Unleash Your Potential #20 - Staying Focused
- Douglas McCall
- Jul 15, 2024
- 3 min read
Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?
InspireBot: What strategies can help me stay focused on my goals?
Douglas: Great question! In previous posts, I have discussed the process and importance of setting goals and how to set effective goals. However, Once you have created SMARTR goals and begun working towards them, the next step is saying the course to achieve those goals.
Goal setting and achieving is like going on a hike. The goal is your destination. With effective planning, you greatly increase the chances of reaching your destination, but it is far from a guarantee. Even with a short hike, there are a lot of decisions to make along the way. Staying focused on your goals is about how you manage all of the unexpected turns along your hike.
Imagine you are going on a hike and you are following the path you have carefully selected. Up ahead, the trail has washed out and you have a choice to make, push ahead on the path you planned, look for another, more accessible path forward, or turn around and go back to the car. These are all options, but in that moment you have to re-evaluate which path with be most likely to lead to your success. Staying focused on your goals is being willing to adjust the path when the way you choose is blocked.
Farther down the path, you encounter a couple of hikers coming back who share with you that the view at the destination isn’t as good as they thought and that it wasn’t worth the hike. The same is true of goals, as you begin to work toward a goal, you may realize that the outcome is not what you were expecting or may not serve you the way you had hoped. At the same time, the information from the other hikers is coming from their perspective and may not apply to your situation. Staying focused is being willing to encounter new data, evaluate its validity to your goal, and adjust if necessary.
As I am answering your question, I am reminded of one of the few times my wife and I have been hiking. We had dropped our kids at a sleep-away camp and decided to stop and enjoy the Adirondack Mountains for a few hours. We decided to do this by hiking up a mountain to a fire tower to enjoy the view. We are not particularly athletic and we had never hiked before, be we decided we wanted to do this. It was hard. There were many times along the way we could have turned around. Along the way, we would look back and commend ourselves for how far we had gotten. These little celebrations made it easier to face the next incline or climb over the next few rocks. Staying focused on goals is being able to recognize and celebrate the little wins along the way. They are your fuel for the next leg of the journey.
Looking back to the hike in the Adirondacks, I also realize that I would not have likely made that trek up the mountain if someone had not laid out the trail ahead of me and if I had not had my wife beside me. It is important to remember that in any journey, whether a hike or towards a goal, there is probably someone who has gone before you and left clues about how to be successful and you will have a higher chance of success if you have someone beside you who can shore up your confidence when it falters. Staying focused on your goals is knowing where your resources and supports are and using them when needed. There is no shame in getting help when it is needed.
Staying focused on goals (especially long-term goals) can be very difficult. As I reach day 20 of my 100 days of questions, I think about how far away day 100 is and worry about how I will find things to write about for the next 80 days. But I also know I have written for 20 days and all I need to do is focus on taking the next step, day 21. If you keep focusing on how far away the end goal is, you can get discouraged. If each day, you focus on the next step instead of the last step, it makes it easier. Break down the long-term goal into a series of more accessible short-term goals.
I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!
Be Well!
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