OnTheBeach: Making Life Difficult With a Lack of Focus

I became aware of something last week. I realised that I was trying to make about 16 financial goals happen at once. And guess what? It wasn’t working! I was not making ANY of them happen. Not one. And I was getting frustrated and irritable and arsey and fed up. Then I had an epiphany.

Perhaps I’m trying to do too much at once?

I’ve been known to do that before. Why work on one goal when you can work on 300 simultaneously? But of course, as you know wise reader, when you’re working on 300 things at once, your attention is scattered, you’re overwhelmed, stressed, tired, there’s no time to do anything, and you don’t make discernible progress on any of those 300 things, which makes you feel bad, discourages you and makes you wonder what the point of it all is.

At the start of the year, I set up my life rules. One of them is to SINGLE TASK . Hahahahaha. Ahem. Yes, single tasking. This was mainly a work rule (that I had got out of the habit of again), but it applies to all areas of life. How often do you make a decision that you will sort everything in your life out at once, live like a trappist monk for 3 days and then fall spectacularly off the wagon?

We all do it. We want to sort out an area of life (or our entire life!) and we go gung-ho at it like a soldier at the charge of the Light Brigade. Unfortunately, it doesn’t often work that way. Changing our lives means changing behaviour, underlying habits, underlying beliefs, clearing any resistance to change, and many more things that we fail to take into account when we decide to repay ALL our debts this week, and start 5 savings accounts, and increase our income 7-fold immediately.

And then we fail. Sadly at that point, most of us give up…at least temporarily. What’s the point of trying if we just fail over and over again?! But that’s a real shame, because we could succeed, if we just changed our focus from ‘changing everything’ to changing just a few small things.

When I realised that trying to make 16 different financial goals happen all at once is stupid, I decided to change my focus. I picked the top 3 financial goals, and decided to focus solely on them for now. In the previous month, I had made no appreciable progress on any of my 16 financial goals. Once I prioritised and focused on 3 at a time (what can I say, I’m an over-achiever!), I’ve achieved 3 of the goals. In about a week.

To be clear, these were all fairly short-term goals, but I wasn’t really sure how I was going to accomplish them this month, never mind in a week! You see, something magical happens when you focus your attention:

The universe aligns in your favour.

Honestly, it does – I know that sounds like woo-woo clap-trap, but it genuinely does. “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the last week, since I made that decision, several things have ‘just fallen into place’ in what appears to be a miraculous way – money I didn’t know I had appeared, refunds I didn’t know were coming appeared, things I needed to buy were cheaper than I had expected, expensive events I was due to go to were cancelled…lots of things conspired to help me hit 3 financial goals in a week!

By stopping myself from trying to do 16 things at once, I gave myself the space and the focus to achieve 3. By the end of the month, I expect at least another 3 to be accomplished…the others are then longer term, so may take til Christmas! 😀 Honestly, as I look at them now, I can’t see how they’ll be done in a year…but I couldn’t see how the others would get done either before I focused on them and just started taking small steps towards them.

Those small steps DO add up, but if your focus is scattered around 68 different projects, you cannot see any changes happening. When you focus on one goal, one area of life, one small change, it is much easier to see the change.

So what will you focus in on this week? Just choose one thing, maybe two if they’re low maintenance, and focus on getting that one thing done, or changing that one behaviour (chocolate biscuits after every meal anyone?!), or taking small steps towards that one goal. You will start to see the universe move to meet you, you’ll start accomplishing your goals, which will increase your confidence and help you do more…it’s a virtuous circle!

Leave me a comment below to tell me how you are planning to focus to make your life easier this week.

Love

Donna.x