What determines what you get in life?
Knowledge, drive, determination, courage, application, luck….?
Many of these are key components, but the critical element is your focus.
What you focus on determines what you achieve.
You will know of stories of people who didn’t finish school or had learning difficulties, yet they were somehow able to create highly successful careers and businesses they loved.
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and motion picture camera after being expelled from school by teachers who considered him too slow to learn.
And there are people who weren’t particularly athletic who strived for a physical goal and achieved it – like Cliff Young who won an ultramarathon at 61 having trained in gumboots on his farm.
In all walks of life there are examples of people who did not have the education, background or connection that would have suggested they would achieve great success. Yet they did.
You may not want to achieve big things on the world stage, but if you want to enjoy a life rich with connection, engagement and time spent doing things that truly inspire you, you’ll need to focus on those things.
If you’ve built an inspiring career and financial success, along with a rich family life and social connections, you may not need to read further – you’ve worked out that in whatever area of your life you’d love to create something, you need to focus on what it is that you’d love and then take steps towards that.
If you’re like me, you might have had success in some areas of your life but felt that there was more that was possible, but somehow you don’t know how to achieve it. I kept thinking I had to work harder, but years of trying that approach didn’t deliver what I really wanted.
Then I discovered that what I was focusing on wasn’t what I thought.
I was focusing on things I wanted to avoid instead of things I wanted to create. On working hard to become more organised, instead of focusing on what I’d really love to create with ease. I don’t mean lay back on the couch all day ease – just being able to have things flow and recognising my capacity to meet whatever challenges came along. So that I could keep going for what I really wanted instead of settling.
Are you focusing on where a partner does not meet your needs, or where family members don’t understand or appreciate you?
Are you constantly looking at career challenges you need to fix, or finances that keep heading in the wrong direction?
Do you think that other people perhaps have more skills or more luck at achieving what they would love than you do, in one or more areas of your life?
That focus will arise from beliefs that you have about yourself in the world which you will have formed a long time ago. And they’re not true.
They will keep running the show, affecting your perceptions and your decisions without your awareness.
Carl Jung said that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
It takes focus to look at what might be underlying the results you are getting in your life.
You will know that you have had times when everything has gone just the way you wanted it, and you have created something that you really loved.
A career milestone, a relationship, a goal.
You created that result through your focus.
You probably understand that, but it is the results you are getting in areas of your life that you don’t love that you may not realise are caused by beliefs you have that really don’t serve you.
Use that memory of what you have created as an anchor, to remind yourself that you do have the capacity to achieve what you would love in every area of your life.
You have that example as evidence. You do have the capacity to bring about what you would love.
Let me know if you would like to have some help to uncover those unconscious elements which are preventing you from getting what you would love in every area of your life.