Fix Your Focus

When the outcome is what you're focusing on, the story and the fear will stop you from achieving your goal.

Focusing on the outcome makes you worry about what's going to happen. When you focus on outcomes in your business then you worry about what happens if it doesn't sell or you start wondering if people will like it. If you focus on the outcomes of the problems in your day-to-day experience, they capture your attention and then you're stressed all the time.  If you focus on the outcome of healing, then you worry about all the change you need to make. It focuses you on the pain you may experience along the way.

Your focus either moves you forward or stops you. That choice is completely determined by how you feel about what you're focusing on. If your focus is causing you fear then it stops you. By the way, fear can look like procrastination and avoidance. Fear can look like making up all the reasons why not. Fear can look like making up problems that don't even exist. In my world fear includes all the reasons why you're not moving, not just the actual feeling of fear we associate with something we consider scary.

Fixing your focus means understanding that the journey is more important than the destination. I know that sounds really cliché and a little trite, but it's something we need to consider. When you focus only on the destination, it really makes you question the obstacles that show up along the way. You start to ask whether it's worth the trouble or not. You start to wonder what the point is. You start to think that maybe those obstacles are signs that you should stop. It gives your brain a reason to make up a story about why the goal isn't worth it. Very quickly you'll drop the goal and walk away because it no longer seems viable.

The first thing we need to understand is what the obstacles actually are. They aren't a redirection. They aren't a sign that you should stop or change your goal. They are a sign that you have work to do within yourself before you can achieve the goal. They are a sign that there is something to heal before you can continue forward.

When you're present in the experience and you're content being on the journey, the things that come up along the way are just part of the process. They are no longer reasons to be afraid or to stop or turn around. They are simply things to deal with that are meant to serve a purpose. Your job is to figure out what that purpose is. It's your job to question the experience. Why is this here? Why am I having this experience? What is this meant to show me?

When you are outcome focused and problems appear, they seem insurmountable and overwhelming. They can begin to make you afraid that you won't find a solution to them. They cause you to worry and stress about what's going to happen. You're still focused on an outcome, but now the focus is much narrower because it's limited to this one problem. That's what makes you think you can't do it. That's what makes you think you need to turn around or stop entirely. The problem is not really the problem, the problem is where your focus is in relationship to that problem and the bigger goal you have.

When you are outcome focused all the problems need to be solved before you can achieve your goal. If too many problems pile up then you give up and walk away. You'll never even get started sometimes because the mind can make up so many obstacles that it becomes impossible to see anything else or find a way forward.

When you focus on the journey and what you need to learn to reach your goal, then the problems are just the lessons. They just become the tools you need to do the learning you need to do. You start to realize they aren't there to stop you. They are there to allow you to shift what you need to, both internally and externally, so that you can achieve your goal.

Any sense of redirection that comes up is because there's something else for you to consider. But when you just assume that it means you're not supposed to do that, you don't catch the lesson that's being offered. You don't get what you need from that experience because you're not focused on learning from it. You're focused on removing or solving the problem instead. When your only focus is jumping the hurdle you miss the whole point of the experience.

What does all this do to the bigger goals we might have in life?

Big goals, by the way, can be anything from feeling better to changing your name and moving to a new country and everything in between. Whatever your big goal is, whether you are fully aware of it or not, your life is going to offer you experiences that you need in order to heal yourself first.

To achieve your bigger goals, you can't be afraid of change. Who here is afraid of change? Pretty much everybody raises their hands. How do you think you're going to achieve that bigger goal without ever changing anything? How do you think you're going to be happy in your new reality if you're still sat squarely in the middle of all the pain you hold onto? You can't have what you want without doing the work first. Step one is getting okay with change by learning to heal yourself and your fear of change.

When I started this process I had one external goal that I was hell bent on achieving. It was my motivation for everything. It was enough to pull me through pounds and pounds of fear, doubt, worry, and powerlessness. But not everybody has a goal that's big enough to do that for them. Some of you only know that you want to feel better. You only know that you don't want to be where you are. How do you fix your focus when that's the case?

If you're outcome focused, then you're focusing on an unknown future. You don't know what feeling better feels like. You don't have a vision for what your reality might look like yet. Look at all the fear focusing on an unknown outcome like that can create. When the mind runs into an unknown, it fills in the blanks with all kinds of cool stuff that give you hundreds of reasons to not even start the process. You can't focus there.

If you truly want to feel better, then you have to focus on the journey of feeling better. You have to focus on each step individually and focus on learning what each step is offering you. When you say you want to feel better the Universe is going to jump up and begin to offer you life experience. That life experience is probably going to be a series of problems or struggles. Those struggles and problems are designed to help you shift within yourself. You have to be able to focus on yourself within the experience.

Why is this triggering me? Is it mine? What do I need to learn from this? Where is the pain I'm projecting? Why am I projecting that pain? What's a better response? Am I reacting appropriately? What can I do differently? What is this showing me?

When you're willing to take every experience that shows up in your life and question it in this way, you will begin to find truth. But here's the catch - you can't make up stories of blame, shame, guilt, or victimization when you do it. You have to be able to stay out of the self-protection that we're all taught to engage in. You have to see it differently from what you normally do if you want to learn from it without victimizing yourself more.

If you ask the question of why it's triggering you and you make up a story about the other person, you're not getting anywhere. It's triggering you because there's some pain back there that you're protecting. It's got nothing to do with the other person. What's the wound? What's the pain you're protecting? What do you need to do to let that go and heal the trigger? How can you react differently? Why are you blaming the other person? Why are you protecting yourself?

There are dozens of questions that you have the potential to ask with every experience. This is how you begin to make sense of your reality. This is how you master the illusion - by shifting your focus and your perspective so that it doesn't cause you more pain. Life is not trying to hurt you. It's trying to show you something about yourself so that you can heal. Your focus on the outcome or the pain or protecting yourself is what makes you unable to see your reality clearly. It's also what stops you from making any positive changes in your life.

The idea that life is out to get you is what makes you think you need to protect yourself from your own experience. Because you just see your experience as painful all the time and you don't fix your focus, so you're miserable. You think life is hard and that you're being punished for something, when really your experience is just talking to you. If you'd simply stop telling stories about all the shame, blame, guilt, and victimization, and started listening to what the experience is trying to show you it would make a whole lot more sense to you. You'd start to see what's going on and then you could start to make the changes you want to make. The pain is what makes you tell those stories. That's the self-protection, but the stories aren't true in the first place, so you're not actually protecting yourself from anything. They just keep you stuck in the pain.

Fixing your focus stops all this crazy. It stops the mind from spinning and making crap up. It allows you to drop the stories that you like to tell. It allows you to find the truth in the experience. The truth is honestly just what you need to learn from the experience. That's the only truth that really matters. Once you find the truth and you shift whatever you need to within yourself, the experience stops happening. You can stop re-living things. You don't have to end up in cycles and patterns that you don't like. You're not triggered anymore. There's no more fear. You're no longer focusing on the outcome because now you can see the value in the experience itself and the outcome no longer matters.

Fixing your focus gives you clarity. You learn to understand your experience and that gives you the ability to master the illusion in your life. You're no longer distracted by problems, outcomes, and fear. You focus on the experience itself and what you need to learn so that you can stop worrying about the rest.

There is method in the madness that you call your life right now. It is possible to fix your focus when you're ready, regardless of whether you have a goal or not.

Love to all.

Della