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Let’s Use The Key To Staying Focused To Unlock The Door To The True You

I hear so many women that I work with beat themselves up over a lack of focus. They blame themselves, believe they’re not motivated enough, and engage in a hefty amount of negative self-talk about these perceived shortcomings.

Let’s stop this now. Stop beating yourself up about your productivity and, instead, let’s get to the root of the real problem. Once we identify where the problem really lies, you’ll stop wasting so much energy.

Staying Focused: Avoid Self-Abuse And Learned Helplessness

Every time you tell yourself you can’t, you’re wasting your precious chi -that life force that flows creatively between you and your goals. Every time you talk yourself down, you erode the vital self-confidence and self-trust you need to excel.

Over time, you’ll begin believing that you actually can’t. This happens with subtle persistence, as you become your own toxic person feeding your head full of doubt. Eventually, you’ll begin to believe that your efforts don’t really matter, and that’s a form of learned helplessness we can’t afford and don’t deserve.

So we need to stop this energy leak by reframing your understanding about yourself and your assessment of what the problem really is. Once we do that, obstacles and distractions melt away.

Staying Focused: The Big Productivity Misconception

I’m about to tell you something I’ve found to be absolutely true for me and so many of the women I work with. More isn’t always more. More is overwhelming, distracting, and leaves us exhausted and scattered.

I think the common misconception when approaching the so-called problem of lack of focus and motivation is that most people are trying to do too much. They quickly get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing. 

I’ve personally spent days being extremely busy, only to find out at the end of the week I have accomplished nothing of importance.

Let that be the word that resonates with you right now: importance. Your productivity approach can transition from quantity to quality and I think it absolutely should.

Staying Focused: Becoming Aligned To What’s Important

When you achieve a natural state of alignment in your life, you’ll stop filling your time with distractions. These distractions are just 3D manifestations of the mental noise we hear in our minds when anxiety and uncertainty creep in. 

As you let yourself experience alignment, it becomes so easy to feel procrastination and avoidance. These activities stand out because when you engage in them, you’re falling out of line with your true self.

As we move from disharmony to alignment, we’ll whittle down your goals and say yes to things that nurture your true self and no to things that don’t. During this process, you’ll understand that accomplishing the goals your true self values feels amazing. 

And feeling amazing is addicting, right?

Observing And Catching Yourself

We approach this process with a distinct lack of judgment because judgment doesn’t help us in any way. Instead, we want discernment: the ability to identify behavior and patterns that move us further from who we are and where we’re going.

Being able to catch yourself when you drift off your path is the first step to achieving true productivity surges. Once that feels natural, you can examine why you’re losing focus and meeting resistance.

Productivity’s Companion: Play

What does it really mean to be productive? Does it look like someone who is ceaselessly in motion, always using energy to further their professional goals?

That doesn’t sound like an aligned life, right?

I think it’s so important to embrace the truth that just because we aren’t being productive, doesn’t mean we’re bad. Society wants us to think we are because a lot of people have much to gain from our productivity. People can also feel threatened when they see someone living an authentic life that looks different from their common beliefs and behaviors.

But the truth is, play is productivity’s best friend. Self-care is as important as chasing your bottom line, and there’s so much to learn in our distractions and fears.

Staying Focused: What We Learn From Examining Our Resistance

We often want to rush out and through fears and distractions, not appreciating them for everything they can teach us. Maybe this is why we have to repeat lessons over and over.

Maybe if we just paid a little more attention to what we were doing or going through, we would be much more effective in learning our lesson, which would therefore also mean we would be more effective in every other area too.

It stops the energy leak because we’ve resolved it and moved on organically.

Once you understand what’s getting in the way, maybe even work on it instead of pushing blindly through it, you’ll be able to get back to your focus. You can even discipline yourself to course-correcting.

My 80/90 Method

When it comes to working with and moving through your roadblocks, or course-correcting, I think a fitness analogy is in order. Let’s talk about my 80/90 method.

If you know me, I practice eating moderately. Explained quickly, I personally eat at an 80-90% range of my “perfect diet”. I do this, because I understand how I work. 

If I shoot for perfection, I fail badly and have to dig myself out of a hole before I gather the courage to try again. It’s a process that is defeating and hasn’t been sustainable for me.

So bringing it back to this discipline of focus, I think we’re most productive when we remain fluid and flexible instead of placing lots of restrictions and judgment on ourselves. It’s part of the human condition. 

When I stay fluid, I thrive. Once I place constraints on my being, I fight to break free of them. That’s just another energy leak and it can trigger the cycle of criticism and procrastination we detailed earlier.

In short: being constrained is not how I am here to live. So when it comes to my diet, as I adjust my food to work with my body type, I’m adjusting my practices in focus and motivation to how I’m wired. Both for the same reasons: self-respect.

So yes, I practice at 80-90% discipline with my focus just like my diet. Motivation is nothing I really depend on anyways, as it’s fleeting. When I’m in alignment, I find that it’s easy to cultivate motivation when I need it.

With this practice, I’ve been able to be far more consistent than I ever have with my productivity and evolution.

Staying Focused: Putting Alignment And Fluidity Into Practice For Productivity

So I’ll end off here with what that looks like with discipline for me:

• It sometimes means I don’t go workout…and that’s okay.<