Tag: Goals

Treasure


Tonight I went in search of treasure and I didn’t have to go far. I knew I wouldn’t, and neither do you.  

I am reminded of some of the ra ra feel good seminars of the eighties and nineties, but I suppose they happened before that as well.  I would go to one of those things and get all charged up, and really thought I would never be down again.  This isn’t the kind of treasure I am talking about, but it is similar in some ways.

I long ago accepted the insanity of placing a condition on a decision to be happy.  We say I will be happy if I can just have or do that one thing.  Yet we get or have that one thing and we are happy for a couple weeks, and now it’s something new.  The treasure I have found is both in every moment, and also in brief moments that I give myself. 

Some time ago I started meditating, and once all the cobwebs cleared away, I realized that I am not the person with all those neurotic thoughts. I am the one who notices all those neurotic thoughts.  Now when I go into meditation I decide in that moment to be happy, and it is easy.  It is easy because I am normally sitting in my office, or with my wife enjoying life.  During that time I think of all the things I have to be grateful for, and then I get grateful for all the things in my life that most people aren’t ever grateful for.  During this particular period of time I have a couple welcome to midlife kind of medical  issues.  It would be really easy to look at all the reasons it is terrible, but I have chosen to let it be a reminder that I made it through all the things I didn’t think I would, and that this too shall pass. 

Right now some people might be tempted to dismiss what I have said here because they don’t understand it.  I haven’t given up on having an impact on the world, I have just refused to let the process make me miserable.  Uncomfortable maybe, but not miserable.  Discomfort is natural, but miserable is just what you think about your discomfort.  I don’t set goals the way the “experts” tell you to set them.  They say set S.M.A.R.T goals, and I say be smart about goals. If I set a goal their way, at some point it gets really uncomfortable, and I usually end up back where I started from.  When I set goals my way or rather intentions, I have a much higher success rate.  Instead of setting a goal and a date I set an intention, figure out what I “think” needs to be done to achieve it. Then I focus on doing the best I can to achieve it, all the while enjoying the process.  I used to hate making beds, and doing dishes, but now I make the bed every day and often do dishes.  I realized that the thoughts I had about doing the dishes, or working on a goal related task were much worse than just doing them.  I just do the dishes or make the bed well, and pay attention to each step rather than what I think about the process. I do the same with goals. 

The key to this, and other things that will make you more effective is coming to the realization that you aren’t your thoughts, your past, or how you feel.  Most of your thoughts are not voluntary, and if you don’t believe me, just sit down and take a deep breath or two for the purpose of just noticing what your mind thinks.  You will find that you don’t choose to think about something. Thoughts just pop up.  So let them pop up, notice them and then get on with what you want to do with your life.   This is the treasure of life, staying happy no matter what happens.  It is a work in process, but works most of the time.  I hope it makes you as happy as it has made me. 

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Your Life is Going to Transform


Today is the day that your life will change for the better. The primary reason for failure is unnecessary struggling. Our whole goal achievement culture is backwards. Science has shown time and time again that calm happy people have the optimum state of mind to succeed. First happiness then success.

Your transformation begins with how you see and treat yourself. Most people are unaware that they have an internal dialogue going on in their mind constantly. It is exactly the reason that all your past attempts to change have failed. You usually end up right back where you started from because your mind thinks the same thoughts over and over again. You react the same way over and over again. How do you change that? The first step is to recognize that voice. Start practicing periods where the soul exercise is to quiet your mind and simply notice the thoughts that come up without reacting to them. Once you get good at this the changes you make will become obvious. You will quit taking those thoughts at face value and eventually realize you are not those thoughts. You are the one who notices them. You will no longer have the notion to play along but instead make decisions that empower you. Once you realize that most of your behavior has been driven by your biological thought box you will transcend those old habits. This will provide the foundation for transformation.

