Category: Achieving Goals

habit building tool : effect-ease mastery matrix

Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix: Definitive Tool To Build Habits For Success

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

Success being a very relative term can differ for every individual. But one definition is common: success is when you achieve the goal that you had set for yourself.

-Divya

We all have goals and we all want to achieve them. At the beginning of each year, we set New Year’s resolutions for ourselves. We set high goals and dedicatedly try to achieve them with all the effort that we can possibly put into it. For a few days, everything seems up, and then one day we fall. Well, that is not the problem. The problem is that we don’t get up again.

Goal setting is easy but to work on them and achieve them, we need dedication, consistency, and habits.

So, when I understood this very basic problem and very simple solution, I started working on my habits. I listed down all the habits that could get me closer to my goal and incorporated all of them into my daily routine. Things were good for the next week and then the habits slipped out of my routine one after the other. I was back to my normal self by the end of the 44th day. My simple solution was not so simple after all.

Eventually, after working on myself for a long time, I came up with the Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix (EEMM) tool to Build Habits.

Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix

The Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix is a tool that helps individuals evaluate and categorize habits based on two critical dimensions: Effectiveness in achieving your goals (vertical axis) and Easiness to incorporate and continue (horizontal axis). This can effectively work as a habit-building worksheet. By plotting habits on this matrix, individuals can gain insights into the balance between the effort required to establish a habit and its potential impact on achieving personal or professional goals. Each habit falls into one of four quadrants based on these two criteria.

Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix : Habit Building Tool

Quadrant 1: Balanced Achievers

The Sweet Spot of Success

Habits in this quadrant strike a harmonious balance between effectiveness and ease of implementation. They are both effective in contributing to one’s goals and manageable in terms of the effort required. These are the habits that can bring about quite a big change with moderate levels of effort. But finding such habits may not be that easy. It will need a little creativity and innovation too. The tagline for this quadrant is “The Sweet Spot of Success,” highlighting the optimal balance achieved between effort and impact.

Quadrant 2: Challenging Champions

Where Grit Meets Greatness

This quadrant represents habits that are both challenging and highly effective. These habits may demand significant effort, discipline, and dedication but offer substantial rewards in terms of personal growth and goal achievement. If you have extremely high willpower and are highly adaptable to change you can pick on habits from this quadrant and you are good to go. Building these habits will bring you closer to your goals faster than anything else. The tagline for this quadrant is “Where Grit Meets Greatness,” emphasizing the resilience and determination required to conquer challenging but impactful habits.

Quadrant 3: Struggle Zone

Overcoming Obstacles on the Path to Mastery

In this quadrant, habits may be challenging to implement, but their impact on goal achievement is limited. These habits might demand a considerable amount of effort but may not bring significant results. The tagline for this quadrant is “Overcoming Obstacles on the Path to Mastery,” acknowledging the difficulties faced in pursuing habits with less tangible outcomes. Habits in this quadrant might be difficult to implement and may not bring significant results. But these may be those little things that can make you stand out from the rest of them. You should take up these only when you are the closest to your goals.

Quadrant 4: Effortless Essentials

Simplicity in Success

Here in this quadrant are habits that are easy to incorporate but do not have a high impact too. The habits that fall under this category are the ones that are not that important but you still have to do them anyway. Like, checking your emails every day. While they require minimal effort, their impact might be limited. Examples include cleaning up your desk, creating a to-do list, or minor daily tasks that don’t align with broader objectives. The tagline for this quadrant is “Simplicity in Success,” emphasizing the ease of incorporating these habits but also recognizing their limited impact. These are habits that aid your growth but do not directly impact it.

Anyone who starts building new habits should begin with something easy to incorporate and have maximum effectiveness in bringing them closer to their goals. Hence begin with habits in Quadrant 1. But also remember to not stop just there.

Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix For A Blogger

As a blogger when I divided my habits according to the effect-ease mastery matrix, this is how it looked:

Building habits is a task that needs determination, but it is important to choose habits that will keep you motivated enough to achieve your goals. If you keep on challenging yourself with habits that are tough to incorporate and do not give any immediate result you may lose your intrinsic motivation to keep going. Hence, this Effect-Ease Mastery Matrix acts as a tool for you to decide where you should start.

how to strengthen your willpower and avoid temptations

Boosting Your Willpower: How to Avoid Temptations and Strengthen Your Willpower

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

Willpower, Determination, Conviction, Drive, and Self-control. There are many names by which you can call this emotion, but what it simply means is deciding upon something and seeing it through no matter what. Willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to achieve your long-term goals. A strong will can reap many benefits and help you reach your goals.

Understanding Willpower and How It Works

Willpower is the ability to keep moving forward even when things are not going your way. When you have a deep-seated desire and the intention to fulfill it, that is what starts your journey toward anything in life. It is quite easy to build a desire and take a pledge to fulfill it. It is also easy to start on the path with your initial motivation to get something or achieve something. The real test begins when you face obstructions and failures. This is when your willpower comes into action and helps you to keep moving.

The most important thing here is the intention. Your intention and the intensity of your desires are the most important factor in determining the strength of your willpower. To keep moving and gather new energy every time you face any obstacle you need to have very strong conviction.

Harnessing the Power of Willpower to Reach Your Goals

When a river leaves its abode in the mountains to meet the sea, it has to cross through the heartland filled with many obstructions. There are times when it needs to break those obstacles and sometimes change its course, it needs to modify according to the needs of the time and situation.

There is no highway to reach your goals, you have to carve out a path like a river does in order to keep flowing.

Divya Toshniwal

One of the key factors in someone’s success is willpower. It is said that successful is that person who can get up one more time than the number of times he has failed. The energy that is needed to get up that one extra time is your determination. It is essential to have strong willpower in order to be successful in life because no success comes without facing failures or obstacles, and when that happens you need to keep your motivation levels up and your intentions intact. The hope for a bright future and achievement of goals needs the base of strong willpower to grow on.

benefits of strong willpower

Benefits of Strong Willpower

  • Increased Self-Control: Strong willpower can help you increase your self-control. It helps you fight the desire for instant gratification and avoid temptations. When you can avoid temptations that are immediately gratifying, you can focus on your long-term goals and align yourself with them.
  • Better Decision-Making: When you have the ability to avoid immediate temptation and have a long-term vision, it becomes easier for you to make decisions that would have a permanent and long-term impact on your dreams and goal.
  • Better Focus: Better willpower gives you the ability to avoid distractions that otherwise disrupt your concentration. This will help you use your time effectively and be more productive.
  • Avoid Procrastination: Your willpower can help you overcome procrastination and boost your productivity. Procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing tasks, often due to a lack of motivation, interest in the task at hand, or maybe sheer laziness. The entire concept of procrastination is based on weak willpower and the need to get instant gratification. Having strong willpower can eliminate a number of issues that are caused by procrastination.
  • Healthy Life: All the unhealthy lifestyle choices that we make in life are for instant gratification. We eat junk food because it gratifies our taste buds right now, we laze around and do not work out because it avoids the struggle that the body has to go through, we drink alcohol for the instant kick we get, and so on. We give in to our temptations. Having strong willpower will help you make healthy choices, such as exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet, and avoiding harmful habits like smoking or excessive drinking.
  • Increased happiness: By resisting temptation and making positive choices, you may experience greater feelings of accomplishment, satisfaction, and well-being in the long run. You will find yourself being more content in your life.
how to strengthen willpower and avoid temptations

How to Improve Willpower and Avoid Temptations

Strengthening willpower is a gradual process and requires consistent effort and discipline. Be patient and persistent, and don’t be discouraged by setbacks or lapses. Here are a few things that will help you improve your willpower and avoid temptations for instant gratification.

