Q&A: How do you stay focused on your goals?

Q&A: How do you stay focused on your goals?

Hi, Tiffany, this is Ashley. My question is how do you stay focused on your goals? I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder, and this is Scared Confident.

The thing that I'm tragically not naturally good at is focus. I am easily distractable. I love new ideas. And so staying committed and focused on the goals. That I have already made and put in front of me is not something that was a natural practice for me. But I have learned a couple of things that have helped me stay really focused and like fight my natural tendency.

The first one is like, give it language, the people around, you need to know what you're trying to do. And that also helps you stay accountable to your actions and activities because when they know that that's your goal, they can remind you of them. My husband in particular, this comes very naturally to him.

He can decide something in his head and like manage his behavior for the rest of his life against that decision. It's like, there's no friction for him. For me. I'm like, I don't really know what my goals are. I want to do all the things.  like, I'm a, I'm like a mind map of chaos. And so picking what I want to do, like this is the thing I have to claim it.

And then saying out loud to him, he then has kind of quasi permission to say, like, I thought you said this was your goal. I'm noticing that these behaviors are the way you're spending your time is not aligned with that. And he knows now, don't, he didn't have to tell me what not to do it, but just say like, I'm making this observation, you get to do what you'd like to about it.

So that is like giving them language helps me stay focused on my goals. The other thing, and this is going to sound like a commercial for the entrepreneurial operating system. And I guess I am a bit of a walking commercial for EOS. Because it has had such a powerful impact on my life, but whether you use EOS or just extract its principles, I'll explain to you the framework of it and why it has been so freeing for somebody who lives with.

I don't want to say mental chaos. To me, it's like so fun. It's like a mental jungle gym, but I'm constantly having new ideas, which means I can be very, very poor at execution and follow through if I don't stay focused. So the EOS framework again. It's not unique. It just is a framework that creates discipline for people like me, that aren't naturally disciplined.

It basically takes your life and puts it into 90 day increments. First, you start out with like, what is your vision? And what do you want to happen in the long-term of your life? You can do this for your life or for your business. Like, what do you want to have happen? And sit down and figure that out. And it can take you an hour.

It can take you three days, like, but get something on paper about what your vision is for your life or for your business or for your family. And then what are the things that have to happen in the next year? To move you towards that. So let's use the example of you want to get in the best shape of your life.

That's your goal? Okay. Well, what do you need to do in the next year to be able to do that? Let's say the first goal is that you want to have exercise as a discipline and lose 10 pounds. Okay. Those are goals towards the big picture of, I want to be in the best shape of my life. Okay, then you break that down into like what, in the next 90 days specifically, what am I going to commit to doing, to move me towards losing 10 pounds and making exercises a discipline?

Maybe you're just going to focus on exercise as a discipline. So then in the next 90 days, you're only going to focus on exercising at least two days a week. And that is all you're going to focus on. And so that behavior in that 90 days, ladders up to your one year goal, which ladders up to your big picture vision for your, for your life.

And it's so fricking obvious. What I just said, but that is not a thing that my brain naturally comes up with. And that's like hilarious and a little horrifying to say out loud, but it's just true. I live in a constant state of ideation and so moving to a place where I decide my behavior and I just commit to these like three to five things in 90 day increments.

Assures me that I'm moving towards and not away from the life I want to live. You can have financial goals, you can have personal goals, you can have spiritual goals. You can have relationship goals with your family or with your spouse, but moving it into a behavior that you can take an action that you can take is so critical to moving goals forward.

And so for me, that 90 day increment of deciding what I'm going to do. And then layered on to that is a weekly meeting. This can be a weekly meeting with yourself. It can be a weekly meeting with your spouse, or can be weekly meeting with your executive team where every single week you get out your commitments for the last 90 days.

And you show on your scoreboard. Am I doing a good job or a bad job? Am I hitting my targets? My goal. We'll go back to my example of exercising at least two days a week. Every week you put in your answer. Yes, I did it or no, I didn't. And you start to actually see a visual scoreboard for am. I. Activating my behavior towards my goals.

And that's where everything falls apart. People wish for things, but they don't break down the practical and almost always simple things that have to be done to move their lives forward. We get distracted by things. We make excuses for our time. We get lazy. We allow. Our emotions to decide whether we do the thing that day or not.

I don't feel like it. I don't like it. It's kind of cloudy today for me. I've got to be able to override how I feel, whether I feel like doing it or not. And this external scoreboard and this commitment to something as short as 90 days has totally been a game changer for my personal life and for my business.

So those are tenants that I have learned, like principles that I learned from the EOS framework and EOS, you can go read the internet about what that is. I'm not going to spend time talking about that right now, but those practices from that operating system and how to help entrepreneurs better run their businesses, that that framework has been a game changer in the way that I think about how do I manage.

My activity and my behavior towards what it is that I'm wishing for.

So what else is on your mind? Text me (317) 350-8921 (317) 350-8921. And be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening today.

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