The Positive Focus Practice

April 20, 2012 by

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

Why Great Writers Always Cross the Finish Line

November 2, 2011 by

Great writing is not something that naturally emerges from talented individuals. It is the result of doing the work until a result is achieved – regardless of whether that result meets with success.

The attribute of  finishing what you start is what makes talented writers great – and competent writers better.

Runners are often coached to run past the finish line because that is where the race is often decided.

Great athletes give their best regardless of the competition. They compete against themselves. It is the same with your writing.

Of course, as a writer you are not competing against anyone, or are you?

Getting better as a writer means giving your best from start to finish – and that is only possible if you endeavor to always cross the finish line on every piece of writing that you take on, whether that is memo, article, or a book.

Easy Victories are Rare

If you are a runner you vividly remember those races where your performance was effortless. Not only did you achieve a victory or a personal best, but you enjoyed the process from start to finish.

Writers know what this is like too. Once in a while you start writing and the ideas bubble up and flow just like magic. The end result is a beautiful and insightful work that is nearly flawless.

Easy victories are rare, but can nevertheless be achieved with greater frequency by adhering to one benchmark – finish what you start.

For writers, this means every single piece of writing – without exception.

The Only Failure is Not Finishing

When you cross the finish line you achieve a result that leads to more victories. It gives you something to build on.

Incomplete efforts are failures. How can you build on something that is unfinished?  You can’t.

Have you not completed a letter or article and reviewed it to only exclaim to yourself:  “This is going nowhere; it makes no sense.”

Then you edit.

Why is it not going anywhere?  It’s a simple puzzle to solve. Did you not start well, get off track in the middle, or not finish well?  It’s usually one or a combination of those three things.

These are not failures. They are actually the raw materials for success.

Compare that to quitting.  You can quit from the start, in the middle, or just as you approach the finish line.  Any one of those is a failure because no result is produced that can serve as a foundation for improvement.

There’s Always Another Finish Line

Writing is a skill that develops when you practice it consistently. Assuming that you are writing for others, the only way to determine if you are making progress is to get your work out there where you can get feedback from your target audience.

An incomplete message cannot be evaluated, so you have to first finish the work. Whether you achieve a victory or something less than that, you have still crossed the finish line.

As a former competitive runner,  I know with certainty that once you quit a race in the middle it gets easier to do it again – much easier.  While it can be embarrassing to cross the finish line at the back of the pack, it is far less damaging to the human psyche than quitting.

Like running, writing is a mental game – one in which your confidence grows with each successful completion.

Great writers celebrate every finish line because they know there are only two results – victories, and victories in disguise.

Leave a comment below or share this with your community on with any of the share buttons below – or on the little red bar at the bottom of this page.  

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

Image Credit: Photostock