Tag Archives: focus

Get Your Head Out of the Clouds

While it can be energizing and inspiring to connect with our goals, visions, and life purpose, each of these are fulfilled through the actions we take.  What that means is that being able to get granular, stay focused and knock out tasks is a prerequisite to reaching a high level of achievement.  As much as we might want to remain at 50,000 foot level, until we get in the weeds, the garden really doesn’t grow.

Covey wrote about this as being the evidence of Independent Will,  the final of the Four Human Endowments.  After having moved through the processes self awareness, imagination and evaluation, our intentions came to life through our independent will.  We must get fully engaged if we wish to “manifest our destiny.”

Three Facets of Action

We engage the world, and forward our work in three related, but unique ways.  Neglecting any of these will ensure that we surrender the momentum we so desperately crave from both the productivity and enjoyment perspectives.

By Prescription

The first facet of action is doing the work we have predesignated.  As we have previously discussed, this is one of the great benefits of envisioning how and where our next physical actions will occur.  It enables us to get into and stay in flow.  Staying on task, building on our successes and being fully engaged increases our energy and ensures a high level of productivity.

The Planning Process

In order to have the predetermined work to do though, we actually have to have invested the time and focus to create it.  We too often relegate this high priority work as an afterthought, squeezing it in when we can, but not respecting the value and leverage inherent in breaking projects down so we can get after it when the time and setting is right.  Failing to honor this time and give it a high priority  results in our wheels coming off, wondering what went wrong.

Life Keeps Coming at You Full Speed

The third facet of action is the doing work as it shows up.  Regardless of how well we have strategically designed our lives, stuff happens.

Real Art Ships

This is a powerful concept in Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin which ties in very well with this awareness that life happens when we are in action. Why I share it here with you is that regardless of the importance of all the other phases in this Live on Purpose model, until we are in action nothing else matters. We can capture, corral, define, systematize, and strategize, but if we fail to act, nothing changes.  Nothing.

Beyond merely taking action, the idea represented by “Real Art Ships” reminds us that beginning projects makes sense only in the context of a commitment to complete them. A huge barrier to completion is our unhealthy obsession with perfection and the belief that it actually exists.  Life is not about creating works of art that we protect from critics until every glitch has been removed and perfection achieved.  No, life, and art by metaphorical extension, must be put out into the world to impact others. Otherwise, it is merely another way of escaping reality.

Sorry to interrupt but have you been enjoying the Living on Purpose video series?  If so, please let me know by leaving a comment.  Here is the next video in the series.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y-3bO4DpWA

Flow in the Moment

Being fully engaged in our lives reduces stress capitalizing on momentum built one small success upon another. Where we lose momentum is when we fail to delineate the activities that comprise our lives.  This leaves us feeling stagnant and paralyzed, trapped motionless within big project rather than moving rapidly through the tasks that comprise the project.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his groundbreaking book Flow, describes the key elements that create full engagement and enable us to access our greatest potential. These components include completable tasks, requires full attention, clear objectives and immediate feedback.

We create the context driven lists in the Systematize phase.  These lists ensure we stay engaged. This scenario creates a fertile environment within which we experience effortless high performance, free of worry and frustration, with a peaceful sense of control.  Our focus shifts from being primarily personal to being more transcendent.

By investing the time and focus to identify the moving parts of our lives, defining our relationship with them, developing systems that enable momentum, and strategically thinking through the most advantageous effective application of our resources, we find ourselves fully engaged in action that is both incredibly effective and fun.  Having fun reinforces our actions and keeps us going for more. And the virtuous cycle continues!

In our next section, we will explore how we delve into the different vantage points from which we evaluate and engage our lives.

What Does It Mean Anyway

Life can be a blur.

One undefined moment turns into the next.  Our lives fly by us as we are buried deep in the weeds.  We are unsatisfied, but we convince ourselves that we are too busy to stop and clarify what we have going on.

Yet, we know that is nonsensical.  Without clarity, we can’t think strategically which ensures that the use of our resources of time, talent and people is ineffective.  It is time to slow down, catch our breath and clarify what is going on.

Take Time to Think

The challenge is that very few people have a committed process by which they grant themselves permission to actually think.  Most of us book our days so full of activities, that we have no time to actually make sense of it all.  We have become so obsessed with how much we can handle, multi-tasking our way through the day, that we skim the surface and miss the richness that lies just below. David Allen says, “you have to think more about what you think about.”

How do we change that?  In the process of Living on Purpose, we must consistently allocate adequate time and focus to provide meaning to the moving pieces of our lives.  I’m not referencing the overarching meaning of why we exist, although that too is important. Instead, what I am referring to here is being present enough to focus our full attention on whatever is before us.

One of the great challenges is that the huge and rapid inflow of information is overwhelming our processing capability.  This occurs in large part because most fail to take the time to “concretize” ideas and concepts into specific plans and actions to forward our progress.  By investing the focus required, we are able to make clear distinctions and more effectively systematize the flow of work.

One Thing at a Time

Alcoholics Anonymous has been famously effective by getting people to look at their lives one day, and one step at at time.  While you may not be suffering from such an affliction, there are I believe, some similarities worth examining.  Much of addiction, whether it is to alcohol,  food, drugs or work, is an attempt to escape our reality.

An unwillingness to slow life down and answer the question, “What does this mean in relationship to my life?” is symptomatic of denial, detachment and escape.  It keeps us racing around frantically, yet making scant progress toward our most important objectives .

The Great Divide

If we are doing a great job of corralling, there will many things dropping out of the funnel that will require action.  There will also be many that don’t.  Making this distinction is the first decision we need to make.  When we combine that which needs to be acted upon with that which doesn’t, our energy is diminished. If nothing needs to be done now, either incubate it, put it in resource, or throw it away.  Whatever the case, get it out of your mind so you can focus your valuable mental resources

Making this actionable/non-actionable decision up front is one of the most powerful habits to develop. Strengthening this muscle is achieved through repetition while procrastinating decision making atrophies our decision making muscle.  We must think through that which we think about, make decisions, and move on.

And Action!

If we decide that action is in fact necessary, the next step is to determine whether  we have thought through our ideas to the point where we are clear of our next physical action.  Often, as we capture and then corral the moving parts, they remain at the level of projects, still in need of further defining.  A phrase that has helped me become more aware of the need for clear thinking and, as a consequence, the need for further thinking is, “we don’t do projects, we do actions.”

This simple phrase serves as a great reminder that until we have visualized the actual steps of what moving forward looks like, we are at risk of being stuck at the project level.  Clarity of next action allows us to build momentum and move forward toward our goals.

Optimizing that potential momentum demands that we bring what Mark Joyner calls Life System Environmental Design to our lives. We will look at systematizing our lives in the next session.

I’d love to hear what you think on this topic. Opinions and questions welcome!  Please leave a comment here on my blog or on Facebook.

Following along with the “Living on Purpose” Video series?  Check out segment 4 on this topic of Defining.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azhk1n_YG7Q