Using ‘Carrots’ To Stick To Your Marketing Plan When You’re Low On Motivation

If you read last week’s post you’ll have seen that I’ve been struggling with indecision and demotivation over recent weeks. I turned to all my usual crutches to try and help me through my flip flopping and actually get stuff done – I sought public accountability by announcing new plans, I did tarot spreads to plan a path forward, I updated my testimonials page to give myself a confidence boost and tried working from bed a few times to mix up my environment. But The Fear was strong with this one – my accountability didn’t work as I barely whispered the announcement, the tarot spread told me I know what I’m doing and to crack on (which I didn’t), my confidence boost was short-lived and I ended up having a nap in bed instead.

I NEEDED A NEW MOTIVATION STRATEGY.

In my conversations with friends around what’s next for the business and what I needed to do next, I always came to the same conclusion: “I just need to get on with it.” Do you notice something a little off-ish in that tone? If a boss said that to me in a job, “will you just get on with it?”, I wouldn’t feel motivated. I’d shrivel into a dried up little seed, mortified, crushed and probably quite tearful. If the way I was trying to motivate myself wasn’t working, then that was what needed to change.

This is wear the carrots come in. As you can probably tell they’re not literal carrots, but the metaphorical ones from the old saying. I’d been using a lot of stick tactics to beat myself into action – “if you don’t know this now, X thing will happen”, “you have to make a start on this or you’ll run out of time and that will be a disaster” – and they patently weren’t scratching the surface. “Ok,” I said to myself, “more carrot, less stick”.

I also realised, after a conversation with Jen Carrington, that part of the problem was also the nature of the work I had coming up. She prompted me to focus on the enjoyable aspects of the work and to focus on them to pull me through. The trouble was, for me the most enjoyable part is always the planning. And that’s what I’ve been doing a lot of over the summer, planning, and re-planning, and writing calendars and outlines, and planning. Once it comes to actually filling in those course outlines, I hit a slump because the enormity of what’s ahead (with no new planning opportunities in sight!) hits me.

So I started a small reward system for myself. At the beginning of the week, I give myself 3 or 4 tasks that must be done that week to move things forward in my business – that’s nothing different, I’ve always done this just lately I haven’t actually done the tasks. But now, once I’ve written down my key to dos, I also add, in capitals at the top of the page, what my reward will be at the weekend if I get all those things done.

Yes, basically, I bribed myself into action. But you know what? It’s working.

Rather than telling myself all the awful things that’s going to happen if I don’t do this thing, and then spiral downwards into more catastrophising, joy is suddenly the driving force in my activity. Like the breeze through a stagnant room, this little shift has made me happy to sit at my desk. The prospect of joy, not doom, is helping to move the needle.

I’m ticking off my tasks now, not because I feel like I’m an awful human if I don’t, because I want the satisfaction of earning the reward.

I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep the reward system up, but for now it’s definitely working. It’s stopping me from overthinking, it’s taking away some of the more painful aspects of the work and it’s helping me to stay committed. I think most importantly, it’s improving my relationship with my boss (also me) because now both those sides of me are really in tune and working together. A couple of weeks in, I’m starting to feel already more on an even keel and like I might not need to reward to feel inspired and motivated – but don’t tell my boss that just yet 😉

Choosing rewards

If you’re thinking that the reward system sounds like it could get expensive or out of hand, here are my parameters for setting my rewards so they are manageable.

KEEP IT SMALL

There are two reasons to keep the rewards small. One is obviously expense – a new designer handbag every week is a short cut to bankruptcy. My rewards have all been under £10 (and mostly around a fiver). The second reason is that you don’t want the carrot to turn into a stick. Meaning, it has to be something that you could give or take. If you promise yourself you’ll book that long-awaited holiday, suddenly there’s a whole lot of pressure on you and the self-talk can turn negative again. The reward should be something that you want enough that it’ll make you happy to achieve it, but not so much that you’ll hate yourself if you miss the deadline.

KEEP IT MEANINGFUL

The way to achieve that balance is to choose a small thing that’s meaningful – a small decadence. For me, I always have a scented candle burning when I’m in the bath, and mine had recently run out (do candles ‘run out’? You know what I mean). So, my reward was to go and choose a new candle for the bathroom. In a sense, the rewards wasn’t about the candle itself, but the ritual of going out and choosing it, and then coming back and having a bath in the literal and metaphorical glow of what I’d achieved.

Some other rewards might be going to that coffee shop you’ve seen on Instagram and wanted to visit, going to an exhibition, buying a favourite magazine or a Sunday paper, taking yourself to the cinema on a rainy afternoon, trying the new lunch menu at your local pub. Small things that feel decadent to you, that have a meaning greater than the sum of their parts.

MAKE IT ABOVE YOUR HYGIENE LEVEL OF REQUIREMENTS

I think that making your reward something that you’d likely do anyway but elevating it to a reward can be a useful way of keeping things manageable (I’d probably have cooked a roast last weekend anyway, but making it my reward made it feel special). However, just be mindful of not getting too strict with this. I have been known to tell myself ‘if you get this done you can have dinner tonight’ or ‘finish this page and you can have a wee’. Make your reward a want not a need.

MAKE YOUR TASKS THINGS THAT YOU CONTROL

Set yourself up to actually achieve your reward by making the tasks that count toward it things that are in your control. This usually means things that don’t include other people, or don’t rely on them to complete the task. For example, ‘book a new client’, ‘appear on x podcast’, ‘sell 5 products’, all rely on others – you are not in sole control of making them happen. However, ‘write a blog post’, ‘complete module one’, ‘take 5 photos’, are things that you control. Set yourself up for success and empower yourself to get that reward.