Ideas To Stay Focused And On Purpose 

 When you first bring your profession home and begin your stay at home business, you will soon yearn for that tiny little cubicle that you had when you were at an office working for someone else.  At least when you were in your own cubicle, you were able to turn your back on impositions and get your work done.  However, in an at home atmosphere, this does not always happen.  When working for an employer, usually it was a nine to five job where your productivity did not have that much influence on your paycheck at the end of the week.  This is not so with your own business.  Your salary is DIRECTLY proportional to your productivity.  You will need to learn early on in your business how to combat these interruptions, stay focused and on task or you will not be in business for yourself for very long.

To be able to overcome your distractions, you will need to recognize where they are coming from.  Are they self imposed or are they from family and friends?  One self-imposed distraction that can be extremely disruptive is procrastination.  It is also easy to fall off task when we have too many interests and try to do all of them at once.  This may seem like multi-tasking but really you are just spinning your wheels and exhausting yourself.  Self-inflicted distractions are the most difficult to conquer but it can be done.  By following a few simple steps, you will have no problem winning against the time wasters.

1.  Quiet Time:  It is not necessary to step into your office and become involved in the first task on hand immediately.  Take a moment to sit and look at your computer and look out of the window.  Better yet, step outside for a moment in the morning sun and clear your mind of the daily family activities.  This is what you would normally do on your commute from your home to a normal job at an office.  Take ten minutes in the morning to begin the transition from family/house life to work life.  Begin to think about the projects that are a priority for the day.

2.  Create a To Do List:  After you have spent a moment "commuting" to work, begin to create a to do list of the projects and tasks that need to be done.  It is okay to add to this list throughout the day for additional items that you might have forgotten about.  When creating your list, do not just write down a general idea of the project.  Give your task a name and break it into milestones.  This will eliminate procrastination and make the task easier to manage.  This is especially important for long-term projects.  Each time you cross off an item on your to do list, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment. 

3.  Have a Set Schedule for Tasks:  Most employees have a set time to work such as your old "nine to five" job.  It is also important to follow this same rule when working from home.  Have a set time that you will begin work and close up shop at a certain time.  Since you own the business, you can choose if you want to work ten hours straight through or break your day into two work periods of five hours each.  Also, set a fixed time to answer your email and other daily tasks.  You do not have to answer every email that comes to you within minutes of receiving it.  Sometimes it is even easier to just turn off your email program all together until your set time.

4.  Shut the Door!  With smaller children, you will need to address each issue as the need arises.  That is not so with older children.  They will understand when you tell them you need to work from x to y.  Hire an in-home babysitter for younger children or enlist an aunt or grandparent if possible.  If the phone becomes a distraction, turn the ringer off for an hour so that you can concentrate on your task.  Most of all, do not permit family and friends to distract them.  Be firm with them and let them know that you are at work and cannot be disturbed for x amount of time.  You will be glad you did.

The main key to successfully staying on task while working at home is to identify the problem that exists and nip it in the bud quickly.

by Suzette Walker

http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/Ideas-To-Stay-Focused-And-On-Purpose/50838

A Guide to a Life of Purpose

“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” ~Rumi

One of the things I want of people who join the Fearless Training Program is to have some kind of deeper purpose in life.

That purpose could be a lot of things:

• To make the lives of people better through coaching, writing, podcasting
• To serve an audience, a small team, a group of people in your community
• To raise kids who are self-sufficient and happy with themselves
• To help others feel empowered to speak out, to pursue their dreams, to feel heard
• To help those in need, those who are suffering
• To be a good person to everyone you meet, so that they might feel the magic of kindness
• To dedicate your life to helping others get enlightened so that they are freed from suffering (the Bodhisattva path)

And millions of other possibilities. You don’t have to be making a living off of your passion — as long as you feel you are doing something meaningful, and you care deeply about those who you’re serving.

The training has to be about something bigger than yourself. It’s not just about self-improvement, but growth to serve others.

Two big reasons it’s important to have some kind of purpose bigger than yourself:

1. You need a deep reason: If you don’t have a deeper reason for doing the training, you’ll wuss out when things get hard. And when things get hard, that’s when things get really good. That’s when true change happens.
2. You need to get out of your closed-in world: Much of the time, we’re very concerned about ourselves. About how we look, about what people think about us, about whether we’re being treated right, about why they have to be like that to us, whether we’ll get what we want, about whether we’re good enough. Our self-concern is natural, but it closes us in to a very small world of self-concern that makes us less happy, less content.

Let’s look at these a little closer. And then talk about how to find your deeper purpose, and beyond that, how to live a life of purpose.

A Deeper Reason to Push Into Discomfort

Imagine this: you decide to go into a weeklong meditation retreat, because it would be nice to be more mindful. Sounds really nice, right?

But then you get to the retreat, and after a brief intro, they have you sit and meditate. Then walk a bit, in silence, meditating as you walk. Then sitting in meditation. Repeat until you eat in silence. Go to bed early, because tomorrow you’re going to meditate all day, speaking to no one. As you get to your room, you realize this is way harder than you thought when you fantasized about it.

