I want to talk to you about focusing in on success.

I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I used to suffer terribly from being easily distracted by stuff that’s going on around me, and even more so, I just hear from lots and lots of people saying that they get distracted by social media and asking how they can get past being stuck on roadblocks or just stop being completely disengaged from what they doing?

So, I wanted to put a little exercise together for you so you can try and adopt some of my tips to help you focus on success.

It is a little map that I do that helps me get out of a place of being stuck in a rut and helps me push towards achieving my goals.

There’s a saying “where focus goes. energy flows” Now, I love this because it’s so true, if we’re connected and focus on what we’re doing, we get emotionally connected to it, we’re more energetic, and we’re more likely to get a successful outcome.

I heard an interesting statistic the other day. ‘The average person scrolls through 300 feet of social media feeds a day ‘that’s the height of the Statue of Liberty” which means we are spending a significant amount of time mindlessly scrolling through stuff that’s not helping us?

So, I want to share with you my three-step plan to success.

It’s pretty straight forwards, you start off with setting your goal, then you set a target and then you set a task.

Now you need to add some details to these steps and have something to measure it by. If you’re not focused on that, you’re not clear about your target or your goal or your step order task, you’ll never do it, so you’ve got to be laser clear on what that goal is, and then you make it measurable.

Now, let’s break these three steps down so you understand what each of them mean.

GOAL – The definition of a goal is an ideal future or a desired result. A goal is similar to a purpose or an aim.

TARGET – The definition of target is something that you are trying to do or achieve, or a person at which an attack is aimed. The person or group that someone is trying to influence or something you’re trying to sell to someone too. So targets are different to goals, which you can see.

TASK – The definition of task is a piece of work to be finished within a certain time, something hard or unpleasant that has to be done? A duty or function.

I found the definition of task really interesting, as the actions you have to take sound quite negative, right? They sound like something that may be a bit boring or monotonous or too hard.

So, this is a really good ninja tip for you to kind of think about when you’re trying to do something complicated. Look at the words and the description of the word so you understand it, and it will often give you some form of instruction of how to do it.

So, let’s go back to the process.

The first thing that you need to do is set your goal, this is going to be your top line. It has to be clear and it has to be measurable.

Let’s take a financial goal, for example. You want to earn £120,000 extra income this year. This is a defined goal as it gives you an amount you want to achieve and a timeline in which to achieve it.

Now to make this goal more manageable and subsequently achievable you need to move to the next step, the targets.

Now you have to break that goal down into targets, so you will pick four targets per month, one a week (I am sure everybody can achieve one thing a week, I think you’ll agree with me, right?) So, you will say every month you need to earn £10,000, so there will be 4 targets that you have to achieve to get to that £10,000. And you define that.

Now to the next step tasks. These need to happen to get to each of your targets.
The way I would recommend doing it is by setting yourself one needle mover task a day which is aligned with the main goal and the targets. Now, I would advise you do that needle mover task before lunchtime as that allows you to have won the day. If you get that one task done, the rest of the day is insignificant. You can either do something else the rest of day or do admin tasks that don’t get you juiced up; it is not important. As a result, you will know that each day if you can get that one thing done before lunchtime, you’ve won the day.

That means you get 5 things done in your work week. That’s five steps and five tasks towards your target. So, applying this to the financial example you know you want to earn £10,000 extra a month, and say for example you are selling paintings, your tasks in order to sell those painting would be to create a certain number of paintings a week to allow us to have, say, 5 paintings a month to sell for X amount of money in order to hit your target. Once you hit that target month on month it gets to your goal.

Now you can see how these steps help to get to you goal.

Let’s take another scenario. You want to lose weight and get healthy, so having that as a goal may not sound achievable because there is no clear focus, there’s no measurability. If instead you say you want to lose 3 stone this year and you want to get healthy, so you are more energetic and the way you’re going to do that is by starting to exercise and eating more healthily, then your goal sounds more achievable and is more measurable.

So, let’s break this down into targets. One maybe you want to cut meat out and be vegetarian, or you want to do a half marathon and start training for it, or you want to try and exercise at least two to three days a week.

Once you have your targets you can now start setting your tasks so that you can achieve them.
For example, to achieve your target of cutting out meat and becoming a vegetarian, the tasks you are going to do are, buy your shopping online once a month to ensure you have all the necessary ingredients. Next you will have recipe sheets printed out for each day so you can prepare the right meals that will help you reach your target.
Similarly, if your target is to run a half marathon, you may task yourself with running 3 miles a day for the first week, 4 miles a day for the second week and so on until can run 13 miles a day, helping you to reach your target of running a half marathon.
And finally in order to achieve your goal of exercising three days a week you going to find some online training videos, that you will have access to every morning in order to carry out your exercise routine.
By doing all the above, that’s moving you towards your targets which will then, in turn, help you reach your goal, and this applies to anything from personal relationships to business and hobbies too.

I do this all the time. It’s called my MAP, my ‘MASSIVE ACTION PLAN’, and I believe the best way to achieve your goals is by breaking it down into granular steps.