Songwriters – 3 Ways to Stick to Your Plans and Achieve Your Goals

Sometimes when you’re first coming up with goals and plans for yourself, it’ll seem like you can handle any task you give yourself, simply because you’re excited to get started. Then you find as time goes on, that motivation can slip away a bit making it harder to stick to your plans.

If that happens, there are a few things you can try.

1. Have Others Hold You Accountable

When you add a new routine to your life that you believe will help you achieve a goal, you might need some outside motivation to help you stick with it. For example, you might add a routine to work on your songs Mondays – Fridays from 6pm to 7pm. If you feel adding that routine is important, but you’re afraid you might bail on it, you can tell one of your friends, “I’ll be working on my songs Mondays – Fridays from 6pm to 7pm. After each of those sessions, I’m going to email you to let you know I did it. If I miss a session, I’m going to give you five bucks!”

That can be a powerful motivator for you to get things done.

Another great way to keep yourself motivated, is to find like minded people and form a meet up group. So you, and two other songwriting friends can work on your music separately, and then you can get together once a week to discuss what you’ve accomplished and when you worked on it. Having to report to others, while they also report to you can be a powerful motivator.

If you’re interesting in starting a meet up group, but don’t have any other friends who write songs, a great place to start would be to go to some open mics in your area. The more you play and hang out with other songwriters, the more relationships you’ll develop. At that point it’ll be easy to get together.

You can also take your efforts online. There are a ton of songwriting forums out there. If you put “songwriting forum” into a search engine you’ll see a handful of contenders right away. Handle the forums the same way you would handle in-person conversations. Start conversations and develop relationships. If you just go into a forum and put up a post asking for something you want, you’re much less likely to get it than if you get involved in conversations and get to know some of the people in the forums. Once you’ve developed some relationships with people online, you can either start a meet up group in person, if the people are in your area, or you can meet up every week via video chat.

2. Collaborate

Aside from simply meeting up and discussing what you’ve accomplished, you can also collaborate with other songwriters. Collaboration is great, because if you find a collaboration partner with complementary skills, you can create some great songs, just by having more skill points covered than you would have alone. Also, when two or more people start talking about ideas on a subject, there’s a likeliness that new ideas will come from it, that neither of them would have considered on their own.

Napolean Hill has a good metaphor on this topic in Think and Grow Rich, when he says:

“A group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery. An individual battery will provide energy in proportion to the number and capacity of the cells it contains. The brain functions in a similar fashion. This accounts for the fact that some brains are more efficient than others, and leads to this significant statement – a group of brains coordinated (or connected) in a spirit of harmony will provide more thought-energy than a single brain, just as a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery.”

3. Use Affirmations

Daily affirmations are another way to keep yourself motivated and working towards your goals. Our subconscious minds tend to take the information we feed it and act on it. If we leave them to their own accord, it can be an easy way to let negative thoughts slip in, if we’re predispositioned to think that way. For that reason, it’s a good idea to start everyday either writing out, or repeating aloud affirmations about your songwriting, or your life in general.

Some of your affirmations might include:

• “I am a confident person”
• “Every song I write is better than the last”
• “I will be a professional songwriter”
• “I take a lesson from every mistake I make”

And so on. These might seem a little silly when you just read them, but if you say them aloud a few times each, or write them out, and believe what you’re saying, it’ll help fuel your subconscious mind to make these thoughts be true.

You really need to stick to this and do it every for it to help you. This is a perfect opportunity to add a new routine to your life. Repeat or write out your daily affirmations every morning, first thing when you get up.

To learn more, download my free EBook here: http://www.SuccessForYourSongs.com/freeoffer/

Anthony Ceseri is the owner of http://www.SuccessForYourSongs.com, a website dedicated to the growth and development of songwriters of all skill levels. Anthony’s writings appear as examples in the book “Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises For Finding Your Voice” by Pat Pattison, an acclaimed lyric writing professor at Berklee College of Music.