Now you can set your intentions and goals and watch them unfold. What happens to you isn’t a problem. What you think about what happens to you is the problem. Judging yourself good or bad will stop your transformation. Whether you believe in God or a natural universe, you can believe that life sustains itself. The sun rises and sets. The seasons change. The cycles of birth and death continue. The point is that all you need is awareness and intention and your life will unfold better than you can imagine.

I can’t fit all of the nuances in a brief blog post, so if you have questions feel free to reach out. There are no shortcuts on the road to transformation. Learning to separate your true self from those repeated thoughts can take a while. I am confident that you have what it takes to live a life better than you can imagine.

Poison in “The Secret”


Should you become a millionaire and want to help the guy who shared this with you, we can talk about ways to contribute.  Until then please take and use what I have given you here today, to bring true riches into your life.

They say, simply envision and focus on what you want, and you will attract it. The universe will manifest it into your life.  The law of attraction is the foundation of “The Secret”.  There are a lot of businesses who promote the law of attraction, and in exchange for money will provide you the content.  In this post I will give you the truth for free, which is an infinitely greater value and infinitely more effective.  What I am sharing here is not a hoax, it is the real thing and it works.  

The poison pill in the law of attraction doesn’t come from the content itself, it comes from the intention of the consumer of the content.  Someone is seeking more in life, now they believe they have found Aladdin’s lamp in the law of attraction. The materially lustful wishes start flowing freely.  Pictures of expensive cars, homes, and exotic vacations flood their minds, and on their vision boards hanging about.  This puts their desires in a much higher state of focus than their belief they will receive it.  You see, true faith quells desire, because “it is the evidence for things not seen”.   Over a period of time they fail to receive the desires.  With this often comes discouragement, depression, and very often self blame. They are unable to manipulate the universe into magically manifesting their every desire.  They must not be good enough, they think.

When I first stumbled on to what I believe is the real secret, I was afraid it was the way to material poverty. The truth I found defies everything I ever believed about abundance.  The starting point of true abundance is gratefulness.  

The first order of business is to do whatever it takes to become truly grateful for what you currently have, and have faith that everything is as it is supposed to be.  If you are thinking  you don’t have anything to be grateful for, notice that you have just taken another breath.  One breath provides the opportunity for you to turn things around.  Do you think your job is terrible, think again.  Within that job lies the starting point for a greater life.  The truth is that most of what is so terrible is not our current situation, but what we think about our current situation.  If you have something “terrible” in your life right now, I want you to just explore what it feels like.  Get curious about it.  Don’t give in to the desire to label it as bad, just experience it, and ask yourself what it is.  Lean into it and feel it, without thinking about it as good or bad.  If you do this you will see that what I am telling you is true.  What you think about something is really what makes it bad.  Otherwise it just is. 

Once you are thankful for what you currently have, your life will be better.  Now it is time to get your head out of the past and future and into the present moment.  If you are goal oriented, you can look at it this way.  You can’t act in the past, and you can’t act in the future.  The only time you can act is right now. In light of that, take those goals and think about what you think they  would bring into your present moment if they were fulfilled.  Take time to really think this through for every goal.  I have found that what most people really want is to feel loved, respected, appreciated, and be happy and secure in themselves.  Chances are that achieving any or all of those goals would not give you a long term sense of happiness and security.  What gives you contentment and security is focusing on what is going on right now without adding any thoughts of the past or future to it.

Once you are grateful, and living in the present moment you will have not only gained happiness, but through this process you will have gained discipline over your own mind.  You will feel abundant, and now it is time to add the goals you want.  Most people who find themselves in this state of gratefulness and discipline set goals not only for their own comfort, but to share this process with others.  It gives me great joy to share this with others, because I know what this has meant to my life.  The biggest and most valuable benefit of this process for me was that for the first time in as long as I can remember I am not depressed, not plagued by insecurities, and as financially fit as I have ever been.  This is a lifelong process, but most of the benefit was realized after only a few months of practicing mindfulness, and realizing that I am not my thoughts, my past, or how I feel.   

