As an entrepreneur, the outcome of my days are determined by what I place my focus on. Sometimes, I wake up feeling like I want to conquer the world! I create to-do lists, and feel a sense of satisfaction when I tick them off one by one. But some days, my focus just gets influenced by my mood. I start off thinking about one task, then I become distracted by something else… and then start thinking, “I don’t feel like doing this now…” and before I know it, it’s 6pm and I didn’t really achieve anything much that day.
I realised that my daily motivations and focus were driven by my emotions, and not necessarily by my intentions. It’s not just at work, but often times, we really have too much on our plate of life. We try to balance our work, family relationships, health, social life, finance, personal growth… the list goes on and on.
About 20 years ago, I read this book titled, “Ordering your private world” by Gordon MacDonald. The caption on the cover attracted me. It says, “A pick-me-up for the disorganised”. In my early 20s, I realised the need to organise my life so that I remain focused on what was important to me. I am glad that I developed the discipline of reflection years ago. It helps keep me in check, to see if I am indeed moving along in life according to my values, desires and dreams. If I am not moving along in life, it’s because I was probably not focused.
During this webtorial, we were tasked to draw our own Wheel of Life, with all the segments of life that matter to us. We had to rate ourselves, thinking about the areas that we want to focus on and where we are currently in that segment.
Then we were asked…
In 2 years from now, which areas do I want to increase or decrease?
If I only had 1 year, what would be my focus? How about 6 months?
Would the time frame influence the dynamics of my choices?
With the luxury of time, we usually put off things that we should do, and think that we can always do that later.
The Wheel of Life was a nice tool to help me reflect on the areas of life that I want to focus on. As a coach, I can use this tool to help coachees move from one level to the next, reflect on their next steps of action so they can achieve their goal within their own time frame.
What we focus on, is where our time and energy goes.
Some questions that are helpful during a coaching session when discussing the topic of focus:
- What are you focused on? (Are you focused on what’s working like your strengths, solutions or truths, or are you focused on what’s not working… like your problems, weaknesses or insecurities?)
- What could help clarify which areas to focus on?
- Are our focus areas scary enough? (Can we be a bit more brave?)
- What are things that you need to eliminate in order to achieve more in a particular area?
One of my biggest fears in life is that I just float through life, never really doing anything worthwhile with my time. I am inspired by people who are really focused on what they want in life, take the action steps to work towards it, and finally, achieve their goals.
This quote truly resonates with me.
Starve your distractions, feed your focus – Anonymous
