The Positive Focus Practice

One of the most powerful tools for maximizing results from your work is a weekly practice of building on your successes.

The positive focus practice is a simple exercise of rehearsing the successes of the previous week, acknowledging what worked (or didn’t), and then taking specific actions to enhance the positive and eliminating the negative – both for you, your team, and your customer.

Focus on What Matters

A traditional checklist typically associates the same priority to each and every item. Picking up your dry cleaning is given equal weight to returning a phone call to follow up on a potentially lucrative business lead.

Does that make any sense?

When you mentally rehearse the week and write down every positive accomplishment, you breathe new life into them – making it possible to progress to the next level.

It’s a powerful exercise.

When you get intensely focused on what matters in a positive way, it builds confidence that encourages future progress.

This is something a simple checklist cannot do for you. In fact, as your to-do list grows, it can actually become a demotivator. We all need checklists to keep our promises and manage the little things in life, but we also need something more to achieve those big goals that build the confidence that sustains our efforts.

A positive focus practice is not only a tool for motivation, it is one for organizing and focusing your talents where they are most likely to produce higher value results.

Build Productive Habits

Checklists tend to emphasize and reward busyness, whereas a positive focus practice emphasizes practical business results. There is a big difference between the two.

Everyone gets caught up in the activities of the moment. This is in fact a very good thing when your present moment awareness is focused on high value activities.

To enhance productivity, you need to build the habit of focusing on what matters, as well as the next steps for progressively accomplishing the desired goal or objective.

A weekly positive focus is going to keep you aligned with the right activities. The net result is you will stay on track with what matters most. If you happen to occasionally lose your focus, as we all do, you will be much more aware of what is necessary to get back on track.

The best time to do your positive focus will depend upon you and your business. It’s personal.

It is common to take some time on Friday afternoon to recap the week, which is why I am publishing this article at this time. However, I personally prefer to naturally find the right time on the weekend when I am refreshed, relaxed, and mentally ready to build my plans for upcoming next.

Find what works best for you.

Transform Negative Experiences

In addition to helping you focus on the important things that matter, the positive focus practice helps you to transform and move on from negative experiences.

Negative experiences can actually be highly productive. These are opportunities for learning that effectively help you make the progress you know is within your capabilities. It’s easy to view unfavorable results as mistakes, however, that is what they are only if you do not learn from them.

Last week I took specific actions to amend an unfavorable result. What I learned not only helped me to move on from it, but also to better prepare future clients for what they can expect from my business.

This is a lesson for all of us. Businesses only succeed when the respective responsibilities of the business or enterprise and the customer or client are absolutely clear.

Regardless of what you may call it, business is a collaborative partnership – one that benefits from mutual accountability and a positive focus on what matters most for the respective parties.

How about you? Will a weekly positive focus enhance your business results?

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Until next time, Jeff

 Photo Credit: Master Isolated Images