Focus is a powerful skill that can help people complete their tasks at work and promote productivity in their professional life. Learning strategies for concentration can help you achieve your goals and overcome distractions.
In this article, we list 9 strategies on how to stay focused on your goals, overcome distractions plus powerful tips to stay motivated to achieve your goals.
#1. You Have Inside You a Core Genius - Believe You Can Stay Focused On Your Goals.
I believe you have inside you a core genius—some one thing that you love to do and do so well that you hardly feel like charging people for it. It’s effortless for you and a whole lot of fun.
And if you could make money doing it, you’d make it your lifetime’s work.
Successful people believe this, too. That’s why they put their core genius first. They focus on it— and delegate everything else to other people on their team.
Compare that to the other people in the world who go through life doing everything, even those tasks they’re bad at or that could be done more cheaply, better, and faster by someone else.
They can’t find the time to focus on their core genius because they fail to delegate even the most menial of tasks.
When you delegate the grunt work—the things you hate doing or those tasks that are so painful, you end up putting them off—you get to concentrate on what you love to do. You free up your time so that you can be more productive.
And you get to enjoy life more following this success principles.
So why is delegating routine tasks and unwanted projects so difficult for most people?
Surprisingly, most people are afraid of looking wasteful or being judged as being above everyone else.
They are afraid to give up control or reluctant to spend the money to pay for help. Deep down, most people simply don’t want to let go.
Others—potentially you—have simply fallen into the habit of doing everything themselves. “It’s too time-consuming to explain it to someone,” you say. “I can do it more quickly and better myself anyway.” But can you?
#2. Delegate Small Tasks Completely To Focus On Your Goals
If you’re a professional earning $75 per hour and you pay a neighborhood kid $10 an hour to cut the grass, you save the effort of doing it yourself on the weekend and gain 1 extra hour when you could profit by $65.
Of course, though 1 hour doesn’t seem like much, multiply that by at least 20 weekends in the spring and summer and you discover you’ve gained 20 hours a year at $65 per hour—or an extra $1,300 in potential earnings.
#3. Become a Con Artist Doing What You Love to Do.
Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan once stated that all entrepreneurs are really con artists. They get other people to pay them to practice getting better at what they love to do. Think about it.
Tiger Woods loves to play golf. People pay him big money to play golf. Every time he plays, he learns more about playing better. He gets to practice and hang out with other golfers, all the while getting paid for it.
So he is automatically focused on his goals and at the same time motivated enough to keep following his passion.
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#4. Do What You Love—Focus On Your Goals - Overcome Distractions - The Money Will Follow.
GREER GARSON
Winner of the 1943 Academy Award for best actress
Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the money will come
Diana von Welanetz Wentworth is someone who has always focused on her goals while following her heart and has been wildly successful as a result.
Her greatest pleasure was always to be cooking something and gathering people around the table to share at a deep level over food.
She was always reaching for a deeper connection, what she calls “a sense of celebration at the table.”
So she started her career writing books about how to give a party and do everything ahead of time so you can actually be present and connect more deeply with the people you invite.
Then in May 1985, she went on a trip to the Soviet Union with a group of leaders in the human potential movement, where she noticed that, for the most part, they were all loners.
Even though they were quite well known for their books and their impact in the world, they didn’t know each other.
When she returned, she realized that her life purpose had always been more about connection than food. She had just used food as a catalyst.
That realization led her to create the Inside Edge, an organization that hosted weekly breakfast meetings in Beverly Hills, Orange County, and San Diego, California, where nationally recognized people of vision came together to share their knowledge and wisdom on human potential, spirituality, consciousness, and world peace.
Speakers included people such as Mark Victor Hansen and me, motivational expert Anthony Robbins, management consultant Ken Blanchard, actor Dennis Weaver, counselor the Reverend Leo Booth, and authors Susan Jeffers and Dan Millman.
In addition to listening to an inspirational speaker, participants would network, encourage each other to dream bigger, and support each other’s projects. Eighteen years later, the Orange County chapter still continues to meet every week.
Diana has gone on to write and coauthor numerous books, including The Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook, once again integrating her love of food with her love of people sharing their ideas, wisdom, and stories.
#5. Focus Days.
A Focus Day is a day in which you spend at least 80% of your time operating in your core genius, or primary area of expertise—interacting with people or processes that give you the highest payoffs for the time you invest.
To be successful, you must schedule more Best Results Days and hold yourself accountable for producing the results. In the previous points, we discussed your core genius—that one thing you love to do and do so well, you hardly feel like charging people for it. It’s effortless for you and a whole lot of fun.
And if you could make money doing it, you’d make it your lifetime’s work. Your core genius is your natural talent, the area where you shine.
My areas of genius are writing, and editing. I do these things easily and well—and when I do them in a focused way, they’re the things I get paid the most money for.
For me, a Best Results Day would be a day in which I spend 80% of the time speaking or leading a writing an article (like this one) to achieve a greater level of success.
Your Best Results Day might be spent designing a new line of clothing, making sales calls, negotiating deals, producing a loan package to send to a mortgage lender, painting, performing, or writing a grant proposal for a nonprofit organization.
Whatever you love to do just stay focused on your goals, stay motivated, overcome distractions, stay persistent and success will follow.
#6. Visualize the Results.
Another important thing when it comes to staying focused on your goals is visualizing the results of achieving your goal.
Thinking about the outcome of your work can help you improve your dedication and focus on your goals.
It can also help you encourage yourself to keep working when you experience challenges or setbacks.
#7. Always Evaluate Your Progress.
To help you stay on a successful trajectory, you can periodically evaluate your progress toward your goals.
Not only does this serve as a motivator for continuing toward your goals, it can also give you a sense of accomplishment for the tasks you've completed so far.
Evaluating your progress can also help you modify your plans to continue toward your goals.
#8. Enjoy Free Days.
A Free Day extends from midnight to midnight and involves no work-related activity of any kind. It’s a day completely free of business meetings, business-related phone calls, cell phone calls, e-mails, or reading work-related documents.
On a true Free Day, you’re not available to your staff, clients, or students for any kind of contact except for true emergencies—injury, death, flood, or fire.
The truth is that most so-called emergencies aren’t emergencies at all. They’re simply employees, coworkers, and family members who don’t have—or haven’t been given—enough training, responsibility, or authority to handle the unexpected situations that arise.
You have to set clear boundaries, stop rescuing people, and trust that they can handle things by themselves.
When you train your employer, staff, and coworkers not to bother you on your Free Days, it forces them to become more self-reliant. It also forces them to grow in ability and self-confidence.
If you are consistent over time, people will eventually get the message. This is ultimately a good thing because it frees you up to have more Free Days and more Focus Days.
#9. Free Days Help You To Stay Focused On Your Goals in a Better Way.
The value of regular Free R days is that you come back to your work refreshed and ready to tackle it with renewed vigor, enthusiasm, and creativity.
To become truly successful, you need these breaks to allow yourself some distance from your normal day-to-day life—so you can become more creative in overcoming distractions, generating breakthrough ideas and solving problems.
I believe everyone’s ultimate goal should be 130 to 150 days off each year. If you took every weekend off—doing no work whatsoever—you would instantly enjoy 104 vacation days.
And if you found another 48 Free Days in the form of long weekends, holiday weeks, 2-week vacations, and other opportunities, you could easily enjoy 150 Free Days to recharge, rejuvenate, and rest—with no laptops, no e-mails, no documents, and no contact with your staff, coworkers, or boss.
It may take you a while to work up to that number, perhaps years, but the main thing is to constantly work to increase your number of Free Days every year.
