Always keep your dreams, mission and goals in mind. We all lose sight of these important matters all the time. Deadlines, daily activities and stressors can eat up your time and clutter your mind.
Here are a few simple steps to help you maintain your focus on what's important and create a plan for what you want to do to continue moving forward when difficulties arise.
1. Ask yourself on a daily basis, what is really important? First off, know what is meaningful and important to you. And if you don't like what you are doing, know you have three options. You can change how you think about it, accept it or remove yourself from it.
2. Identify what you are working towards and make sure you have smaller steps (and backup steps) along the way. The perfect plan involves not only big goals and small steps, but also back up ideas for when things change or don't work out the way you intended.
3. Realize that it's not always going to go according to plan. Think back to a situation in which something went off the rails and didn't really work out the way you intended. Did the world end? How did you get through it? How will you be able to better handle it next time? If you can see that most likely things aren't going to go perfectly, and thats ok, then you will enable yourself towards a stronger sense of control and power to handle whatever life brings the next time around.
4. See the good in bad situations. Did you learn anything? Did it cause you to think differently in any way? Did you build resilience at all? These are the things to focus upon more so than what often gets us hung up. If it's already happened might as well grow from it. This is the key to meaning making, realizing that there is choice in how we perceive and work through situations. It's important to see both the bad and the good.
5. Reconnect to what motivates you (and do it often!). My favorite way to keep my mind fresh and motivated includes running and listening to podcasts. There are constantly things grasping for our attention, so we want to even the odds by maintaining a routine in which we can place our focus on what drives us and moves us forward.