How To Cure Career Distraction

When you start to get strategic with your career path, you realize that everything that extends from you also begins within you.

Once you realize this, you will also realize that you can re-prioritize yourself and your career at will.

You will be able to easily identify where you’re wasting your time and energy and who you’re wasting it with.

Control Your Focus

The only way to protect yourself against distraction is to sharpen your focus.

The only way to build a career you want to keep is to protect your focus and stop giving away your time and energy to things that don’t amplify your career.

Being distracted by other people, changing circumstances, and your own rampant thoughts is the quickest way to derail from any sort of forward movement in your career.

Without growth, you will suffer. Without controlling your focus, you will not grow.

A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology looked at personality and goal-striving and found that mental focus emerged as the most important aspect of the self-regulation process and an important motivational strategy that successful people use while working toward goal achievement.

Studies reported in the Handbook of Self-Determination Research looked at goal achievement and identified characteristics inherent in the process of successful goal-setting.

The studies found that people who did not protect their focus or align their focus with their deeper interests and values had difficulty not only choosing appropriate goals to pursue, but found themselves exhausted of resources before ever reaching their goals.

In other words, people who can’t control their focus, can’t achieve their career goals.

Look — protecting yourself against internal distraction and unwanted thoughts is essential for goal attainment. Studies have shown this.

Research from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin agrees that if you don’t strategically protect yourself from your own negative thoughts by controlling your focus, you are more likely to sabotage your success.

Have you ever pulled back right before reaching a big goal? Have you ever overthought a situation and, as a result, failed to make the right decision? This is self-sabotage. And it’s the result of having inadequate control over your own focus.

When internal focus is protected, goals are achieved and people feel an increased sense of well-being and improved mood, as well as an increased ability to select, set, and achieve future goals.

Focus + Alignment = Success.

The end.

Here are three strategies for regaining control over your focus and your career…

1. Cut out the wrong people.

Take back your focus by eliminating the wrong people from your life.

You know who they are. The ones who have values that are the exact opposite of yours. The ones who always turn you into a worse version of yourself. The ones that pretend to support you, but really just want to pull you into their drama. The ones who make you question your ideas and goals because they lack vision and have a vehemently negative mindset.

Don’t allow these people to steal your focus anymore.

2. Cut out the wrong goals.

You will never be able to maintain focus and the necessary discipline toward your goals if you aren’t 100% committed to them. This means getting 100% aligned with the future you want for yourself.

Lots of people set goals that are wrong for them personally and, as a result, fail miserably and repeatedly. These people set goals that other people want them to set. Or they just copy other people’s goals. These people are sheep.

The truth is, we’ve all been sheep before. We’ve set goals for a specific career path because our advisors or family nudged us to.

Look — just because someone else has a goal doesn’t mean you need to have the same goal.

It seems obvious, but most people spend their lives chasing other people’s goals.

The only way to protect yourself against this is to spend some time getting to know yourself. What do you want? Who do you want to be? Start getting to know your core values and the outcomes that you want to achieve in life.

What drives you? What excites you? What future vision makes you come alive with seething and relentless passion? What idea or vision makes your eyes dilate, the blood rush to your head, and tears come to your eyes? What gets you excited?

3. Cut out the wrong thoughts.

Internal locus of control — this is a core belief that you are the master of your life.

You are in control of your destiny. You determine your success or failure. But what determines whether or not you’ll be successful? Your focus.

If you can’t learn how to manage the chaos of your own mind — your obsessive thoughts, your wildly changing goals, your emotional highs and lows — you are doomed.

You can either be in control of your mind or your mind can be in control of you.

If you want to be happy and successful in your career, there is no other option. You must start choosing the right thoughts and you must start eliminating the wrong thoughts.

Wrong thoughts include the obsession of loyalty to unproductive people, things, and thoughts by guilt and obligation — the suppression of greatness because of false humility.

Your own mind is your first and most important dragon to slay.

The only way to protect against distraction is to sharpen your focus. The only way you’ll build a career that you want is to protect your focus and stop giving away your time and energy to things that don’t amplify your career. Being distracted by other people, changing circumstances, and your own rampant thoughts is the quickest way to derail forward progress in your career. To eliminate distraction from your life, you need to focus on the right things, and to do this, you need to cut out the wrong things.

How do you eliminate career distraction? Tell me in a comment below.

I also write for Fast Company and Entrepreneur Magazine:

• The Skills You Need To Grow Your Business
• 10 People Who Will Destroy Your Business
• 5 Benefits Of Being A Misfit Entrepreneur

Check out my book of personal and professional advice, Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Create A Powerful Purpose For Their Lives.