15 Nov What About Your Next One?
As we come to the end of the year, it’s easy to think about the previous 10 months, but it’s more important to focus on what you’re going to do about this one.
It’s easy to let last month dictate this month, last week affect this week, or yesterday determine today. You can have bad days, but they don’t have to derail your pursuits or ruin everything you’ve worked for.
If you hit the snooze button this morning instead of hitting the gym, you can beat yourself up all day about it. Or you can realize it’s just one morning and you still have tonight. You can still get back after it tomorrow.
What are you going to do now and moving forward?
Often we have a really bad habit of allowing one bad choice or bad day to turn into two. Then that two becomes three and three becomes four. Soon we realize that one moment snowballed into more because we allowed it to.
What if we started looking at our choices as independent of each other?
Instead of focusing on the one mistake you made, what if you decided to make the next choice a better one? What if you start the habit of asking yourself, “What do I need to do to win it?”
Stop worrying about what decision was just made because you can’t change it. Don’t worry about a future unknown decision that may or may not happen. Instead, dial into the next choice, the next meal, the next sales call, the next workout, or the next conversation with your spouse.
We influence the future by winning this moment.
A great athlete can’t make a play on the field if they’re too distracted by what happened during the last play, where the party is after the game, or how they’ve performed so far. They have to be dialed into the play at hand.
If you’re too distracted by your last poor choice, you’ll fail to capitalize on the next one.
Something I love to do to refocus myself on the current moment is to wiggle my toes in my shoes. I feel the ground on my feet and ask myself, “Where am I right now in this moment?”
I focus on my breathing and pull my attention away from everything else and back into the present moment.
Instead of beating myself up about what didn’t go according to plan or letting worry and anxiety take over, I get locked into the moment and say, “How can I be productive?” “What’s the best thing I can do?”
You’re not going to win every moment. You’re going to have good days and bad days. But every single day creates multiple opportunities and choices that we can make. We can allow the bad ones to derail us or we can realize that every choice we make is independent of itself. We hold the power.
So how are you going to win today? How are you going to win the rest of this month?
Focus on the first choice, win it, and then worry about the next one.
No Comments