The Real Source of Positive Change


Just under the label of self help alone, there are nearly 90,000 books in print. Then you can just keep adding labels, like success, spirituality, motivation, and the list goes on and on.  My point is that we have more books available to us than we could read in a lifetime.  So how many of those books do you need to make a positive change in your life?  The answer is “ZERO”.  Yes it is true that most leaders read, and it is also true that some of the information in these kinds of books are very useful.  I read self help books.  The problem is that some of us get the idea that we need these kinds of books to succeed.  Sometimes we also get the idea that we are going to prepare ourselves for massive change overnight.  While change happens in an instant, getting ourselves to the place where we are ready to make those changes doesn’t work like that. 

Here are three of the things I believe to be the real catalysts for positive change.  

Awareness Without Assumptions

Awareness of the present moment is one of the most overlooked treasure troves for living a better life.  We tend to live too much of our lives in thoughts of the past and future.  We think about what didn’t work in the past, and how we need to do better in the future.  Pay attention to where your awareness is.  Are you thinking about the past or future?  How much of your energy do you spend being aware in the present moment, and not reliving the past or thinking about the future?  

This week try to devote thirty minutes in the morning reflection and planning for the day.  Other than these thirty minutes, pay attention to the present moment.  Without putting stress on yourself just carefully observe what is going on around you, and the process of doing what needs to be done.  Don’t make assumptions about meaning or outcome.  The present moment has many things to tell you if you are just aware.  If you catch your mind wandering back to the past or into the future, just gently bring it back to the present moment. 

We also need to be aware when we are making assumptions about things.  Is it true that the best scientists in the world know gravity?  The truth is that scientists can measure the effects of gravity but we have no earthly idea, what gravity is, why it is, or where it came from.  When we notice things our brain puts a label on them.  When we label them, we think we know them.  

When you are doing this exercise to focus on being aware, don’t make any assumptions about what you see in the present moment.  Just keep a sense of curiosity.  Instead of making assumptions, ask questions about what you are seeing.  Good questions begin with something like “Is it possible that…?”, or “What if…?.  Asking these kinds of questions about everything around us, will help us not to make the assumption that we know what it all means.  

One piece of awareness that has helped me greatly both physically and mentaly is learning to be aware of my breath.  When I am not aware of the present moment while I am working I tend to breathe quick shallow breaths.  When we breathe shallow breaths we greatly increase the likelihood of anxiety, and a wandering mind.  When we breathe slowly and deeply our bodies will naturally calm down.  If you want to test this out for yourself just stop what you are doing and take six deep, slow breaths.  You will notice a sense of relaxation.  Paying attention to your breath will also keep you mind out of the past and future.  The breath is a common anchor used in meditation.   

Be Grateful

Because we are constantly living in the past and anxious about the future, we find it very difficult to be grateful.  Once we start living in the present moment we can find all kinds of things to be grateful for.  It can be difficult to be grateful when we are faced with life’s problems, but even then we can find things in the moment to be grateful for.  

I don’t believe in silver bullets for success, but the idea I am about to share is powerful.  It is a primary reason that most goal setting doesn’t work.  Let’s say you set a goal to have a million dollars in the bank.  Your mind will imagine all the ways it would make you happy.  You begin to obsess on that goal.   You desire a million dollars so much that you lose everything you have to be grateful for. You feel the lack of not having a million dollars.  Now when you actually have to work hard, you feel discouraged.

No matter what your goal is, remember to work hard to find things you are grateful for along the way.  Maybe instead of setting a goal for a million dollars, try to set a goal to add a million dollars worth of value to others.  With this kind of goal you will find it easier to be grateful, and what you desire won’t make you lose what you have.

This is hard for some people, but sit down and write down all the things you have to be grateful for.  

Bias for Action

Nothing gets done unless someone does it.  Once you are aware of your environment, aware of what needs done, and have gratitude it is time to do something.  Earlier in the post I mentioned one reason that most goal setting fails.  Lack of action is the natural result of lack of motivation and purpose.  Having a sense of lack is one of the reasons we get discouraged and don’t act. We get discouraged because our minds are thinking about a past failure, or fearing a future failure. 