  • Set realistic and achievable goals: Create a plan to achieve your long-term goals and make sure you break them down into some short-term goals. I call these mini-goals. Achieving these mini-goals in the journey will keep you motivated to focus on your long-term goals. This little satisfaction keeps you going and helps you avoid the diversions you may take for instant gratification.
  • Surround yourself with support: Be with friends, family, and supportive people who inspire you to achieve long-term goals and not with the ones who push you to give in to your temptations.
  • Identify your triggers: You will be surprised to know but there may be certain triggers to your temptations. You may tend to eat more junk food when you are stressed or you may binge-watch when you are delayed on your timeline to achieve a goal. Try to identify what breaks your ability to stay focused and determined and work on them.
  • Practice Mindfulness: Be here in this moment and avoid thinking about the things that tempt you to break down and leave behind your long-term goals. Mindfulness can help increase self-awareness and improve decision-making by reducing the influence of emotions and impulses.
  • Avoid Decision Fatigue: Decision fatigue is a real problem. When you have to take multiple decisions you exhaust yourself more. And when you are mentally exhausted you tend to give in to your temptations more easily.
  • Get enough sleep: Sleep deprivation can decrease your mental strength and the capacity of your brain to work efficiently and push itself to work harder. In such situations, you will feel weaker and in reduced capacity to exert your willpower. [Also read: 7 SLEEP MISTAKES THAT YOU ARE MAKING AND HOW TO FIX THEM ]
  • Eat healthy and exercise regularly: When you are physically fit, you have more control over your mental strength too. You can thus have more conviction towards your goals and be more focused without having any distractions.

Everyone is different and what works for one person may not work for another. It’s important to experiment and find what works best for you.

benefits of using mind mapping tool

The Benefits of Mind-Mapping

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

Among the various tools of brainstorming, mind-mapping has been the most popular and common among life coaches all around the world. Whether it is for setting up your goals or taking action on achieving them, mind-mapping works on both aspects. Whether it is to create something from scratch or to resolve issues in already established ideas, mind mapping is an efficient tool for both. There are various benefits of mind-mapping but before we get into that we need to understand what is mind-mapping and how this tool exactly works.

What is Mind-Mapping?

Mind-mapping is a graphical representation of the brainstorming you do around a central idea. The process to use the mind-mapping tool is simple. Mind-mapping starts with one central idea and whatever related information or ideas you have around that central idea are noted down around that idea displayed as different branches. Similar ideas are grouped under one branch. This helps you get all information and creative ideas on one screen to view in one glance.

The Benefits of Mind-Mapping as a Tool for Coaching

  1. Makes learning meaningful – Mind- Mapping promotes conceptual learning instead of rote learning. When graphically represented the connections between the ideas come our clearer and stronger. This makes learning more meaningful.
  2. Increases Creativity- One of the benefits of mind-mapping is that is promotes and increases creative thinking abilities. Mind mapping allows you to expand on ideas using trigger words. It creates association between the ideas which helps you to identify connections that were not visible otherwise.
  3. Helps with Memorization- When you see connections between your ideas it becomes easier to memorize the concepts. Rote learning is a formula of past and now it is important to understand the concepts and connections to work on ideas.
  4. Simplifies – The greatest benefit of mind mapping that I have found though is that it simplifies complex ideas, connections, processes and problems. When all the aspects of a particular concepts are laid out in front of you with all possible connections and the representations show you how each idea is derived it simplifies even the most complex problems.

How can you use Mind-Mapping to achieve your goals?

When we talk about coaching , most of us refer to coaching for goal achievement. So, let us now see how mind-mapping can help you have clearer goals and also a well defined path to achieve them.

Steps to follow:

  1. Right your goal in the centre of the page
  2. From the left side start building on paths that can lead to it from separate directions
  3. To the right start building how achieving this goal will affect your life.
  4. On the bottom set up alternative goals or opportunity cost
  5. On the top list the obstacles that you may face and skills that you need.
  6. Feel free to branch out anything you see relevant to the goal.

