Focusing On Your Goals
Life is about learning and loving and the journey along the way. When people have dreams or desires, they often think of them as unattainable. The simple vocabulary can sometimes be the biggest hinderance in the attainment. The words “dream” or “desire” can have a subconscious overtone that tells people that’s all they should or will ever be and they are not attainable.
Sometimes when we share our dreams or desires with family, instead of supporting, they often say something like “well everyone has dreams” or even more negative, “dream on”. By saying “these are my goals” the mind doesn’t have that negative overtone and somehow the “dream” has now become a something that Is attainable, something that they can see on the horizon, something positive that they now believe they have the power to achieve.
The process of determining what your goals are is an achievement in itself. Once you know where you’re going, the hardest part is done. Now you just have to figure out how to get there and go!
Many people waste too much time envying other people and their lives and don’t spend enough time focusing their own goals. Some people give the excuse “well they are successful and I want to follow them and what they do so I will be as successful.” First of all success comes in many different packages. Secondly, it is not uncommon to waste extraordinary amounts of time idolizing someone else’s life only to realize they don’t have things as good as we thought. Frankly, by focusing on others we take the focus off ourselves. We neglect ourselves and become our biggest road blocks.
Focusing is the process of combining resources to achieve a goal. Once you determine your goal you must map out your strategy or plan of how to get there. Once you know where and how the next step is simple. Go!
Sounds easy and too logical? Logical yes. Easy no. The road to success may not be an easy one. Chances are there will be many road blocks and extreme difficulties along the way. You may often feel close to giving up. DON’T! As long as you keep you goals in sight and map beside you, you won’t get lost. Stay the course!
Fundamentals
• Every day you must invest everything within your power to achieve that goal
• Avoid distractions and excess activities that take your time and focus away.
• Keep a journal.
-Record your thoughts and mini accomplishments that occur along the path to your goal.
-Record your setbacks and analyze why they occur and what you learn from them.
• Learn to create opportunity. Get out there, Meet people. Open up.
• Learn to recognize and seize opportunity. Often opportunity comes down to luck and it is simply being in the right place at the right time.
• Become involved in activities that support and nurture your inner self and desire to achieve that goal. By becoming involved in supportive related activities you take distraction and wasted time away from the wrong activities.
• Develop a mentorship or support system with someone who has chosen a similar path.
How Personality Affects Focus
Some people have trouble focusing because of the type of personality traits they have. If you can identify your personality type you will be better prepared to recognize the self-inflicting obstacles that deter your focus. By recognizing them you can begin to prevent them and maintain course.
If you are an emotional person, you need to understand your emotions and where they come and what they truly mean before acting. Often times people react according to their emotions without understanding the base of the emotion. When you act strictly on how you feel and are not aware of the deriving source of the emotion you often act on a situation and make it worse or gloss over the true situation without addressing the true issue. Although feelings are important, make sure they are relative to the bigger picture.
If you are an anxious person you may feel easily distracted and deterred from you path. You may feel you are not getting to your goal fast enough and wasting too much time. Be patient. Anything difficult is worth it! Try not to distract yourself by finding other things to do such as cleaning, reading, phone-calling. All these activities take time away from you and your goal. Don’t let them.
Disillusioned people are often against competition. They sometimes even deny the entire goal-setting process. This is a self-limiting way of thinking. These people are often unhappy with themselves or lives and would like more, but are afraid or in such a regulated state of mind that they never step outside of their box to see what the world can really offer you. To set goals or compete does not mean that someone has to be better or more prominent than another. The process is simply envisioning what you want and believing in ability to achieve it. The power is within you.
If you are introverted person or underachiever who has constantly sat on the sidelines you may have trouble focusing because you fear you will be rejected or you will be looked at as different. You may fear failure or even success. This is not about living up to anyone else’s expectations. This is about you. This is for you. Your only concern should be you.
Someone who is an overachiever can become fixated on the focusing process because it appears to reinforce success. Success, however is different to different people and when someone is so intent on accomplishing quantity rather than quality they are often unable to to achieve the most important goal of inner peace and contentment. Having goals and achieving them is great, but losing track of the actual journey and the true achievements along the way is a disservice to yourself.
Regardless of what type of personality traits you have, take time to understand who you truly are as a person. If you know who you are and what you want the rest is simple.
I totally agree – defining something as your goal is the first and most important step to attaining it. It’s normal to make missteps and have setbacks, but you haven’t lost a chance until you give up.
Your post is abstract – personally my goal is to be as fluent in Mandarin as I am in English (I am Dutch, not a native speaker of English). I believe it is attainable with continuous effort over a longer period of time. Started in 2006 and am now about midway, come a long way and have a long way ahead of me.
What I see a lot is people who may say “I would like to learn some Mandarin”. If it’s a nice-to-have, but you’re not really committed to go all the way, don’t even start! We all have the opportunity to do just a few things really well, what waste to try and do 100,000 things well and give up in the end…
yagosingapore
October 9, 2009