Once we have a goal, a daily task, we can then start doing it.  It is important to remember to keep our thoughts out of the past and future, and just focus on the task at hand.  Be curious about what you are doing and be aware of the results you are getting in the moment. 

Summary

You don’t need any books or programs to improve the quality of your life.  Just look within and in the present moment.  Early in the post I made the statement that the present moment has a lot to tell you.  If we can be fully aware of the moment we can act without the weight of the past and future, and be much more effective.   

If you are interested in talking further about improving the quality of your life, feel free to take advantage of a free thirty minute consultation.  

Where the Rubber Meets the Road


One thing that I am very aware of when writing these blog posts, is that it is easy to talk about achieving great things.  It is another matter entirely to actually make things happen.  When we plan, talk, and write about success, we meet with minimal resistance. When we get out there and start moving we meet with real resistance.  

Here are a few tips to help you move forward.  

  1. Take Immediate Action

Mel Robbins wrote a book titled “The Five Second Rule”. It is a great book.  The important takeaway from the book is that from the moment you decide you want to do something, it takes your mind about five seconds to realize you are going to do something uncomfortable. Once that happens it will do what it can to keep you from being uncomfortable.  It is a short book, a good read, and one of the most practical and effective books I have read on getting yourself to act.  Take action on your goals within five seconds of getting the urge.  Mel Robbins recommends counting down from five like you are a rocket about to blast off.

  1. Question Your Negative Thoughts

We all have moments of self-doubt.  That is especially true when we are fighting to do something that our mind continues to tell us we can’t.  When this happens, ask, “What if that voice is wrong?”  Follow that up with, “is it possible that if I take this course of action, I can overcome this self-doubt and get it done?  The truth is that all you need to do to make things happen is take the right action.  You are not those thoughts, and if you do what you know will work, you will get results.  Those negative thoughts are not true, and you can prove it by acting in spite of them.  If for some reason you fail, try again.  It took Thomas Edison ten thousand “failures” to invent the electric light bulb.  Did he fail? 

  1. Perform your tasks Mindfully

One of the things that makes it easier to think and talk about doing something than actually doing is chaos.  When you set out to do something hard and worth doing, there are usually a lot of moving pieces.  On top of that our minds are busy worrying about the outcome, and we put unneccesary pressure on ourselves.  The way to overcome this is to take a couple of deep breaths right before you start something, and deliberately and mindfully focus on the task.  Paying attention to every step.  If your mind starts to get busy, take another couple of deep breaths, and get back to doing the task mindfully.  Rinse and repeat.  This one takes a lot of practice, but I promise it works. 

Quarterbacks Tom Brady, Ben Rothlisburger, Patrick Mahomes, and Aaron Rogers all share one trait. This trait is a big part of what makes them great quarterbacks.  It is their ability to act in the chaos on the field, and stay keenly aware of their environment.  There are Quarterbacks who exceed their purely athletic abilities, and yet you will never hear their name.

These great quarterbacks have not always had the necessary ability to deal with chaos on the field.  They practice endlessly and have lots of hours on the field in live play.  Becoming intimate with the experience is one of the components that gives them this ability to remain mostly calm in chaos.  There is something else though.

They all realize that they can’t be great alone, and understand that the pressure is spread across the field of play.  They depend and invest in their teammates, and use their coaches to see what they can’t. Before we can become great at anything we have to practice.  We also have to find teammates and coaches, and give them our best in exchange for theirs.    

Happy New Year!


Do you have New Year’s resolutions?  Do you want to make your 2022 exponentially better than 2021? Congratulations!  Here are some tips for keeping your resolutions, and achieving your goals. For the sake of this post we will frame your New Year’s resolutions as goals. I am also offering the first three respondents who share their resolutions or goals, two free thirty-minute life coaching sessions.  

