First, let's define what a distraction is. This is important because in order to know how to deflect distractions, we have to be able to see them coming.
A distraction is a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else. So here's what we're going to do, we are going to deflect the things that are pulling your attention away from your goals, your dreams, your aspirations.
We're going to start off with clarifying what a distraction is not:
Resting is not a distraction. Eating, working out, sleeping and actually just taking time out of your day to stop and breathe - because sleeping is not always rest and rest isn't always sleeping.
These things are not distractions, these things are important to maintaining the proper physical, mental, and emotional state of being in order to be able to successfully accomplish your goals.
I want to make this clear right now, hustle culture is real and I do believe that we should be working hard to achieve our goals. I do believe that the only way to achieve our goals really is to work hard, but we also have to understand that resting and taking care of our bodies, taking care of our hearts, taking care of our mind is all a part of attaining our goals. Now, let's define what distractions actually look like. Distractions often come in the form of procrastination and if you know that you have a task that you need to complete, but you decide to take any kind of side road that does not contribute to the completion of your task, this can be described as a distraction.
For example, let's say I need to write a blog and so often, when I'm writing my blogs I can easily get sucked down many a rabbit hole because I'm looking up scriptures, I'm looking at concepts, I'm looking up examples and because writing the blog is an important thing, I try to make the content as engaging as possible.
It's a big thing because the blog helps to maintain the website and it helps to provide information, and free resources for you all but, sometimes I procrastinate by allowing myself to go down a rabbit hole and it distracts me from actually completing the task of finishing the blog.
Distraction can also look like, work opportunities that don't align with your ultimate goals. Another personal example is, the past few months I've been temping and the goal of the temp work is always to sustain Highly and Humbly, to have some capital that helps me to be able to run the business properly. So sometimes these jobs have become a distraction, in the sense that they would consume my mind in a way that wouldn't allow for me to be able to have the energy I needed to be able to run my business.
Now the question is this: How do we deflect these distractions? How do we realign ourselves with our goals?
Whenever I find myself like floating away, I remind myself by re-centering myself, asking myself these questions:
What is the purpose? What is the purpose of this day? What is the purpose of this moment? What is the purpose of this week? This year? This month?
The point of these questions is to push myself to an intentional realigning of myself. So if I'm about to start an activity that doesn't allow for me to finish or contribute to finishing these overarching goals, I know that I need to stop, and start again.
Try asking yourself: What do I want to do today? Is this going to help me move forward? Is this going to help me accomplish my task? Is this on my right path? Is this the next step into where I want to go? Into who I want to be?
Regularly asking yourself these questions, is how we can deflect distractions. We stop, take that mental pause, and reset, re-center and then continue.
I hope today's life hack was helpful for you!
If so, let me know in the comments below!
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