Don’t attempt to kick start your year off fully before reading this;

2016 is far gone, and steadily being forgotten, memories of the year are gradually being deleted off our mental hard drives, while for some, those memories are memories of boundaries falling for them in pleasant places and having a delightful year, for others, 2016 might just be full of memories they’ll rather not recall forever, it’s just the way life is.

Well, the good news is, if you’re as much as reading this post; then you’ve made it into the new year 2017. Which simply means we are numbered once again amongst the living beings at this precise moment, which could translate to having the privileged of staring down the race track of 2017, and if each month left ahead this year are each compared to 10 metres of a 110 metres hurdles race, it then gives a good indication of how hard and how fast we’ll have to work to gain a price and complete the race in what will be record time.

The beauty of the start of each year is that almost the entire world tries to mentally reposition itself to do new things, bigger and better than they did the previous year, people make new year’s resolutions, governments do cabinet reshuffles, even football clubs get a new transfer window opened to buy new players at the start of each year; so basically, the start of the year literally gives everyone a chance to start afresh or to refresh ourselves, clear our caches and go at it again, go at our failures again, go at our goals not attained, our wishes not fulfilled and our dreams that didn’t manifest in the previous year.

Needless to say, there are probably 101 reasons or external factors why many of us fail to reach our targets or our goals we set for ourselves in the space of a year, or possibly why we make new year’s resolutions and find ourselves not following through, or only following through half way before we quit. What I’ve discovered vividly in this noisy world we live in, is that, the number one hurdle we need to jump over each time we set a new year’s resolution, a goal or a target, is the hurdle of our very own mind, and most importantly, the hurdle of paying ATTENTION to what’s important, which will enable us achieve our set desires and build some form of traction for our resolution at the start of each year.

I say this, because in retrospect the world we live in today consist of hundreds of things that seek for our attention each moment of the day, things which systematically creep in our face to unconsciously grab our attention, or things we ourselves do habitually which side tracks our attention span for an average of at least 5-10 minutes at any giving time. Even when we’ll consider ourselves at our busiest, we still get caught unaware by the secret entry of distraction, which in many ways simply disguises itself as an important element of our time of day.
Amazingly, unknown to many, most of the reasons why we fail to meet our goals, hit our targets or follow through with our resolutions and plans we set out with at the beginning of each year are not simply because we lack the will power, tenacity or mental capability, the major reason is because were often DISTRACTED.

Hence in this quick post I’m going to present a list of 5 things that can be major distractions to us in this attention seeking 21st century, and which could potentially prevent us from sticking to our resolutions, achieving our goals or hitting our targets for the year 2017. Distractions can present itself in form of social media, communication devices, misplaced priorities to mention but a few

Often, distractions not only prevent us from focusing on the task at hand, but it comfortably captures our attention in a way that before we know, has bitten deep into the core of our daily activities pushing everything else which is important to our goals and achievements aside.

Hence the aim of this article is to help identify some of the common forms of modern day distractions that have the capacity to cloud our focus, and outline how we can manage them properly or even do away with them completely in our endeavour to meet our set goals and abide by our resolutions for the year 2017.

1. Technology:

Wherever the word technology pops up, we no longer think its predominantly applies to Nasa space missions, military aircrafts, war ships or submarines, nowadays technology has wiggled its way into almost everyone’s way of life, from the kindergarten who could operate a tablet or smartphone perfectly unaided, to the teenager or middle age individual whose an expert on all social media platforms, all the way up to multinational cooperation’s that leverage off the world-wide web to bring their products and services closer to the final consumers, frankly, there’s never been a time in history where man has been so dependent on technology and all our present day digital clutter for his proper earthly functional existence.

[img][/img]However, Technology is not the distraction, it’s the lack of human digital responsibility and discipline that is the major cause of most distraction. Yes, I used the words “digital responsibility” as some of the major distractions from technology that affect us are all mainly digital. Our smartphones, the internet, social media, emails, TV and so on, with social media being the major culprit of all. Research shows in the UK that the average person in 2015 had about 5 social media accounts and spends around 1 hour 40 minutes per day browsing these accounts, to put this into perspective, that means in a week, if the average working week hours is capped at 40 hours per week, we find ourselves spending hours that amount to one whole work day of a working week browsing through our social media.