Goal Setting

When setting your goals:  

  • Make them achievable. Also, make sure they stretch you a little bit, and provide a benefit that will help keep you motivated to achieve them.
  • Take the time to visualize what your life will look like if you achieve them.
  • Find some pictures that represent them, and keep them in the same place.  I have my goals in a document with a few pictures pasted at the bottom to represent them.  
  • Make them specific, and make sure they have an achievement date..  
  • Consider framing your goals in terms of the benefit they will provide others as well as yourself.  If your goals add value to others and that is important to you, it will make them much more motivating.

Goal Review

Set aside five minutes or so every day to look at your goals, and make note of any achievements or changes.  Look at the dates and the pictures.  List any thing that you will do today towards their progress.  Check off any tasks you completed yesterday towards your goals.

Enjoy The Journey

Make a decision that throughout your day you will look at each task with curiosity, and enjoy the process.  Approach each task, as if it has something to tell you. It does have something to tell you.  Every action has feedback. The reality is that life is tough, and sticking to and accomplishing your goals is even tougher.  Once a day you will paint the picture of the goal in your mind, and the rest of the day focus on the process.  Obsess over what your activities can teach you.  It will feel awesome when you achieve a big goal, but that feeling doesn’t last long so it is important that we enjoy the journey.  

Self Check

The number 1 cause of unachieved goals is that we let those unconscious thoughts tell us they are not worth the pain of pursuing, or that we can’t achieve them.  Take time every day to just pay attention to the thoughts that are coming up in your mind.  Don’t react to them, but just get curious as to why they are coming up.  Understand that those thoughts arise as a result of past experiences.  You are not your past, and are capable of much more than you believe. 

Share

If you have someone to share your goals with that will support, encourage, and hold you accountable, you increase your chances of achieving them exponentially.  Make sure this is someone who won’t judge you, and add more weight to achievement.

Share your New Year’s resolutions / Goals and get two free thirty minute life coaching sessions.

What Makes You Unhappy?


If I asked you what makes you unhappy you might tell me about your boss, a family member, or something else.  I am not discounting anyone’s experience, but what really makes us unhappy is having unmet needs and desires.  We want our boss to stop treating us a certain way.  We want to quit feeling bad about a broken relationship.  Maybe we need money to pay our bills.  What do we do about these problems, until we can change our circumstances? 

This post is not about settling for whatever comes your way, and being happy about it.  It’s about accepting our circumstances for what they are at the moment. When we have unmet needs and desires it causes us to become discontent.  If we can’t see our way clearly towards a solution, it can lead to unhappiness or even depression.  

The most effective way to stop this cycle is to really think about our circumstances without reacting to them.  Accept them and then ask… Now What?  

For much of my adult life I had a lot of things to be thankful for, but I felt like the world was caving in on me.  What I discovered was my unconscious mind playing the same thoughts over and over.  I didn’t realize how much control our unconscious thoughts have over us.  Have you ever wondered why you don’t do what you ought to?

We consciously know that exercise is good for us, but until we can manage to make exercise a habit, we opt out often enough that we end up having to start from scratch again.  When we think about exercising, our unconscious mind tries to keep us from that pain.  If we don’t take action right away those unconscious thoughts take over.  Next thing we know we are planted somewhere on our backsides. 

It is often these same kinds of thoughts that are making you unhappy.  The first step is to use mindfulness, prayer time, or meditation to clear your mind and just notice the thoughts that are coming up.  Purposefully taking notice of those thoughts that are rising, but not reacting to them is the first step in stopping the cycle of negative thoughts.  That is what accepting what is without responding to it means.  Once you know what those thoughts are you can choose to replace them.  
If this post hit home for you and you want to explore in more depth what you can do to make your life more of what you want schedule your free Thirty Minute Consult.

Starting From Different Places


Have you genuinely tried to make positive changes in your life, and just feel stuck? Have you taken the advice of “success experts”, and still couldn’t make any significant progress? The purpose of this post is to provide both a possible reason and solution for this problem. I doesn’t matter where you are starting from, you can still get there.

