It seems like everywhere I look or listen lately determination and discipline keep coming up. I don’t know about you, but for me it is often a struggle to stay consistent with what I know I should be doing with my small business marketing, social media engagement, networking and keeping in touch with my network in order to continually build my businesses, my brand, and my community reputation.

Have you experienced this? Often we’re humming along, consistently following our marketing plan, writing blogs, engaging well with our social network, talking to contacts, and for the most part checking off our daily task list and ‘boom,’ we get inundated with distractions or other life happenings that require our attention. When this happens it’s easy to get discouraged and off-track as we see important marketing tasks falling off the plate and slipping out of our grasp.

So how do we maintain that daily discipline and determination to get done what we know we need to do in order to build our businesses?

Below are three simple practices that I’ve found can help right away to cultivate daily determination to succeed and do what you know you need to do to build your business.

1. Cultivate your determination. Like building muscles, determination starts out small and builds upon itself the more and more you exercise it. Celebrate small wins and use that positivity and momentum to build bigger and bigger wins. Your determination will grow if you continue to cultivate and reward it.
2. Create actionable daily goals. We all know the saying about eating an elephant…the only way to do it is one bite at a time. Create bite-sized, actionable goals for yourself each day to build your determination. I like the idea of picking the top four most important tasks or projects I need to complete each day and then allowing myself to feel accomplished if I get those four items checked off.
3. Create accountability. If you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder making sure you follow your larger business development, marketing and sales goals, you need to. Sometimes the kick in the pants that we need to stick to our plans has to come from someone else. So, invite a mentor, colleague, spouse, partner, friend to hold you accountable for your goals. As a writer, I’ve worked primarily on my own for many years and finally I’ve put together a mastermind group and it’s changed my life and my business. The importance of accountability cannot be understated!

Having systems and habits in place as much as possible can often help you from getting behind on the important marketing tasks that you know you should be doing regularly. I’ve developed a helpful, no-cost Digital Keep-in-Touch Plan that will help you form the habits to keep in regular contact with your network so that you can keep a steady flow of business and opportunities coming your way. Check it out!

I’ve helped countless professionals better communicate with their networks and market their businesses. If I can be of help to you, let me know! I specialize in helping independent professionals and small businesses communicate through social media, blogs, e-newsletters, articles, white papers, and various other written means. So, if writing is not your favorite task, let me know how I can I help!

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Cheers,

Melissa