If you want to achieve big goals, one of the trickiest aspects is staying patient. When you’ve got your goal in sight you want it NOW! It’s easy to look at other people and believe in overnight success stories. But the truth is success doesn’t hit you like a bolt of lightning. Instead, success is the result of consistent daily action - because this strategy creates momentum.

It takes a lot of effort to push a heavy boulder up a hill. But once the ball is rolling back down again, all you’ve got to do is keep up! It’s the same with your goals. You’ll face a lot of friction and resistance when you first begin, but the second you’re out of the starting blocks you can ride the flow.

That’s why momentum makes everything feels easier. Instead of pushing you’re rolling and instead of procrastinating, you’re implementing [which also builds your confidence].

So how do you build momentum into your life so you can more easily achieve your goals? The simplest answer is the way you approach your day. Let me show you how…

1. Plan your day to master your time

The self-help guru, Jim Rohn famously said, “either you run the day or the day runs you.”

In other words, you’ve got to get a daily plan pinned down to ensure you don’t squander your time and your minutes are invested wisely.

A tool such as the Self Journal will help you get granular with your day. Use the daily timeline to plan your day in 30 minute chunks [it’s a great for working on Pomodoros]. Plan in everything so you can eliminate decision fatigue and move smoothly from one prioritized task to another.

When you know what you have to do, your daily implementation becomes seamless - allowing you to leverage flow and create that all important momentum.

2. Start with your morning routine

There are only two parts of your day that you can control fully. That’s the way you wake up and the way you go to bed. While you may have robust plans for the space in between life can be unpredictable. You never know what else is going to come your way.

Your morning routine is your time to set your day up right. It’s your opportunity to do things that light you up and put you in gear for your A game. During this time, eliminate all distractions so you don’t get thrown off course. Don’t look at your phone. Don’t check your email. Don’t jump onto social media. Instead, stay fully focused on you and your world.

You can experiment with what gets you going and tailor a morning routine that’s perfected for your needs. For example, you may want to journal, fit in a workout, meditate, do some yoga, take a cold shower etc. There are no hard fast rules when creating a morning routine - it’s just what works for you.

Regardless of what you do, the benefits are clear. With a morning routine getting you into a peak mental, physical, and emotional state, you can hit the day hard - and create maximum momentum and results.

3. Invest in good habits

Take a moment right now to think about all the things you do in your day on autopilot. For example, clean your teeth, make your bed, eat your breakfast… Autopilot tasks take virtually zero bandwidth or motivation. Instead, you just do them. What’s more, you feel bad if you don’t do them!

That’s why Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

If you want to build momentum and get more out of your day, your habits are the key.

Imagine how much easier it would be to achieve your goals if you did all the actions necessary - without even having to think about them? For example, you habitually went on a run, made those sales calls, wrote 3 emails, published a blog… Whatever the small steps to your goal, just imagine if they became a habit.

Habits build momentum, which is why the world’s top performers double down on theirs. You can do the same when you use a habit tracker. It’s not easy to embed new habits - especially in the early days. So hack it! Use a tool such as the Habit Roadmap to track a winning streak. Build a visual chain of daily wins and before long that chain will become so strong you won’t want to break it.

As Warren Buffett says, “chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

4. Get accountability

The road to your goals is never going to be smooth! Ups and downs are inevitable when you’re trying something new and pushing out of your comfort zone. That’s where an accountability structure can make all the difference.

It’s harder to back out of the things you said you were going to do when other people are watching. This is why accountability structures can make such a difference to your goal-inspired journey. When someone else is checking in and has the same ambition as you, you’re more likely to get stuff done.

Accountability can take a number of forms.

Momentum can be hard to build, but the pay off for sticking with it is clear. When you can ride the wave of action and implementation you can go further - and faster.

So try out some of these techniques this week.

Take the actions necessary to get you moving - because once you truly start, it’s a lot harder to stop.

You’ve got this!