It’s also said, that it takes around 15-25 minutes to get fully back to focus on what you were doing after being distracted by a social media prompt or notification, add that to the minutes and hours already burnt up during the day browsing and we can easily arrive at a day ending unproductively, with failure to complete our set tasks and targets. If we were to do that on a weekly basis for a period of a month, we’ll would easily identify how easy it is to deprived ourselves from attaining our full potential during the month, ultimately creating pressure and stress on our part.

Therefore, it’s advisable to create a mindset that thinks digital responsibility always,
Set specific times exactly that you want to browse, check for updates on your social media, reply post, return emails or have baseless conversations on the phone with non-productive friends. Importantly set those times to times when your less busy, if it’s not important leave it till late, while you give more meaningful and important things priority in your life.

2. Procrastination:

Although not a member of the digital family of distraction, this non-technological form of distraction I would say is closely related to the digital form of distractions, and might as well be call a relative to them. Why? Simply because procrastination could be defined as the “avoidance of doing a task that needs to be done or accomplished by the practice of doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones” (sounds like a form of mental social media to me).
Another definition of procrastination, which I think highlights the power of its destruction once it’s got a reserved seat in the fore-front of our mind, is the conclusion that describes procrastination as a “voluntarily delay to an intended course of action, despite expecting to be worse off by the delay”.

In saying that, we all must personally identify what we consider as pleasurable substitutes for our less pleasurable ones, i.e. going to a club till the early hours of the morning, when you clearly know you have an important morning appointment and struggle to get out of bed early, or deciding to constantly put off important payments and bills even when you have the funds to pay it off, in favour of fashionable trends or fake flossing.

Many times, people who procrastinate tend to believe that their procrastinating behaviour is not actually procrastinating, but that whatever they are doing is more important than the avoided one, they mostly tend to engage in pleasurable distractions or activities to prevent awareness and thoughts of the most important ones.

Whichever category we find ourselves falling into, the idea is to manage our procrastination well enough to prevent it developing a deep and persistent root in our lives, and becoming a major form of distraction to our daily and ultimately future goals.

To also combat procrastination, it’s important to set goals and resolutions that are
measurable and achievable, as one of the major reasons why people tend to procrastinate
is because they suddenly realise the size of their goals as so huge, it scares them off from taking any constructive actions towards it. We also need to discipline ourselves to do the priorities we set at all cost, and finally, we should never stop evaluating and revaluating our goals and priorities, plus our strengths and weakness until the set goals are attained.

3. Self-Doubt:

The tragedy of self-doubters is not the fact that they’re in doubt about their own ability to achieve their goals, it’s the fact that they allow majority of their self-doubts to be bewitched and enchanted upon them by friends and haters alike, causing them to disbelieve in their own abilities, breeding skepticism in their self-belief and eventually causing them loose focus. Self-doubt basically says, we are incapable by ourselves of opening the door that leads to change in circumstances.

These kinds of self-doubters tend to be fickle minded and believe everything they see and hear, they have a weak mindset to the extent that once their opinions or form of judgement is challenged, they become intimidated and curl back into their shells. Although they initially had a master-plan in place to achieve their goals, not guarding their hearts and minds with all diligence, and allowing all sorts of commentaries and advice from the wrong people into their situation, gets them distracted from the important things they need to focus upon.
And if the only view or vision we have of ourselves comes from others, their opinions, their commentaries or perceptions, then the view of ourselves would be like the reflection we’ll get back of ourselves from looking into a crazy mirror at a carnival street party ….. all over the place!!

One good way of conquering self-doubt is to understand the knowledge of these 3 things
1) That we are (2) Know and believe that we are (3) Delight in our being.
The reasons are simple, because in these 3 things there is no true seeming illusions that will disturb us, as we don’t come into contact with these 3 things by our five senses of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing, and I’ll like to think that without any delusive representations of other people’s words or thoughts ringing in or head, I’m almost certain that “I am” or “we are” whatever we say we are, that we know, and can be delighted about.