Example of mind-mapping:

mind-mapping

The 5 M’s of Achieving Your Goal

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

We all have dreams, we all have desires. Some are materialistic desires while others are emotional, social, or spiritual desires. But we all have desires. To transform my desires into goals I started using the H.E.A.R.T. Model for goal setting. Not only me but many of my clients have benefitted from this model too.

While talking about the HEART model I also talked about preparing for the action. If I had 7 hours to cut a tree I’ll spend 6 hours sharpening my axe. This article is about sharpening the axe.

There are 5 M’s that you need to be aware of while working on achieving your goals.

5 M's of Achieving Goals

Mindset

While talking about goals it is more important to set your mindset, than your targets. What I mean here is to set your mindset for the kind of person you want to become. The goal is to become a healthy person and not lose 10kgs. The goal is to become a good parent and not reduce scolding your kids. The goal is to become a rich person and not earn a million dollars. Set your mind like the person you want to become and start living like one. So when you make a decision on what you should eat ask yourself what would a healthy person eat. Make decisions like the person you want to become.

mindset shift

Motivation

Understand the Why?’ behind your goal. What is your motivation? Why are you setting up these goals? If you are not motivated enough to achieve your goals, you will not be able to leave your comfort zone and the growth zone definitely starts after that. Even if you are successful in the internal fights you would turn back at the first sight of external trouble and hence it is extremely important that you have a very strong motivating force for achieving your goals. This motivation can be internal or external, but in my opinion, internal motivations work better in the long run while external motivations are excellent for immediate gratification.

Mini-Goals

It is easier to achieve goals that can be achieved in a short span of time. It’s better to target reading one book a week than 52 books in a year. This way when you complete the book one of your mini-goals is already achieved. Your brain celebrates and is ready to accept next week’s goal. On the other hand, 52 books feel like a burden and if you are not able to read for a few weeks it feels like piling up and you are more likely to give up. When I started writing my book I set up mini-goals like creating a flow about what I want to say, then listing down the chapters, writing each chapter was a mini-goal, even- proofreading and creating the graphics were set up as goals. I celebrated each achievement and it motivated me to keep writing.

Maps

If you are going treasure hunting, don’t forget the map. If you want something, always remember that someone, somewhere in the world has created a map for it. Someone has been on this path and they have left breadcrumbs for you to follow. Find out about the people who have achieved the goal and also the ones who could not. You can learn a lot from their journey. Refer to the various maps created by these people and create your own map for reaching your goal. No, I am not telling you to follow someone blindly but I would strongly recommend taking suggestions from both who achieved or could not achieve their goals.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a very important quality that you need to develop in order to achieve your goals. Neither ruminating about the past nor planning the future is going to actually help you in achieving your goal. Rather, what will actually help is taking action in the present. Being in the present moment fully aware of what is happening around you is extremely helpful in grabbing the opportunities that come your way. Most of us lose many opportunities because we do not even realize that this opportunity has come our way. We are not able to identify the expressways and keep struggling in the smaller lanes.

There are many ways to develop mindfulness and one of my tried and tested ways is meditation. You can read about the types of meditation here.

To read similar articles on achieving goals click here.

9 Barriers In Achieving Your Goals You Can Break

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

Achieving your goals is not going to be a smooth ride. You are not going to get a road without speed breakers. A few of these obstructions in achieving your goal will be absolutely out of your control while some you can manage to control. Having these internal obstacles is not defeating but doing nothing about them definitely is. I am listing down 9 different internal obstructions that I have faced along with my clients and also how you can deal with a few of them.

Break Barriers and achieve your goals

Perfectionism

How can being perfect be a barrier to achieving your goals? it should rather be motivation, right?

well, not always. Being perfect can lead to more harm than good in your journey towards success. I have faced this myself. I was not ready to present myself as a life coach until I have learned it all. I spent almost 3 years trying to understand all the things I need to learn and learning them. Every time I would set a date to make the announcement and every time I realized there is still more to learn. Learning would never end and it should never end. Learning is an ongoing process and hence no one can ever be perfect.

