The Bigger the Goal, the Narrower the Focus.
Whew! I’m back from a whirlwind trip to Cabo followed by a trip to Greece! My Big Fat Greek Adventure included 34 hours in travel time to get there, lost luggage, and absolutely amazing friendships. . .
While I’d like to just skip over the jet lag part, for the most part, it’s just part of the process, right? Well. . . sometimes feeling crappy is part of the journey to your goals. But it doesn’t need to be.
This comes up over and over again in my coaching practice and I’d like to challenge you to think (and FEEL) differently about approaching your goals.
So often, the very thing that holds you back from achieving your big scary goal is your intense focus on that goal.
Does that sound counter-intuitive? Let me explain.
Because the truth is, the big goals can create a lot of unhappiness in your life, and maybe you felt this before because each and every morning you may get up and ask yourself (in some way, shape or form), “Am I closer or farther away from my goal?”
And if you’re not closer, you start to feel defeated, right? Maybe you’ll even start to feel unworthy. And sometimes (okay, more than sometimes), you’ll feel like a failure. . . I’m going to breathe a little fire into you. This is where this idea of goal setting, especially when you’re chasing the big goals, becomes intimidating and frustrating.
But how about you approach it this way instead?
Stop feeling like a failure. Stop focusing on the outcome. And start narrowing your focus and taking daily action.
Here’s what I mean by that. Once we set the goal, we actually have to stop focusing on the outcome. We have very little actual control over outcomes.
So we have to stop focusing on those outcomes and instead, ask ourselves, “What are the actions and activities that are controllable each and every day that I can commit to?”
These actions will become your day-to-day systems and processes that if you do them over time, persistently and consistently, are going to produce the outcome (AKA reaching that big awesome goal).
👉 I’m going to talk to the network marketers for a minute. Network marketers may have a huge monetary goal or a rank advancement goal. So rather than focusing on that outcome, we’ve got to focus on completing the activities each and every day, persistently and consistently, that create results over time. For network marketers, that includes meeting new people, sharing the product, and the business opportunity. And so if we focus on the activities each and every day, you measure your success by, “Did I complete the activities/tasks?” We don’t measure the success by, “Did I rank advance today?”
The bigger the goal, the narrower the focus.
If you take just one thing away from this, please let it be this. The bigger the goal, the narrower your focus needs to be.
This also means that we have to clear out the noise when you’ve committed to reaching a massive goal, my friend. It means that you have to start saying no to many other things in your life (not forever, but for a season) so you can control your time and energy.
Click to tweet: The bigger the goal, the narrower the focus.
So, my friend, that is how you actually make progress towards the goals that you have in your life, make sure you are focused on the right things and you do them consistently over time. Then you’re going to nail it each and every time.
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