Focusing on Success

It's so easy to let your mind get preoccupied and lose track of your goals and dreams. The world is more full of distractions than ever before, and they are all at our fingertips - social networking, computer games, television, mobile devices, and so on. And even if you don't give in to those distractions, there are life distractions - kids, household chores, errands... How do you stay focused on success?

First of all, no one can remain focused on one thing all day every day. That would be impossible, especially in this world where multiple demands are characteristic of the average day. But you can focus on success by adopting a successful mindset. Here are some ideas on keeping focused on success.

Keep a Log

Every day, write in a log or journal about what you did for your business that day. Note particularly all your successes and things you did toward your goals. If you spent the morning designing a logo, that's not wasted time - that's a success, and a step toward your goal. When you log in this way, you will also be able to see areas where you are losing focus and need to step things up a bit.

Write Your Goals

You probably know this, but writing down your goals is important. What you may not have thought of is displaying them where you can see them. Keep them nearby - maybe even frame them - so that you can look often and get your mind back on achieving success.

Visualize

Visualizing takes the concept of the daydream up several notches. Taking some time every day to visualize your success can help. Take a few quiet minutes and envision yourself succeeding. Be specific - if this is about your business, imagine yourself meeting clients, making them happy, and then imagine those clients telling others.

If this is about personal success, imagine the details of a successful relationship, a harmonious family, or a different lifestyle. Try to make it real, as if you're watching it happen. Think in vivid colors, sights, and sounds.

Don't Be Hesitant

Experts say that it can hamper your success if you keep thinking you need a back-up plan "just in case." It may be better just to go for it 100 percent and not look back. Otherwise, you may jump into your back-up plan at the first sign of trouble, and success takes effort.

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7 Key Stages to Becoming Mentally Strong

You have to get to work. You haven’t had a full night’s sleep in months. Life can sometimes be overwhelming. And it seems you can do nothing about it.

A solution does exist, though… It’s called mental strength.

7 Key Stages to Becoming Mentally Strong

Mental strength can’t be seen physically. Rather, it’s a concept. An idea that you can get through anything. You can persevere. But how do you build it? How do you turn your scared mind into a place of confidence and peace?

Here are 7 key stages to becoming mentally strong:


1. Be Consistent

To begin with, consistency is one of the keys to victory in almost any aspect of life.

You go to the gym to tone up. That’s fine and Dandy, but most people quit after two weeks. The consistency isn’t there. You won’t see the progress if you only work out when you feel like it. You have to be vigilant.

Are you working on a novel? Maybe you’re trying to learn a new language. Or, maybe you’re just trying to get through the day. If you’re consistent with growing as a person and continuously working toward your goal, you’ll eventually reach it.


2. Positivity over Anxiety

Have you ever felt guilty for feeling like you’re not getting anything done while everyone else seem to be powering through their goals? This type of guilt is what leads to self-loathing and anxious tendencies.

This is where positive thinking comes in. Positive thinking may seem like a joke, but science backs it up.

Research has shown that positive thinking is a real skill, with real consequences. Positive emotions and thoughts affect both your physical and your mental perception of the world.

It’s more than just being happy all the time – it’s about being confident and having a healthy self-esteem.

With busy schedules and our high drive to succeed, some of us experience anxiety on a daily basis. Anxiety brings emotional and physical symptoms like restlessness or irritability, insomnia, headaches, and fatigue – symptoms a lot of us accept as normal.


TO DEAL WITH THIS ANXIETY, POSITIVE THINKING CAN HELP. BUT POSITIVE THINKING ISN’T “BEING HAPPY ALL THE TIME.” RATHER, IT’S A WAY OF THINKING AND BELIEVING WHEN THINGS GO WRONG.


Psychologists say that the most effective way to eliminate your anxiety is by learning how to change your thoughts and think with more positive energy.

Challenging these negative thoughts by focusing on what is rational, the positive, the beautiful and the pleasant helps you move forward in the right direction.

Life is going to hit you with unexpected events and circumstances. If you’re going to be mentally strong, it’s important to always keep a positive spin on things.


3. Experience New Things

You have something called a “comfort zone.”

It’s the place where you feel the safest. It may be a physical space (such as your room) or a more metaphorical place (such as the state of your life). While living in the comfort zone is nice, it doesn’t do a whole lot to help you grow.

In order to grow and learn, you need to experience different things in life. Start out small.

Take a different route to work. Order something from your favorite restaurant that you’ve never ordered before. Or ask that person out that you’ve always wanted to ask. You’ll be surprised at how much this can impact you in a positive way.

More importantly, these new experiences will show you that new experiences aren’t so scary, and that you can do it.

4. Evaluate Your Core Beliefs

In order to build your mental toughness, it’s important to know why you do what you do. Thinking about your core beliefs not only serves as motivation, but it also helps you establish yourself.

Who are you? What drives you? Knowing who you truly are assists you in establishing your mental toughness. It’s a lot easier to fight for your values when you actually believe in them.


5. Focus on What You Can Control

So many times, you lose focus on life. You get distracted and stressed. While getting rid of stress and distractions is impossible, there’s a strategy that can help you. When life gets to be a bit too much for you, shift your focus onto what you can control.