Don’t stop learning but don’t wait to be perfect too.

Procrastination

This is my favorite one. How many times do you think you tell yourself ‘ I’ll do that later.’ in one day? The first thing you need to do is count it. Once you are done counting, ask yourself why are you saying that. Procrastination (meaning – the act of putting off doing something that you should do till another day or time because you do not want to do it because it’s unpleasant or boring.) There can be a number of reasons for procrastination but only one way to deal with it. As Nike says ‘just do it.’

One of the best solutions that I have come up with to deal with procrastination is the 5-minute-rule. The 5-Minute-Rule to deal with procrastination is simply that if any task that you are supposed to do, is going to take less than 5 minutes to do, you would not postpone it. This has worked for me and many of my clients. Not only will this help you achieve your goals, but it will also make you more organized and save a lot of your time in the long run.

Losing Focus

This is the most common obstacle to achieving your goal. Most of us have been facing this lately and no doubt the biggest reason is our smartphones and the pinging notifications. Your phone never lets you leave its side. As soon as you lock the screen and try and focus on work again there comes a ‘ping’ and here you go back to your phone. One thing leads to another and there go the next 20 minutes of your life.

The best way to deal with the distractions is to remove them. Simply remove them and don’t exert your willpower. You don’t have an infinite stock of it. Simply remove your distractions. So if your biggest distraction is your phone, switch it off or at least put it on focus mode.

Feeling Overwhelmed

You are bound to feel overwhelmed if you take up goals that are too difficult to achieve or those which have a lot of aspects attached to them. It takes a toll on your confidence or blocks a large portion of your mind in assessing the next steps and calculating all the variables. Such goals stop you from moving forward even when you keep working on them the entire day. The reason is that you are not able to take any actionable steps.

The best solution is to simplify your goals and divide them into smaller goals. So if you have a goal for the year, divide it into 12 monthly goals, the weekly goals, and then daily goals, making them easier, clearer, and achievable. Do not underestimate the power of small steps.

Boredom or Retreat

Too simple goals or goals that are not challenging enough can also be the reason why you are not being able to achieve them. Have you ever thought about visiting the nearest tourist place to your city ? you always feel like- ‘we can go there anytime. Let us go to some other good (far away) place. ‘. This has happened to me so many times and in spite of living in Kolkata for 25 years, I have never been to Darjeeling while I have traveled to Mussoorie, Nainital, and Kashmir.

The same applies to our goals. We procrastinate and say it’s too easy it can be done anytime. But that anytime never comes. So don’t make your goals too easy to achieve.

Drama Seeking Behavior

For people who love drama, the fights between two colleagues, banter in the house, and back-bitching from people(or sometimes even self), be aware, this is taking up so much time of your life that it is pulling you behind and not letting you achieve your goals. This can be the silliest and most daunting barrier that you’ll ever face in achieving your goals.

So just stop, which one of your colleagues is going to win the fight is not going to make any difference in your life. Understand the reason behind this behavior. Even though it is the silliest obstacle it might be one of the toughest to deal with. Mostly, people who seek drama in others’ life are ones who do not have fulfilling lives themselves. So, connect to someone who can help you create a fulfilling life for yourself.

Negative Self-talk

“I have failed before, I will fail again”

“Nobody wants what I have to offer”

” I don’t have the right connections”

“This is way out of my league”

Do these statements sound familiar? Well, then you are a victim of negative self-talk. The irony is that you are the victim and you are the assailant too. Creating self-awareness is very important to understand why are you saying these negative statements to yourself. Imagine if your best friend came to you and told you a business idea, would you say this to them?

Dig deeper into your beliefs, see what are the beliefs you hold for yourself and why do you hold these beliefs. Eliminate the negative beliefs and move on. It will take some time and some practice, nothing happens overnights. But things will change. Start talking to yourself positively. Learn more on how to overcome negative self-talk here.

