We often believe that we will continue to be successful once we have achieved success.
But sometimes, once we have reached our goal, we lose the drive, the edge, the eye of the tiger, and the motivation that initially drove us to success.
Reality is often completely different from fantasy.
After achieving the success our performance plateaus, or possibly drops.
Then we need to find the motivation to keep on going, to sustain that success, to keep the arrow going upwards.
Often this is tied to our aspiration, if our aspiration, what we truly desired, was to achieve some success, then once we have tasted success, it is possible that we will be satisfied, our aspiration is met, and our motivation drops.
What we need to do is to feed our aspirations, and reignite our desire, this will then give us the motivation and drive to keep on going.
To do this, we need to elevate our goals: it might be something like wanting to be the first team to win the league three times or achieving an even better on-time delivery than we achieved last year.
If we don’t find the right goals, then our performance will suffer.
I know that before I ran my first marathon I was training 5-6 times per week, I knew that if I didn’t do that I wouldn’t be able to hit that goal.
However, once I had completed my first marathon, my training fell off, it was so much harder to get out of bed at 5.30 in the morning to go for my training runs.
Excuses not to run, seemed so much more plausible, and hell I’d run my marathon, so why did I need to keep training so hard?
Consequently, my training dropped, even though I was scheduled to run another marathon in 6 months’ time. It just didn’t inspire me to get out of bed.
I needed a new target, and not just running another marathon, or running my next marathon faster, this didn’t inspire me, and it didn’t feed my aspiration, I needed something bigger, better, bolder.
Finally, I decided that I would look to run a Marathon in each of the 5 major continents, Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia.
My goal now was to run in
This was a goal which inspired me, it seemed like it would be fun to accomplish, something different, something bigger, and I would look to get to visit some great places into the bargain.
After creating this new goal, I was getting out of bed at 5.30 and running 5-6 times per week again.
This is what we need to do with our team, we need to find new goals for them, to keep pushing them onward and upwards.
It’s not always easy to do, but we need to give them success, reward them, make them hungry for success, and then just raise the bar so they feel that they are achieving more.
As leaders, this is one of our key tasks.
Anyone can achieve success once, but it is more difficult to repeat it; they say that maintaining the number one position is often much harder than becoming number one.
Great leaders achieve success repeatedly.
So if you want to be a great leader this is a skill that you need to master.
If you want to learn more about creating highly engaged teams or being a better leader click the link to make an appointment to talk about how I can help.
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