One of the most enlightening discoveries that I have made while talking to people about their goals, is how our difference in perception of the world, impacts our outcome. We often project our view of the world on others. We understand them through our filter of the world. The reality is people are very different. It has been humbling, but necessary to discover this.

For one person, making their goal so big it is almost unachievable really helps them to persevere. To another person driving toward a goal that big creates nothing but more stress in their lives. That was me.

It all depends on how you interpret the world. For some of us we have to start the road to achievement with much smaller goals, and build on small successes. This goes back to all of those unconscious thoughts that we have that make up our view of the world. Sometimes past failures impact us, and we have no idea that it is happening. If we take time to examine the facts you may find that the same things happen over and over again, regardless of the approach. This is most often unconscious thoughts, that you haven’t uncovered.

If you can uncover what these thoughts are, then you can start to deal with them. In this post, I give you some suggestions to learn to notice these unconscious thoughts.

Some people naturally move towards goals, and others attempt to move away from the negative consequences of their current situation. Any real achievement in life is mostly a result of moving toward what you want, not away from what you don’t want. For those people who are “moving away from” , there is a need to become conscious of that behavior. You start this by setting small achievable goals, and as you have these small successes, your mindset will begin to transform.

The bottom line is that you can set and achieve your goals, you just need to find what works for you. Either way when you are stuck, start with smaller achievable goals, and them build momentum for you.

Is Your Life Full of Stress ?


Have you ever stopped to think about the things in our lives that cause unnecessary stress? In this post I am going to list a few of those stress inducers and some tips to reduce stress in your life.

Mobile Phones

In a prior blog post I talked about dysfunctional alarms. We often associate alarms with things like our alarm clocks, and fire alarms that were meant to startle us to action.

The term alarm can mean anything that creates urgency for us to perform some action. The device that we carry everywhere with us is constantly calling us to pay attention to notifications that are often unimportant. Of course having an unanswered notification causes us to switch the screen on, and check it. Your unconscious has no means of determining the importance of those notifications. It just reacts by breaking your focus.

The constant breaking of focus throughout the day breaks down our ability to focus our attention where we want it. It keeps our brains in a constant state of alarm, but we often don’t realize it.

Do an experiment this week. Keep your mobile device in silent mode for a whole week, and make a special effort to focus a hundred percent of your attention on what you are doing. Doing routine tasks that are second nature to you and purposely and fully focusing on them may bring more enjoyment to them. It will definitely make them more tolerable.

Social Media

Facebook and other social media platforms know what kinds of content you are attracted to by monitoring the kinds of content you browse. They have algorithms that put content in your feeds based on your likes and reading habits. These algorithms know what you believe, and can be pretty accurate. They also know the kind of content that is most likely to get you to respond. This causes you to add more content, and this is what they want.

Advertisers also make their money by knowing what will cause you to respond to ads. If you have particular political leanings, it is almost certain that Facebook will place things in your news feed that cause your mind to overact to something. Something that may be happening a thousand miles away, or not really happening at all. Have you ever read a post on social media and it gave you a sense of dread almost immediately? Was it something that would lead you to believe the world is coming unglued? The algorithms are designed to do this, to get you to respond.

This week I asked you to set your phone to silent, and check it periodically. Maybe next week you can start a social media diet. If you are an active social media user, maybe look at your social media feeds once or twice per day, and stay on for no more than ten or fifteen minutes. This will pay dividends

Unconscious Thoughts

Your mind is constantly working to protect you. All the things that have caused you pain in the past, cause your mind to stay vigilant to alert you to future dangers. This can be useful sometimes, but in our modern world a lot of these thoughts just hold us back.

This week schedule five or ten minutes a few times per day. Consciously stop thinking, and just pay attention to the thoughts that come up without judging them. Another thing I mentioned in the mobile phone section is deliberately focusing your attention on every detail of what you are currently doing. This will also go a long way in helping you to quieting those rogue thoughts.

