of our full attention, meaning that we can make mistakes more easily and actually carry out tasks more slowly.
Be fully present with your daily action steps and tackle one at a time. Once you have achieved one, move onto the next.
This can be hard to do these days because we are constantly distracted by our external world and by other shiny goals that may pop up along our way.
Create an environment that limits these distractions, put your phone on silent when you’re carrying out a resin task on your list, put it in a completely different room. Play concentration music without lyrics if you have a task that you need ultimate focus on.
7 - Reward yourself along the way.
Most of us think that the reward we get from our goals in in achieving the goal itself. However a goal could take ages to accomplish, it could be so far away in the distance that you can’t simply wait for that to become your reward, you need to set rewards along the way.
Reward yourself for the tasks you do to get to your goal.
For example, if your goal is to start a resin business this year, your action steps might be to set up an Etsy page, set up a resin Facebook business page, create extra resin artwork as inventory etc.
Why not set rewards when you accomplish any of the above. When I set up my Etsy page and I click that live button, I’m going to reward myself with an evening of self care at home, by booking a spa day in, by going out for a meal with my partner, I’m going to take a full day off like I’ve been meaning to for the last 5 years! - Whatever reward you can afford, but also that would make you work for it, every reward will be different for every person.
What can your rewards be along the way?
8 - Announce your goals to the world!
This last one is a cracker - Once you put your goal out there to the world, either by telling your close friends and family, or your entire audience on social media, it’s tough to face the prospect at having to tell the people you didn’t achieve your goal because you didn’t do what you needed to because you gave up in the 2nd week of January - owch!
If you are on social media and you want to sell on social media then your audience needs to know who you are, take them along on the journey with you. Show them who you are, what motivates you to achieve more, how you go about doing it, inspire them that they can stick to their goals too.
You might even find a few of them becoming your biggest cheerleaders and your external motivational push when you need it the most.
Hopefully this helps you to all stay on track and perks you back up again if you have already taken a back step on your goals. It’s never too late to refocus on them and to go for them throughout the year, don’t beat yourself up if you do fall off the wagon, just make the choice to get back on.
If you’d like to announce your goals for the year to the world and share them with us please do pop them in the comments below this blog, we’d love to hear them and cheer you along the way.
Team Craft Resin
