Focus: The Key To Owning Your Destiny
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four-hour days.” – Zig Ziglar
When I was starting out in life, I really wished I had known more about the importance of focus and how it ultimately plays an enormous role in how far you go in life and how fast you achieve your goals and objectives. It may seem obvious, and for sure, we’ve heard it a thousand times, but what you focus on is exactly what you will get in life. While coaching clients, I quickly noticed that the ones that were constantly focused on illnesses were always sick; those that were focused on the lack of love in their lives had no love; those that were focused on having little or no money never had financial abundance; and so on and so forth. Therefore, it became very clear that what we focused on simply manifested itself in our lives.
While it’s obvious that we need to focus daily on positive and constructive thoughts, in this article, I want to look at the things that can distract us and easily make us lose our focus, very often causing us to get off track and taking us further away from our goals.
Social Media: While social media can be a lot of fun and certainly a great way to keep in contact with people, unless you are using it to advance your life’s goals, it needs to be limited to no more than one hour a day, and some people may say that that is even too much. If you do not have the discipline to do this, there are several programs that you can use that will cut you off from accessing social media once you have reached your pre-established limit. As it has been proven that it takes about fifteen minutes to get into a concentrated state, constantly taking time to check social media will distract you and ultimately lower your productivity, as it will keep you in an unfocused state of mind.
Other People’s Drama: Let other people live their lives and concentrate on your own. It never fails to amaze me how much energy people put into trying to guide and live other people’s lives. Leave them alone! If you are honest with yourself, how many times have these other people taken your advice? I bet the answer is never or very rarely. Of course, there are times when we need to be involved in the lives of a close friend or relative, and that is fine. What I am talking about here is when you run around giving unsolicited advice and are more focused on other people’s lives than you are on your own. This is a classic delay tactic that we use sometimes to avoid looking at our own lives and thus sidestepping the changes we need to make.
Television: An hour or two of a well-written scripted drama is fine, but hours of watching reality television (by the way, there is very little or no reality in this genre) is completely unproductive and totally takes your focus off your goals and dreams. Reality television is very often filled with the worst aspects of humans: constant fighting and quarreling, vacuous conversations that lead nowhere, people’s struggles being exploited for so-called entertainment, and all for the sole purpose of ratings. Don’t allow yourself to get dragged into this; use your time wisely. The two or three hours that you may spend every evening watching television can be used in a much more productive manner to build a business or to dedicate to self-improvement activities.
“Focus on your goals, not your fear. Focus like a laser beam on your goals.” – Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Emails: Checking your phone constantly for emails or some other notification is also totally distracting and causes you to lose focus. I suggest that you turn off all the notifications on your phone and check them at certain times during the day. Checking emails at certain times of the day, like 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., also helps with concentration; answering emails in real time becomes like a virtual chat that is extremely detrimental to focus and staying mentally on track. The answering of emails can also be outsourced to a virtual assistant; if you give them clear guidelines on how to answer, you can free yourself from this albatross that can be very burdensome.
Emotions: One of the lessons I am learning in life is patience. I don’t know how it happens, but I always seem to get stuck behind a slow person at the ATM machine or in line at the supermarket. There was a time when this would drive me crazy and I would get all worked up, but I’ve learned with time that this only drains me, and my focus gets totally shot. The same can be true of getting mad when someone cuts you off in traffic, or your partner does something that irritates you, or it rains when you don’t have an umbrella, or your employee calls in sick when there is an important meeting—the list of things that can send us into an emotional tailspin is endless! The trick is learning to look at these events in a way that keeps you calm and focused. It can take some people literally hours, or even days, to recover from anger, rage, or some other emotional upset. If need be, work with a therapist or coach to learn techniques to master your emotions. You will be so glad that you did!
All the people that I have met in my life that I consider successful in one field, or another have all learned how to stay focused and how to not let outside stimuli destroy their concentration. If your mind is scattered and going in too many directions, it is almost impossible to achieve anything. If your focus creates toxic thoughts and emotions, you will most certainly have a hard time sticking to your life’s plan. Remember that you have the power to stay focused no matter what; don’t let other people, devices, events, or emotions distract you and ruin your concentration. You may not learn this way of living immediately, and in the case that you get off track, just get back in the saddle and keep working towards your goals and dreams through positive and careful focus.