Many times, you get frustrated because your boss made you stay late for work. Or maybe traffic is backed up for the third time this week and you’re late for an appointment. These experiences don’t have to be frustrating.

Rather, simply admit to yourself that these situations are out of your control.

Relinquishing control to situations in which you have no control is one of the best things you can do. This step alone can vastly improve your mental toughness. Why? Because you don’t let things that you can’t control get to you.

When you focus on what you can control, you’ll find your mental strength will grow.


6. Measure Your Daily Wins

Small victories are much bigger than they may seem. In fact, daily victories can even be applied to your workplace. It’s been proven that small victories in business are some of the best ways to inspire creativity and confidence.

The power of the daily win results from the sense of progression humans rely on.

Known as the “progress principle,” the principle states that workers most value progression in their place of employment. They are more motivated to complete their tasks when they feel they’re working towards something. The same can be found in everyday life.

If you’re having a bad day, just getting out of bed may be a small win for you. If so, then treat it like one. Celebrate! Is your goal to socialize more? Just getting outside and saying “hi” to your neighbor may be your small victory.

Either way, you need small wins to feel a sense of progression. And this progression helps you build confidence, too. Naturally, more confidence will lead to better mental strength. You believe in yourself — thus, you don’t let many things bother you.


7. Reflect on Your Daily Progress

At the end of the day, look back on what you’ve done, how you did it and whether or not you reached your goal. This process of self-reflection helps you recognize both areas for improvement and your strengths.

Not only will this self-reflection show you your strengths, but you’ll also be able to see how you’ve grown. Reflecting is similar, in many ways, to measuring your daily wins.

Building your mental strength takes focus and dedication, but it’s worth it. And the best time to start building this mental strength is right now. Go out and take back your life!


Summary

Here’s a quick breakdown of this article on becoming mentally strong:
Be consistent
Positivity over anxiety
Experience new things
Evaluate your core beliefs
Focus on what you can control
Measure your daily wins
Reflect on your daily progress
Are you interested in becoming mentally strong? Leave a comment below.

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3 D's of Productivity Success Values to Adopt Now

Our values drive our behavior. We also choose our values. Why not choose the best ones? Some values support our faith, others how we manage our money, still others how effective we are at achieving our dreams and goals. These I call Success Values. Let's look at which Success Values help us be more productive.

First, what does it mean to be productive? We generally think of productivity as being able to get more done in less time, also known as being efficient. Productivity is not necessarily about cramming more work into less time. What does it matter if we get more done if they're the wrong things?

Real productivity is about getting the right things done at the right time. These three Success Values will help you with maximizing real productivity in your life.

Discipline - This one is obvious. We have to be able to set priorities and do them when we're supposed to. Ultimate discipline is being able to force yourself to do what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it. On a more practical level, discipline means doing what you've planned to do or what must be done. Discipline is the key to all Success. It's what helps you get on track when you're off-track. It helps you create your plans and execute them.

Dedication - Dedication to your goals is next. Achieving your goals will be hard, presuming your goals are truly worthwhile. Easy goals don't need dedication and really aren't worth concentrating on either. Hard goals, that stretch us and make us become better than we were are the ones worth pursuing. Those are also the ones that sometimes make you want to quit. That's where dedication comes in. You have to be committed to the outcome you're after. You have to be willing to throw all of yourself into your goals when necessary.

Discernment - Discernment is how you know when it's necessary to throw all of yourself into your goals. Sometimes, we get too caught up in the pursuit of our goals that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Our lives get out of balance because we let too much attention get focused on one area of our lives. Being able to discern what's important is key to true success. Knowing when it's OK to be unbalanced in our focus is just as important knowing when it's not. Sometimes we have to spend our time in a single area temporarily. What's important is knowing when to stop.

These Success Values are, of course, not the only ones that apply to productivity. They are a really good foundation to build on though.

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Tired of Never Being “Good Enough?” 4 Ways to Kill your Inner Critic

Does that voice in your head ever make you feel like you’re not good enough?

I’ve been there and it sucks. When I launched a startup I used to constantly feel impatient, frustrated and inadequate because I wasn’t achieving “massive success.” I fooled myself into thinking that I would only be good enough once I reached some “successful” milestone in the future. This perspective only increased the feelings of impatience and frustration and it turned into a vicious cycle of negative thinking.

Don’t make the same mistake.

Do you really want to spend your short life worrying about when you will be good enough rather than being comfortable with yourself now?

Today I want to share 4 powerful mental habits that you can use to break away from this negative cycle and that I learned the hard way.

Habit #1: Have Self-Compassion

Shame is a dangerous emotion. It can easily become a part of your identity if you’re not careful. When you identify yourself with tiny mistakes or over-analyse situations that make yourself feel guilty, it can easily lead to shame.

When things weren’t going as planned in my business, I used to think that it was because I wasn’t good enough. Although I knew to analyse the different factors of the business to realise where things were going wrong, I always pointed the finger at myself first!

If I could have done it all over again, I would’ve given myself way more compassion.


