Work-At-Home Expert Tips: How do you re-boot your enthusiasm for your home career when it starts to wane?
I’ve been running Work-At-Home since 1998. Over the last ten years or so, I have periods (usually at the end of the year), where my energy and enthusiasm for the site drops. A couple of times, I began to research options for selling it.
Working at home offers many perks, including doing something you love. But that doesn’t mean you’ll love it every day or that it doesn’t ever get boring or tedious. There are many times through your work-at-home career that you may lose interest, including during the starting phase, when success takes so long. And later, when the excitement about it is gone.
This week, I asked work-at-home expert to share their tips and strategies for staying excited about their ventures, when enthusiasm starts to wane.
Joshua M. Evans, Enthusiasm Expert at Enthusiastic You
Tips for rebooting your Enthusiasm:
1. Revisit why you started your business. When we get pulled into the day to day running of our home careers, we can lose focus on our big goals. Take time to remember why you wanted to start your business in the first place. Then reinforce that by reinstating your sense of purpose.
2. List your accomplishments. Take time to list things that you have accomplished in you career so far that makes you proud. Review these every week to help reinvigorate your passion and energy for this career.
3. Set big goals and big rewards. Set goals for yourself to help keep you on track. Then attach rewards or bonuses to these goals to motivate you to keep striving for them.
Tracee Sioux, Bella Spark Magazine
If you’re enthusiasm is waning that means you’ve outgrown your business. The only way to amp it up is to take on a new challenge. Learn a new skill, add a new service, expand so that you’re hiring people to work for you rather than doing all of the work yourself. People are only excited about
their work if they can reach a state of challenge and pleasure. Examine whether what you’re doing is really what you want to be doing and if it’s
not, then make the necessary adjustments.
Adam Smith, Xobni
Go for mini-goals. Sometimes large or longer-term goals can be overwhelming. After a couple weeks, we may lose motivation, because we still have several months or a year or more left to accomplish the goal. It’s hard to maintain motivation for a single goal for such a long time. Solution: break it down into smaller goals along the way. For example, if you are having a hard time sticking to your goal of “exercising more,” split it up into concrete, achievable mini-goals to boost your momentum. “Go for a 15-minute walk three times a week” and “Run with a friend twice a week in the mornings” are more specific and more doable than a bigger, vaguer goal.
Sami Inkinen, Obvious Ventures
There are some days when you don’t feel like heading out the door for a run, or figuring out your budget, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do that day for your goal. Well, instead of thinking about how hard it is, and how long it will take, tell yourself that you just have to start. Don’t wait until you “feel” like doing whatever it is you need to do.
Ali Luke, Pick The Brain
Focus on fewer goals: Any goal takes effort – and tackling more than two or three at a time is beyond most of us. Rather than trying to change everything overnight, focus on just a couple of key goals. Ideally, you’ll want to choose goals that complement one another.
Dwain Schenck, WSJ
set realistic expectations for yourself as to how long it is going to take to become re-employed. More than likely it will take longer than you think in finding work again. On average it is taking job seekers well over six months to land a new position. Everybody wants to end the pain and loneliness of the search as quickly as possible, but you have to embrace the process and do the right things in order to get hired or get traction starting your own enterprise. Prepare yourself mentally for the pain, humiliation and rejection that come with the interview process.
Remez Sasson, Success Conciousness
Like fire, which needs constant feeding, care and direction, so is enthusiasm. It can easily wane. It can help you start a new project or a plan, but to keep going you need some inner power and stamina, and you need to do some work, which sometimes, could be boring or need effort and time.
Amy Strong, Strong Writing Services
Slap yourself out of it! You KNOW this isn’t the end of the road for you. You deserve everything good that life has to offer. The only thing is, sometimes life isn’t simply “offering” it- you have to go fight for it!
Joaquin Altenberg, VERT Solar Finance
When this happens, the wall will try to push you back into your old habits. This is because the mind fears the unknown. Your old habits, as negative as they may have been, are all your brain and body knows. YOU know that there is more out there for you, but convincing the wall of that is a more difficult task.
Note from WAHS Leslie: I love all these suggestions. When I start to lose interest in WAHS, I often add a new feature or change something (i.e. the look of the site). I also agree that forging ahead even without excitement is important. Action leads to results which can in turn lead to motivation. Finally, breaking down your goals into smaller ones is a great idea. Long distant rewards often aren’t motivating enough to keep you going. But making smaller goals and tracking their attainment, helps you move forward.
