Why you must know what you want -get focused; get results

As far as any of us can prove, we only get one life. So, we want to make the most of that life. In a modern world, driven by advertising and consumerism, we are constantly being told that we need to add stuff to our life so that we can be happier. Of course, the one thing we need to add just happens to be the one thing that is being advertised to us in that very moment. What a beautiful coincidence.

The sad thing is that we regularly fall for all the marketing and hype and we end up spending too much of our time, money and energy chasing after things that we don’t really want anyway.

So, how do you avoid falling for the hype? Simple, know what you want. Get clear about what you want from your life and view everything else as a distraction.

Of course, marketing isn’t the only area where you will suffer if you don’t know what you want from your life. People set goals every day and work hard to improve their lives. Unfortunately, they end up spinning their wheels and getting nowhere because they don’t know what real improvement looks life. Before you set your goals to improve your life, you need to know what you want from your life. You need to at least know the following:

That may sound like a lot of work and it can be. But the work done up front will save you a great deal of time in the long run. It will allow you to make better and wiser decisions. These decisions will allow you to hit your goals, faster and with greater precision. And the reason it is all possible is that you took the time to know what you want from life. The clearer you are about what you want, the easier it is to identify what you should be doing and just as importantly; what you should not be doing. This means you can achieve more in less time, with less effort.

It is a sad indictment of modern society that people boast and brag about working hard is if it is something to be proud of. Life isn’t all about taking it easy but you weren’t put on Earth just to work hard. If you are talking about how hard you work, it is likely that you are not achieving very much because if you were focused on what you really want from life; you would be talking about that. You would realise that how much work you do or, how little, is irrelevant. What really matters is what you are trying to achieve and the action you are taking to get there.

And, if you are really working hard, you are probably working too hard. Are you doing ridiculous hours like 12-14-hour days? That is a sign of somebody who is not focused on what they really need to be doing. When you work too hard, you do not take enough time to enjoy the other aspects of life but more importantly, you do not get the necessary time to recover from your efforts.

Your daily work requires both mental and physical energy as it puts strain on both your body and mind. At the end of each day, you need to have sufficient rest and relaxation time to allow both your body and mind to recover from the efforts of the day. If you don’t get that recovery, you start the next day with depleted energy. As this continues, day after day, the quality of your performance suffers. In addition, your health deteriorates as you expose your body to more stress and strain than it can cope with.

Regarding working too hard, a recent experiment was undertaken in Sweden where nurses in Gothenburg had their work day reduced to 6 hours. The premise was that they would be more focused and give more effort for the 6 hours than they would be able to do for an 8-hour workday. The result was that absence was reduced, employees felt healthier and patient care improved. While the costs mean that it will be some time before it is introduced permanently in the public sector; the Swedish tech sector is still very keen on the idea.

If you don’t know what you really want, you can end up striving for efficiency rather than effectiveness. This is something I consistently mention because it is very important that you understand this if you want to be productive and still enjoy your life. Let me quickly remind you of the difference:

​Note: The definitions below are not strict definitions of effectiveness and efficiency. They are very simple definitions which aim to give you an understanidng of what you are doing from a time managmenet perspective.

Effective people do not really care about how much work they get done. Their focus in on getting their most important tasks done when they need to be done. Whether this results in completing a large quantity of work or not, is largely irrelevant.

The 80/20 principle teaches us that a small percentage of the work we complete is important. The rest of our work is of little or no importance to the results we achieve in life.

The efficient individual will be so focused on the quantity of work he completes that he will give ​insufficient thought to the importance of that work.

The effective individual will first pause to determine which tasks constitute the small percentage which have the biggest impact upon his work. He will focus on these tasks and avoid anything which does not make a significant, positive contribution to his results.

The myth of good stress is one of the misconceptions which most annoys me. There is no such thing as good stress and it can be very damaging to believe otherwise. If you are genuinely experiencing stress, you need to take immediate action to resolve the problem before it gets worse. Unfortunately, many people have been led to believe that stress is a good thing so, when they start to experience stress, they fail to take action and by the time they realise there is a problem, the situation has become more severe.

What people mistakenly call ‘good stress’ is actually pressure. To get the best from ourselves, it can help to experience a degree of pressure. This helps us to become more focused and concentrated on the things we need to do to get the result we desire. This is fine as long as we believe that we can cope with the pressure. However, as soon as we believe that we cannot cope with the pressure, we start to experience stress.

When you do not know what you want, you cannot easily differentiate between the work you need to do and work which you don’t need to do. You end up doing more work than you need to and, as pointed out earlier, you allow yourself insufficient time to recover from your efforts. This will eventually lead to stress and the negative health consequences associated with it.

There is more than one area of your life which is important; at least there should be. And, it’s not just work life and personal life. These need to be broken down further e.g. family, finances, hobbies. It is up to you to determine which areas of your life are the most important but you need to make sure that you have time for each of them.

It’s nigh on impossible to give enough time and attention to the important areas of your life if you don’t first take the time to identify and define those areas. When you take the time to determine the most important areas of your life (usually 5-8 areas) you may well find that there is an area of your life which is more important than you had realised.

Even if you are crystal clear about the important areas of your life, you still need to assign enough time and attention to them. It is not necessary to give each area of your life the same amount of time and attention. That is not what balance is about. However, you will have needs in each area and you need to assign enough time and attention to ensure that you meet those needs in each area. This allows you to be happy in each area of your life and it even makes you more resilient because if one area of your life is not going well; you can still get great joy and satisfaction from the other areas of your life.

You are not on this planet alone. You need to be able to interact with others to get what you want. More importantly, deep and meaningful relationships, in the form of intimate relationships and friendships, help you to be your best self. These relationships allow you to achieve levels of joy and happiness which you could not achieve alone.

First, you need to be able to establish these relationships and to do so, you need to know what you need and value from relationships. It is very easy to waste time in relationships which will never work out. You may have spent time in relationships where, when they have ended, you wondered why you were ever with that person. It is not being nasty; it’s just that you eventually concluded that the two of you were never compatible and you wonder how you didn’t see that earlier. If you managed to see it earlier, you could have saved yourself a lot of pain but more importantly, you would have been available to look for somebody who is compatible with you.

With friendships, you may fail to identify who your real friends are. It is very easy to get confused between those who are friends and those whom you are friendly with. It is great to be friendly with many people but you only need a small number of friends. It is important that you differentiate between the two. Even if you are clear about who your real friends are; do you ensure that they get enough of your time and attention? Don’t let those whom you are friendly with steal too much of your time because you will get far more happiness and joy from giving that time and attention to your real friends.​

A great deal of your confidence comes from achievement. I am not talking about winning competitions. Achievement comes from completing the tasks, challenges and goals you set for yourself in life. It comes from knowing that you are making progress and continuously improving yourself. Do not underestimate the sense of achievement and the confidence boost that come from knowing that you are a better person today than you were last week. You can of course be proud of the person you are today while still striving to become even better.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when setting goals is that they think that the goals are separate from who they are. Not only is that untrue but if you try to keep your goals separate from who you are; you are unlikely to achieve them and even if you do, they won’t make you happy because they are not the goals you really wanted anyway.

If you want to set effective goals and build your confidence too; the two need to be linked. Your goals need to come from within. They need to be based on your purpose, values and vision for life i.e. the person you really want to be, the life you want to live and the impact you want to have on this world. When you set your goals this way, you are giving yourself permission to be yourself and there is no bigger vote of confidence you can give yourself. Then, as you reach every milestone along the way; your confidence builds further because you are becoming the person you want to be.

If you are struggling for confidence, Unbreakable Self Confidence will help you to build the confidence and self-belief you need.