One of the keys to success in any area of life is being able to focus all your efforts on getting what you want.
If you’re in sport, it’s easy to motivate yourself towards winning a championship or winning a medal.
In business, the goals are not always so obvious but the secret of success is knowing what you want and committing to it 100%.
If you want to be seen as the authority in your market, you need clear focus on that outcome.
It’s a lack of clear focus that leads so many people to be easily distracted by new ideas or ‘opportunities’ that come their way and end up unsatisfied with the results.
When you have a clear vision for getting what you want, you know where your business is going. So, it becomes easy to make decisions as you concentrate your activities and resources on that outcome.
The ability to focus your efforts is one of the key points that separates successful business owners from the rest.
- Unsuccessful business owners are like light bulbs. They disperse energy in many different directions at once. They’re opportunists – always looking for easy ways to make money because they don’t have a long-term plan. They spend too much time evaluating new opportunities and not enough taking action.
- Successful business owners are more like lasers, focusing all their energy on a single outcome with very powerful results. They are strategic and know where their business is going so they can identify opportunities that will help them get there.
Focus on Getting What You Want
The great advantage of knowing what you want is that the power of the mind will help you get it.
Within your mind at an unconscious level is something called the Reticular Activating System.
According to some descriptions, this is almost like your own personal search engine which automatically picks up ideas and opportunities to help you move toward that goal. It is the Reticular Activating System that is said to help you notice which of the millions of bits of information coming at you every second are the ones that will help you get what you want.
Another way of looking at this was described by Robert Anton Wilson in his book Prometheus Rising, where he talks about how ‘the thinker thinks, the prover proves.’ Essentially, your mind is split into two parts:
- The ‘thinker‘ has total freedom and can think anything.
- The ‘prover‘ will find evidence for it.
So, if you’re focused on where you’re going – and believe you will get there – then the ‘prover’ will find ways of supporting you and helping you toward your objective.
But if you have no clear sense of direction or you have doubts about your abilities, your ‘prover’ will come up with evidence that you are right.
Imagine you are a golfer on the last hole of a major championship. If you want to win, you want to be thinking ‘I’m going to hole this’ rather than ‘I don’t want to miss it’.
Keep your focus 100% on what you want rather than on what you don’t want. Either way, you might just get what you’re focusing on.
Focus has been described as Following One Course Until Successful.
So, if you’re not sure what you’re focusing on now, just check your results. If you’re not getting the results that you want, perhaps you need to change your focus.
This is a topic also covered differently in Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
Here are some points to think about if you want to improve your focus:
- What is the single most important outcome you are focused on achieving this week?
- What are the three biggest outcomes you are focused on achieving this year?
- What activities are you doing or what thoughts are you having that distract you from these objectives?
- Can you change these thoughts or stop these actions?
The importance of focus is key to the power beliefs of business success.