How to Practice Self-Compassion

Having self-compassion is important because it gives you permission to fail. Making “failure” acceptable will give you the confidence to take risks and try new things.

If you’ve been thinking about an experience you’ve been wanting to try, go into it giving yourself permission to fail and being compassionate with yourself if you do. This will remove the importance of the outcomes and will help you enjoy the actual experience.

A great tactic to make sure you’re practising self-compassion is to role-play with yourself. Pretend that the issue you’re berating yourself about is actually an issue that a friend has.

How would you advise that friend? Would you call them a loser and make them feel low or would you encourage them to give themselves a second chance?

When you begin getting down on yourself or you hear that negative self-talk trigger, think about yourself and treat yourself as a friend. Give yourself the much needed compassion and support to simply do better next time.


Habit #2: Be grateful for what you’ve got

Like the famous Sheryl Crow line goes: “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.”

When you’re focused on what you don’t have or what you’re not achieving, you discount your past success.

If you’re constantly telling yourself that you’ll be good enough once you reach a certain career milestone or have a certain amount of money in your bank account, you will fail to enjoy the path that you’re currently on. You’re essentially “living in the future.”

Being grateful for your current situation, no matter what state it is in will make you feel more comfortable with yourself. Beyond that, gratitude has also been reported to strengthen immune systems, lower blood pressure, and increase levels of positive emotions in people.

It may sound cheesy, but I like to start my day with a short meditation focusing on gratitude. The reason that I’ve made this meditation a habit is because it achieves two important things: having gratitude and presence.
Easy 3-Step Meditative Practice:
Gratitude for the people in my life– this keeps me grounded and reminds me of all the supportive people in my life
Gratitude for the small stuff– I then like to think about minor things that make me happy or that I take for granted. Things like the birds chirping outside my window, running water, food and shelter, even silly things like my favourite TV shows!
Gratitude for the big stuff– I also like to think about the endless opportunities in life that I have access to, like hobbies I’m passionate about, volunteer activities and other cool things I can live and learn from! Other things I may take for granted such as freedom and health are important things to be grateful for every single day.

You can use this same practice and tweak it to your own life. It will help focus your mind on the what you should be grateful for and it will bring you back into the now!

Habit #3: Focus on Small Wins

Setting goals is a great way to focus your mind and energy towards achievement to kill that inner self-doubt. Studies have also shown that setting goals can increase intrinsic motivation.

A hack that I like to use to build confidence is setting up small wins. You can do this by setting smaller, specific, achievable goals. Tracking a series of small wins can lead you to a long-term goal systematically. It also propels success by feeding off of the momentum of each small win, making you feel excited and motivated at every win.
Here’s an example:

I always wanted to start my own blog but it always felt really daunting. To get started, I made a small goal of getting at least 20 subscribers within one month.

Knowing that I was working towards a very specific goal made starting a blog more real, it gave me a reason to launch it and work on it consistently. Although the goal seemed small, I remember how ecstatic I was when I achieved it. It got me motivated to continue writing and I proved to myself that I could do it!

When you are setting goals to help you achieve small wins remember to be specific, have a deadline, make them achievable and track them. When you achieve those small wins be sure to celebrate them with gusto!

Habit #4: Visualisation

Visualisation is not mumbo jumbo. Top athletes and entrepreneurs use visualisation to help prime their brains for success. The reason why it works is because you’re activating a series of connected nuclei in your brain called the “reticular activating system.”

In short, the RAS controls your belief system and links the unconscious and conscious parts of your brain. It helps filter out the tons of information you are exposed to, narrowing your brain’s focus only on the information that is deemed important by you.

For example, have you ever been at a busy airport but still hear your name through the intercom or someone shouting for you? That’s because your RAS has been primed to pay special attention to something important, your first name. It then turns all the other noise around you into “background noise.”

Visualising helps prime your brain for success by cuing the RAS to focus on things that matter to you.
How to Visualise

A handy visualisation exercise I like to use is imagining my “ideal future.” I like to vividly imagine a variety of things like what I’ll be doing, with whom, in what location and even imagine the way I’ll internally feel.

By doing this exercise, my brain is now focused on the things I can be doing to achieve this “ideal future.” I’d love to work from anywhere in the world, so I imagine myself blogging away on a white-sand beach. Since my brain has been primed with that vision, I’ve become hyper-aware of experiences and stories that I can channel into blog posts because I’ve trained my brain to focus on achieving that ideal goal!

The interesting thing about visualisation is that it can be as powerful as actually doing what you’re thinking. In a fascinating study, piano players were divided in two groups. One group was told to physically practice, while the other was told to “mentally” practice by sitting in front of the piano and visualise playing it.

The takeaway was that in both groups there were identical physical changes in the brain and after three days their piano playing accuracy was exactly the same, regardless of how they practice.

Start visualising the future you want so your brain can help you focus on the things that will get you there!


Conclusion

Being able to control that voice in your head can make a huge difference in your life. That voice has the power to hold you back from success, from living life to your fullest and so much more! By practising the mental habits of self-compassion, gratitude, focusing on goals and visualisation you can get over your self-doubt and negative self-talk.

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