The Attitude for Success
Episode #1 of the course How to stay focused: Ten top hacks for motivation by K.C. Finn
Welcome to the course!
I’m K.C. Finn, a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of Young Adult, Fantasy, and Horror fiction. I have been self-employed all my life, running multiple successful freelance enterprises from the comfort of my own home, which means running a home office and having to stay motivated to meet deadlines and get work done. This can be difficult when you’re always at home, surrounded by many comforts and distractions.
I’m here to show you how to boost motivation and focus no matter where you are working, and all of these methods have been keenly developed from more than ten years in a home working situation. We’ll look at methods involving time management, task organization, mental attitude, and physical health, all of which play a huge role in improving focus and getting the job done, however big or small it may be!
So, onto the first lesson. In Lesson One, we’ll examine what I like to term the Attitude For Success, which is an exploration of how your mind is at the start of the working day. Cluttered thoughts, worries, anxieties, and defeatist narratives in our heads can distract us from accessing optimum focus from the moment we open our eyes, so it’s vital to learn some positive mindfulness techniques which help to clear unproductive thoughts away.
The Theory
Meditation and positive mental attitude can be extremely tricky things to get your head into, especially if you’re more of an active and busy-minded person like me. Over the years, I’ve customized my morning ritual in order to form a practical meditative strategy that really helps to clear my head. It requires a few small steps to achieve, but it’s easy to fit in with your morning drink, on your commute if you have one, or at your desk for a few minutes before the working day actually begins.
As I’m sure you’ll have heard from many different sources, those who are able to meditate fully can achieve clarity of mind, emptying their heads of unwanted thoughts and keeping only those which are positive and beneficial to the day ahead. It’s not to say that those other worries that we have won’t come back from time to time, but if we can put them aside in the correct order of priority, then we can get our work done in a time-efficient manner and return to address other problems later on in the day. As many of our concerns at the start of the day tend to be work-related, it’s also possible to find that the worries we put aside in the morning may have already been resolved by the time we come to deal with them later.
In Practice
Take a small piece of notepaper and something to write with. If you have any worries about the day ahead that are work-related, write them down on one side of the page. Additional worries that might be personal or unrelated to work can also be added, but keep those at the very bottom of the page. Now, turn the side of the paper over, and in large, clear letters, make your affirmation for the day. This is a statement that makes a positive promise to yourself, for example: “Today I will complete my report!”
Keep the affirmation side of the paper in view, and promise yourself that you will address any worries or concerns once the work portion of your day had ended.
The central message behind the practice is to “start as you mean to go on”, which involves working on exactly what kind of attitude you need for the day ahead in order to get your goals met. If you have meetings in the day and you need the confidence to address them, that will be the focus of your practice. If you need focus to get through a long and tedious job, that can be the goal too. Sometimes a mixture of approaches will be needed for the whole day to be a success, but it’s important to choose the one that is most in need and affirm to yourself that you can achieve it for the day ahead.
Reflection
It may seem futile at first, but any kind of daily practice that you do before work becomes a natural ritual, and these are soon the first things that we think about when the workday begins, rather than having a jumble of thoughts all at once. After a few days of making your mindful affirmations, you’ll know exactly what your attitudes and goals need to be for the day ahead, and you may even start making this list and getting organized mentally much earlier in your morning routine. This is the first step to proving to yourself that you can attain focus because you’re already achieving a positive clarity of thought and a central focus for the day before the actual work even begins.
In Lesson Two, we’ll be exploring an organizational strategy that builds on the positive mantras we’ve begun today, and helps to break large, daunting tasks down into smaller, more achievable goals.
Until then, start the day as you mean to go on!
K.C.
Recommended reading
If you find that meditation and mantras really work for you, then you might like to explore more of them at the Sonima health site.
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