In summary, the more time you can keep your mind in the present moment and eliminate distractions the better your quality of life. If you would like to quiet your thoughts, and can’t seem to get there, feel free to reach out.

A Mirage In the Desert


This post is meant to expand on and provide a “how to” for my last post.  Most of us who are working towards our life’s goals are thinking about a destination where life will be easy.  This is a place where we will have plenty of abundance to keep us happy and content.  Many successful people have traveled the road to their ultimate destination, only to find a new set of challenges, and another goal.  If we really pay attention, this is the story we tell ourselves.  We keep this destination in mind and we move forward.   Standard Oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller was asked, “How much money is enough?”  He answered, “Just a little bit more.”  He was teasing the fact that it will never be enough.  Someone who has achieved so much, realizes that the destination doesn’t exist, only a continued journey. 

That feeling of having given it everything you have, and getting to your goal is a great feeling.  If you talk to most people who have achieved a big goal like reaching a billion dollars in business, they report that initial deep satisfaction of having reached their destination.  Then they often report a huge let down once they settle into their new reality.  In their minds they had imagined a long term sense of satisfaction, only to be disappointed that it quickly faded.  If you want to achieve great things and avoid being fooled by a mirage in the desert read on.    

Goal Setting

The first step in a better way forward begins the same.  Write down your goals and visualize what your goals might mean for your life.  Only a small percentage of people write down their goals, and only a small percentage of people have great success.  That doesn’t mean that if you write out your goals, you will achieve great things.  What it does mean is that the chances of success without specific goals is thin.  It is important that you visualize what those goals will mean for your life as well as write them down. Once you have your goals written down, list the first ten or so things that you will need to do to achieve them. This is where your new path forward diverges from the traditional way of achieving goals. 

Shifting Your Focus

Take that list of ten next steps that you will need to take, and pick the one you are going to work on first.  You have already determined that this is something that you will need to do to reach your goal, so put everything else out of your mind, and just focus on the doing.  Most of the time when we are doing things, our mind is busy trying to distract us.  As I discussed in my last post it is distracting us with pictures of our goal, or by telling us we can’t achieve it.  As soon as you catch your focus going anywhere else, other than on what you are doing, gently push your focus back to what you are doing.  The purpose here is to derive your satisfaction from the doing.  Perform each task with equal parts trying to discover something interesting, and getting the task done.  Look at the task like it has something to tell you.  If you have never done this before, it might feel a little odd, but trust me it works.  

The Reason for Shifting Your Focus

Shifting your focus away from the destination does two things for you.  First it keeps the distractions that your mind will feed you at bay.  Just as important, it will add flexibility to your destination.  If you talk to someone who has grown a large company from scratch, more often than not, the business they created is much different that the business they set out to create. One you have the full picture of that original goal, that should become a second priority.  Your first priority should be on what you are doing right now.

Review

At the end of each week set aside a couple of hours to review what you have achieved.  Review the list of ten steps, and see what you have accomplished.  Then add anything new that needs to be done in the coming week.  Just like any other task along the way, focus on the doing and don’t let your focus move away from the task at hand.  This is a particularly good time to discover new things to guide you forward.  When you are done go back to the big goal, and see how certain parts of it may have changed or stayed the same.  This process of adjusting your goals as you go keeps your reality aligned with your goal.  It causes your goal to become the journey.  It will keep your expectations aligned with the process.

Continuous Improvement

As you perform each task, keeping yourself laser focused on just that task, and performing it as if it is the task itself that is the goal will greatly increase the quality of the work.  You will also start to notice inspiration coming from the doing rather than the achieving.  Continuous improvement will come naturally.  

If you have any questions about this post or are interested in life coaching you can drop me a note at www.brentpinkston.com/contact .  I also keep four fifteen minute spaces open on my calendar each month for free discussions about what you want to achieve via Google Meet.  These can be one on one, or group calls.