Greetings All,
In less than a month, the brand new year 2011 will be with us, are you ready for welcome the new year?
As entrepreneurs, they have an ability to see many opportunities and possibilities, but many of them also tend to spread themselves too thin and try and do everything, which hinders them from achieving their goals.
How many times a day do you read about a new trend or app – a “bright shiny object” that marketers dangle in front of you with the promise of saving your business? You add it to your arsenal – already overwhelmed by your blog, your videos, your ebooks and your social media. Soon you lost your Focus and Concentration, your business is tricked out with every new tool in the book. But you still aren’t making any money.
“Concentration is the factor that causes the great discrepancy between men and the results they achieve the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability and concentrating on one point.” — Orison Swett Marden
For myself, it seems that the more ideas I have from time to time, the more ideas they generate. Recently, the number of ideas has increased dramatically. They’re there first thing in the morning, in the middle of the day and in the evening as well, they made me feel inspired, excited and enthusiastic about many of the ideas. However, I realized that if I wanted to translate these ideas into action and become more productive, I would need to become more focused than ever been.
Do One Thing at a Time
A clear intentional focus moves us towards our dreams quickly and effectively. But when you have too much on the go at the same time, you will often end up dabbling in many different things. As a result you don’t produce the results you desire. You may feel overwhelmed, frustrated and fed up. The friction and stress of being pulled in many directions eats up your time and energy, leaving you less able to be focused and move forward.
If you are someone who has lots of ideas, projects and things you want to do, acknowledge this fact – accept that you don’t need to act on them all now and be willing to let some things go for the time being. It is the same thing as if you try to chase two rabbits at the same time – both will escape.
A recent study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment by 10 points. In addition, every time you shift your focus from an activity to something else, it takes a few minutes to be able to fully refocus your attention on what you were doing. A key element in being able to fully focus is that you only do one thing at a time.
Tell Your Mind What to Focus On
Below this “awareness test” has been widely watched, it shows eight basketball players, four wearing black shirts and four wearing white shirts. You’re asked the following question: “How many passes does the team in white make?” That is, you’re told to focus on the players in white and how many times they pass the basketball to each other.
While you’re watching the players moving around and passing the basketball back and forth, a person in a bear suit moonwalks across the middle of the action. Most people completely miss the bear because they’re focused on the basketball players dressed in white.
There are several other “awareness tests” of this type. For instance, sometimes you’re asked to read a paragraph and count how many times you see the letter “A”. When you’re done, they ask you how many “T’s” were there. But you don’t have the slightest idea because you were focused on counting the letter “A” as you were told to do instead of counting the letter “T”.
These ‘Awareness tests’ demonstrate the ability of mind, the human mind is good at concentrating when you give it a clear mandate of what it should concentrate on.
If You’re Having Trouble Focusing, Narrow Down the List and Make the Task Smaller
You can choose three ideas that feel most important to you, or resonate with your passions, or would give life to your dream, or make your heart sing, specific areas of focus and write them down, the more specific you are, the more focused you’ll be. Such as Monday to Sunday Affiliate Profit Plan.
After you done that, evaluate how they fit into your vision or dream and ascertain to see whether they are the most effective choices or not. With each of your three ideas, define your compelling reason for pursuing them, because your compelling reason will inspire you to continue and be committed.
Each day, review your three areas of focus and take actions that align with those priorities.
Through the practice, you will reach to a state of “flow” – where you lose your sense of self, lose track of time, you will completely focused on the present moment and on the task at hand (it can happen in any domain of activity). You will find all of your attention is focused on the activity and self-consciousness disappears.
However, if your skills are not up to the challenge, or the task you’ve set for yourself is too complex, and you find you can’t get yourself to concentrate fully on the task you’re trying to accomplish, then chunking the tasks down further so you can make it more manageable.
For Important Projects, Give Yourself More Time
Neal Stephenson once explained that the productivity equation is nonlinear; creative projects such as writing a novel require large unbroken slabs of time:
“This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time -chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.”
Be Accountable
Making the shift to being focused at any time may require you to step out of your comfort zone, and sometime you might find yourself slipping back. To strengthen your commitment, you can ask others help, like find someone that you trusted – let him/her challenge you to help you maintain your focus. Giving someone permission to challenge you in a healthy way can add lots of fun to the process, just keeping it light-hearted.
I believe, lots of you have equated genius with the power of intense concentration. What you need is a crystal-clear perspective of your business – your individual situation – and your exact action items to grow to the next level. Example, if internet marketing is the area you want to focus on, then you need to Master One Form of Marketing First.
By applying the above these suggestions, you’ll be well on your way toward leveraging the power of focus.
‘Til next time .. promote & prosper!
Cheers
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