August 13, 2012

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Life is full of distractions.

But learning to keep your goals at the center of interest and priority is essential for long-term business growth and success.

As you’re growing a successful startup and transforming it into a profitable and sustainable business you are going to be presented with distractions. Why? Because the scope of accountability has broadened professionally and the personal development needed to sustain such growth also demands your full attention.

You may easily become distracted by people, success, challenges, or frustrations with your current and desired state. Whatever the reason may be, you can rebound from distractions that are meant to put you off course and take small steps daily to keep a consistently focused mindset.

Here are three simple tactics, I use regularly to stay focused and minimize distractions.

1. Target Practice: Keep your goals in the forefront daily.

Did you set goals last year? If so, do you remember them – verbatim? Chances are … no. This is why it’s essential to remember why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place. Your business goals shouldn’t be moving targets.

The human brain is complex. And if you haven’t set a target — you’ll find yourself mentally ‘all over the place.’ But if you keep your goals in front of you — via vision boards, goal sheets, daily to-do lists, affirmations and so on you’ll soon move them up through your memory continuum – from short-term to long-term memory. If you understand how your brain works, and how you learn — focusing will become much easier with practice.

“Regular short-term memories are only in the brain for a short amount of time and are deemed not important enough to be stored long term. At this point they are bumped out by more important thoughts. Working memory is short-term memory that is kept indefinitely by repetition of information.” In contrast — we want our goals to stick and this happens in our long-term memory.

“Long-term memory is where most of the action happens regarding the brain actually remembering things. This starts with encoding. Encoding is where the details of a long-term memory such as smells, colors or information are stored in the hippocampus of the brain.”

By keeping your brain cognizant of your goals on a daily basis — you’ll soon improve your ability to focus on your target and reclaim your focus.

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