What’s your Focus?
by Andrew Bryant
Executive Coach and Leadership Trainer
Have you ever experienced a moment of clarity? A moment when your full concentration was on just one thing, do you feel powerful when you know exactly what to do?
Focus has been identified as a key component of success in life and business. Successful sports people often talk about their focus on a goal and the state of being 'in the zone', when everything else goes away.
"My main focus is on my game." - Tiger Woods
The problem, however is that in today's busy world we are bombarded with so much choice and distractions where multi-tasking is seen as a virtue not a vice.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi researched the phenomenon of 'flow', the state when we feel effortless because we are totally engaged in the activity at hand. Most of us have had these experiences, often when engaged in a sport or a hobby, but how do we get this when we are at work?
Focus or flow states occur when we experience a high degree of challenge that causes us to use all our skill in this area. For me, I experience flow when I am training or coaching. I am full focused on the audience or person and my mind is tracking for verbal and non-verbal meanings. At such moments time goes away and I feel in touch with my purpose.
Purpose or meaning is another key component in obtaining focus or flow. When we engage in activities work that have a high level meaning for us we are much more likely to be engaged. For example, removing garbage from an inner city block of land could be a boring chore or it could be highly engaging if your purpose is to create a safe playground for yours and your neighbours children.
So my questions to you for this month’s newsletter are:
- What are you going to focus on this year?
- What distractions are you going to say "No" to?
- What purpose or significant meaning are you going to bring to this activity?
If you are a manager or a leader then my questions for you are:
- Have you shared with your team what the focus of the year is?
- Have let them know what not to focus on, competition, last year's figures etc?
- Have you shared the big "Why" they are focusing on certain activities?
At Self Leadership International we focus on coaching, public and in-house training. Our purpose is to empower individuals and organisations to realise and actualise their full potential.
If you are interested in developing more focus then I highly recommend you attend Coaching Genius, a 3-day workshop that will facilitate you stepping into your focus state and bring meaning and purpose to what you do. Coaching Genius a.k.a Accessing Personal Genius will increase your emotional intelligence and allow you to coach yourself and others into higher states of flow and focus. I will be conducting Coaching Genius in Sydney and Singapore.