Fear

One of the most common reasons you are not able to achieve your goals is- fear. Fear of the unknown. Many of us are not being able to move forward just because we are too comfortable where we are. Even when we are not happy, we prefer to stay because there is a certainty. We prefer not to venture into the unknown as here at least we know what’s going to happen. Even Elsa could realize her true power only when she ventured into the unknown, so take that lesson from Disney.

Anger

Anger – it’s the most dangerous emotion to face. Yes, it’s a part of our emotions wheel and yes, everyone is bound to face it. But, how you deal with it is what will make all the difference. Do you rise above it and move forward, or will you let your energy burn in the heat of it(remember you have limited energy for each day)? Keeping any kind of anger or disappointment within you can cause a lot of your energy to burn without any fruitful results in your favor.

So ask yourself – are you angry when someone gets a promotion and you don’t? are you angry when things don’t work for you and they work for someone else? are you angry when you can’t perform as much as you expected to? and how do you react to your emotion of anger?

Take your anger out in productive ways. Empty yourself of this negative energy. I am not going to tell you to count backward and breathe deep. Because this kind of anger may not even surface but it’s there. So you need to dig deeper to see where it arises from and how it affects you. This will help you change your thought patterns when you start working on your emotions.

To understand your own obstacles and how you can deal with them, You can connect to me for personal virtual sessions

Break Barriers and achieve your goals

HEART Model For Goal Setting

Posted on by Divya Toshniwal

While talking about achieving your goals the most prominent thing you’ll hear is to be determined, take the first step, and make your goals SMART. Smart word here isn’t used literally but as an abbreviation for the model used for goal setting .

SMART model of goal setting in life coaching

The new innovative approach that I applied to myself a few weeks ago, however, is a little different and more fulfilling. The model that I am talking about is the HEART model for goal setting.

Why HEART you ask? Because something that comes from your heart and has your emotions attached is always more powerful than something that comes from your mind.

HEART model for goal setting in coaching

The HEART model for goal setting is closer to you emotionally and has extra motivation and impact when you move forward to achieve it. Even when things do not work out the way you want them to and even when you are not getting desired results, you are bound to try harder for things that are closer to your heart, in comparison to things that your mind is telling you to achieve.

This is what the H.E.A.R.T. model for goal setting stands for :

H stands for Honest :

So the first thing that you should ask yourself is whether your goals are honest towards your life vision, mission and purpose. Are they consistent with your ambitions and aspirations? If your life mission is extremely humanitarian and you set up a capitalistic goal for yourself there are chances that you would quit as soon as you start facing obstacles. Capitalistic goals would not provide enough fuel for you to keep going in the downtime.

E stands for Exact :

This is what you exactly want and what exactly would you need to achieve these goals. Determine the resources and skills required. Break down your goals into smaller chunks and prepare to achieve one at a time. So if you have a yearly goal, break it down into monthly and weekly goals. Make your statements exact. A wise man once said ‘ If I was given 7 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 hours sharpening my axe’. So, prepare well.

A stands for Action:

A goal without a plan is just wishful thinking and words without actions mean nothing. To achieve your goals, in the exact center of the heart model is- Action. To take action for your goals it is important that you ask yourself the right questions. Questions like = ‘ What is the one small step that I can take today?’ The hardest part is actually not solving a problem but asking the right questions that can lead you to solve the problem.

R stands for Realistic:

As I said before, a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking. So in order to make a plan to achieve your dreams you need to consider the realities around them. What are the possible obstacles that might come in your way? Do you have the time and energy to give into this goal? What are your other obligations? How much are you willing to give for this dream of yours?

T stands for Time-Bound:

And yes, your goal needs to have a deadline. No, it’s not that you cannot achieve a goal after the deadline, but plans with a deadline are more effective in general. So set time for each step you take and mark your achievement with each step crossed. This will also give you the motivation to keep moving forward.

H.E.A.R.T. model for goal setting in life coaching.

The most important thing is that you need to celebrate and reward yourself for even the smallest of your achievements and for every step you take toward your goals.