Therefore, keeping these 3 things in the fore front of our mind regularly keeps us in a constant state of self-awareness and creates room for our thoughts and mind to embrace its limitless potentials and bench any form of self-doubt or disbelief our 5 senses might be nurturing.

Self-doubt can be deemed as ignorance, ignorance of not knowing the potential ability of greatness that lies within us, or knowing it and not believing in it…. Either way, ignorance that knows itself, judges itself and condemns itself, is not complete ignorance; to be that, it must be ignorant of itself also.

4. Social Circles:

In anyway we decide to look at it, via technology, work, associates, member’s clubs, circles of faith, when the words “social circle” is mentioned, were mainly referring to people we class as friends or have allowed into our inner circle knowingly or unknowingly. Needless to say, the type of friends we keep around us gets us distracted or keeps us focused.

As mentioned above there are friends whose words are toxic and negative, friends who don’t even believe in themselves, so they find it extremely difficult to believe in somebody else. If these kinds of friends hang around you too often, it’s only be a matter of time before you begin to succumbed to their pear pressure, and start believing in what they say.

They’re the sort of friends that will say certain things are impossible to attain, simply because they can’t attain it themselves. For us not to get distracted and lose focus by the type of friends we keep, it is important to identify and differentiate our associations with friends based on mutual pleasure and reciprocal gains from those relationships in which each person is truly concerned with the good of the other. Identify what I’ll call counterfeit friends, that are unlikely to increase you by their associations, all they bred is distractions to your focus and progress, be unapologetic to drop a friend whose course of action or progress doesn’t align with yours this year 2017. As the saying goes 20 friends cannot play together for 20 years, neither is that necessary.

Having said that, it’s also important that we have a passion for good and true friends, who we can share or thoughts and desires with, in life we all need some form of friendships, genuine friendships, I believe with good friends around us, we tend to be happier, think happier and act happier. Therefore, I always say friendship should be a partnership, as you are to yourself, so should you be to your friend.

5. Blurred Vision:

Taking all the four points above into perspective, this last point envelopes them all into one pack. When we have no perspective of the end result we desire, a blurred vision of our goal, or perhaps we simply just find it difficult to visualise the outcome we want for ourselves in life, then were susceptible to fall foul to the power of any of the 4 forms of distractions listed above, if not all.

Henry Thoreau once said “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by his conscious endeavour”. If we were asked to temporarily step outside ourselves for a few minutes, and look at ourselves just as someone else will see us, what would we see of our true self? Would we see ourselves as bad, good, kind,
horrible, beautiful or handsome etc.….? the ability to do that, is also the same power and ability we possess to visualise our goals and end results we desire, or the wishes we want fulfilled in our life.

Don’t let our emotions shaped us or our life, we are not our mood, our thoughts or our feelings, the fact that we can even discern how we feel about them when we feel them, simply means also that we can change the way we focus and feel about them in order not to get distracted by them. Psychologist say, self-paradigm is the most fundamental paradigm in personal effectiveness, it not only affects the way we see ourselves it’s a benchmark for how we choose to see others also.

With the power of our imagination and visualisation we can exercise a magical touch of sensible reality, hence when we constantly visualise and imagine the outcome of the result we want in or mind, it will be difficult to get distracted from working towards them.

In conclusion, I’m not saying all these points above are the only forms of distractions that exist and prevents us from reaching our set goals and desires, I’m simply saying they’re a major cause of distractions to our goals and resolutions, and also have the capacity to halt our personal effectiveness and keep us stagnant, not only that, I also believe all these points mentioned above are holistic, and altogether play a wholesome part of affecting our personal and interpersonal effectiveness as humans. Playing close attention to them will enable us to take responsibility for our actions, as well as, identify when we begin to drift off the course of our predetermine goals and desires.

My prayers are that this year 2017 each one of us will develop the capacity to focus on those things that we consider important to elevate us to another level of success and that every form of distraction that keeps us from focusing on the right things in our strive for success, we will have the strength to lay aside.

May all our work in 2017 be prosperous

Tony Williams
Twitter: @tonywilliamms
www.tonywilliamss.com

6. Nairaland

Nice points... @Antiwailer make mod catch u