FOCUS! Finish up 2011 Strong!

The name of the game for the remainder of 2011 is, focus!  To successfully negotiate the current economic rip tides, focus on finishing up strong.  If you have been doing your job as a leader, whether leading yourself or others, you already have a set of goals you’ve been working to achieve this year.  A leader’s challenge is how to remain focused and not sabotage your organization’s efforts by getting distracted.  It sounds easy to do but, if you are like me and you listen to the news, you are being bombarded with negative input.  Thousands of people are succumbing to the widespread negativity.  You don’t have to be one of them.

With effort, you can learn to pay more attention to the positive information while prudently disregarding the negative.  Just as an athlete mentally trains hard on what she is doing right, not wrong, to perfect a vault or a three-point shot, you must learn to ignore the distractions that derail your progress.  A multitude of useless diversions await you each day.

Excessive e-mails are at the top of my clients’ time-wasting list of supremely distracting detritus of working in the electronic age.  The attention-getting e-mail notifications are notorious for enticing even the highest performers away from their critical job functions!  Once you open that e-mail you become ensnared in responding to the message creating a series of actions that pull you further and further off your intended task (=goal)!  This is self-sabotage!  Yes, sabotage, both personal and business.  Caroline Myss asserts, “all distractions are self-sabotage.”  Once you veer from your path, you exhibit symptoms of  The Atalanta Syndrome™.

“Atalanta  (at-uh-LAN-tuh), abandoned at birth by a father who wanted a son, Atalanta became a great heroine and one of the Argonauts. Unwilling to marry, she finally consented to wed any man who could beat her at a foot race. Such was her fleetness that she would have remained happily single, but that the Goddess of Love gave one of her suitors golden apples to scatter on the race course. These were magical, and Atalanta could not resist them. Stooping to gather them in, she lost the contest to her destined husband.
Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology, www.mythweb.com

Remember Atalanta?  She sabotaged her own chances of winning the race under the spell of Venus’ apples.  Are you Atalanta, irresistibly picking up those apples on your life path which only serves to slow you down?”
(The Atalanta Syndrome™  Who is Atalanta?  You, that’s Who!, Lewine, 2007)

Wrapping up 2011 effectively demands that leaders hone their focusing skills.  Those that allow themselves to get side-tracked (sabotage) with anything other than steps toward achieving the organization goals, will slip behind quicker than ever before.  The economic environment is harsher today.  Mistakes which were previously treated with inconsequential punishments might render an organization extinct in the coming 12-24 months!

Consider yourself a role model in your organization.  What you do, the people in your company do.  Set clearly defined goals and stay focused on achieving them.  The rest of your company will follow your lead.  Most people want to follow.  Only a small percentage of the workforce truly has the desire to formally lead other people.  (Maybe they know something you don’t !  When you get distracted, they get distracted.  Don’t you just hate it when “they” aren’t doing their jobs!  It goes both ways.  Your followers know exactly when you are not doing your job.  Don’t kid yourself by misreading their silence.  Few will confront you, their boss, directly so consider yourself the Emperor with No Clothes.  However, the informal communication system (gossip) will be on fire, clearly and accurately condemning your sabotaging, poor-performing actions.  Walls have ears.  People talk.

This challenging economy is weeding out the weak and ineffective organizations.  It’s a foot race of mythical proportion with golden apples of distraction raining down upon us all.  If you do not have a clearly written set of operational goals, your #1 priority is to establish them, NOW!  Otherwise, you are setting a de facto course of meandering and unplanned obsolescence.  No responsible captain of a ship would load her passengers onboard and set sail without a pre-established destination.  Sailing the open seas without a course is almost certain death.  In today’s market, it is not a stretch to say the same.  Goals are the primary antidote to The Atalanta Syndrome ™!

Once proper goals are set, mastering the skill of focusing is the preventive medicine to fend off organization sabotage.  The next group to fall in this erratic market will be those who have goals and succumb to the plethora of “golden apple” distractions.  These leaders fall prey to bad news, lose sight of their goals, and descend into the morass of useless activity.  Leaders who find themselves trapped in off-task minutiae end each day with a longer To Do list than they began.

In reality, everyone strays from their goals and intended tasks.  Leaders are not perfect, nor do they need to be.   As a leader you do need to practice the self-discipline of returning to task, as soon as you can, rather than be swept away with a distraction.

For example, when you are scanning a list of headlines searching for potential business, you’ll find 7 or 8 out of 10 are negative.  You may need to read some of those items because that information pertains to your goal.  However, if you do not need that information to perform your task at hand, employ your self-discipline and skip those unnecessary ones.  Zero in on the information that addresses what you are looking for to help you with your goal!  It is simple but not as easy as it sounds.  Try it.  You won’t be successful all the time, but you can improve; and that improvement may be the incremental level that keeps your organization on track more often than not.  In baseball, you can bat .300, and you are a star!  Yes, baseball players can fail 7 out of 10 times and be highly successful.  Business is not that accepting.  You’ll have to be doing things right more than 50% of the time to remain intact.  To thrive you’ll have to do even better, but it won’t take 10/10.  Every tenth of one-percent improvement makes a difference in your bottom line and reduces stress.

I am no different than you.  I still have to do what you do.  I am not exempt.  Golden apples lay strewn around me, too!  When I’m catching up on the business news of the day, I have to discipline myself to turn off the twitter feed and e-mail pop-ups.

None of this means you should ignore or deny critical facts that may be necessary to deal with a thorny obstacle to your goal.  Selecting what to focus on and what to ignore requires your professional judgment.  Your judgment accumulates as a blend of your personal and business experience.  Knowing who you are, where you are going, and how you will get there is the essence of personal leadership, a pre-requisite to formal leadership.  Maintaining your attention to the goals, not the obstacles, keeps everyone on the right path and out of Atalanta’s reach!

The good news is that the challenges you face this year are a clarion call to improve yourself and your organization.  My job is to find and work with companies that are good and getting better.  This year, some of my clients will break new records in revenue and/or profits!   When I am tempted to surrender to bad news, all I have to do is turn my attention to my clients.  That’s where I can find the good news.  Focusing on them, that’s my job!

Nancy C. Lewine, PhD
© 2011  All Rights Reserved

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