How To Beat The Slump Of New Routines

Track Your Progress

It may sound silly, but a great way to stay encouraged while pursuing a goal is to track your progress. It should go without saying that even little steps towards a lofty ideal are incredible. They represent a change that did not exist before you made it, and that’s something to be proud of. However, there’s another reason to keep tabs on your journey.

Goals are mental concepts of desired outcomes and your goal intentions—how you plan to attain it—are instructions you give yourself. But what happens between the decision and action to make that decision real? Psychologists have been busy studying this and other aspects of goal-related behavior for decades, and what they discovered is recording progress impacts action. The factors that determine whether the impact is positive or not is how we define progress and how gentle we are with any setbacks or lack of perceived change.

Progress monitoring also benefits from social interaction, which we’ll explore next.