You get through the second day, but again in your room, you start to think about escaping. You don’t want to do this anymore. You don’t really care about this meditation enough to keep doing it when your hips are sore, your back is tired, your mind is tired.

This is a key juncture: do you quit or do you keep training?

The truth is that if you can push into the discomfort, with love, and keep going … it’ll be an amazing breakthrough for you, an opening up of your habitual patterns. It’ll be a place of growth, of learning, of tremendous change.

This is the kind of training that you need to put yourself in if you want to grow. Not a meditation retreat, necessarily, but any kind of practice that makes you want to retreat. It doesn’t have to be hardcore, just something that causes you to be uncomfortable, that causes your old habitual patterns to come up.

At this point, if you have something you care about — a group of people you really love, who you want to serve — you can stay in this place of discomfort and growth.

If you don’t, you’ll probably run. Because why put yourself through that?

You need the deeper reason.

A Way Out of Our Closed-In World

Besides giving you a deeper reason to push into discomfort … having a purpose expands your world.

Most of us live worried about ourselves most of the time, worried about whether or not:

• We get what we want
• We’re in discomfort, pain, illness
• We have bodies we like
• Other people are treating us nicely or fairly
• People think highly of us or not
• Things are difficult, stressful, overwhelming
• Things go the way we like, things are orderly, things are pleasurable

And so forth. We want what we want, we want others to be nice to us and think highly of us, we want to be happy and good looking, etc.

But this is a narrow world. It’s small — focused only on ourselves and what we want or don’t want.

Having a bigger purpose, focused on helping others, broadens that world. It expands our view so that we’re thinking of others and ourselves, and how we are all interconnected.

It’s a much more fulfilling way to live.

How to Find the Purpose

That’s all great, but how do you find your purpose if you don’t have a clue where to start looking?

There are two guiding principles:

1. Clear away all distractions, and
2. Listen deeply

If you don’t have a clear purpose yet, if you haven’t found work or an activity that gives you fulfillment and meaning … it would help to make looking for that your main purpose. Your entire focus is on seeking a purpose.

So clear everything out, and have no distractions. Simplify things so that you can start looking. Clear your schedule as much as you can, drop your commitments to the extent that you can (as they’re not meaningful to you anyway).

Then do this:

1. Make a list of everything you do right now. Which ones give you meaning and fulfillment? Which don’t?
2. Make a list of things you’ve done in the past that have given you meaning. Are there any connections between them? Any connections to the ones on your current list?
3. Open to suffering in your life. Things become more meaningful when you’ve been through suffering — it’s not something to be avoided, but something to work with, something to grow with, a path to deeper meaning. Think about the most meaningful experiences in your life — they probably involved other people, and they probably involved some kind of suffering.
4. Take time in silence. Out in nature, on a couch meditating. Use the silence to listen — to your heart, to the infinite, to your deeper consciousness. Really listen. Open yourself to not knowing.
5. Open to the not knowing even as you interact with others and read books and online articles. What are people saying that feels meaningful? What inspiration can you find?
6. Open yourself to others: their challenges, their feedback.
7. Listening, listening … then pick something and take action. You won’t really know until you get started, so pick anything that feels remotely right: volunteer, work at a non-profit, write a blog or a book, start recording something, find someone to help as best you can. Get started, take action, and see what happens.

You do not have to have the perfect answer to get started. That’s a need for perfection, a need for knowing. Instead, embrace not-knowing, and just start.

How to Live a Life of Purpose

Once you’ve found an approximation of your purpose, some kind of meaningful activity … now it’s time to live a life of deeper purpose.

There’s no one way to do that … but here are some ideas:

1. Start to cultivate a list of guiding principles. Gather them from books, from things that speak to you, from things you’ve learned over the years. These are not things you need to be hardened around, but values and ideas that seem to guide you well. Keep the list somewhere visible. Live by these principles as much as you can, adjusting your behavior regularly if needed, tossing out or revising principles as you learn, not holding to them too tightly.
2. Keep your purpose front of mind. Every day, reflect on your purpose. How are you living it? How can you go deeper or expand with it? What one or two things can you do today to serve that purpose?
3. Set an intention with each task. If you’re going to write an article, record a video, clean a church floor, see a patient … start that activity by setting an intention to serve the people you care deeply about with love, mindfulness, devotion, or whatever you want to bring to that activity. It helps to set the intention, because the activity becomes filled with purpose, instead of something not very meaningful.
4. Have regular reviews. I’ve found that it’s one thing to have an intention, but it’s another to actually live it. We forget, we get distracted, we fall into habitual patterns. To get us back on track, it really helps to have regular reviews. For example: have a 5-minute review at the end of the day — how did you do today? How can you get better? Maybe write 1-2 sentences in a journal. Or just reflect on it. Do the same each week: plan out your week on Sundays (for example), but also review your past week. How can you adjust for the upcoming week? And each month, and each year. Put these on your calendar and don’t skip it when the review date comes up!
5. Have people hold your purpose in their hearts. Find at least 1-2 other people (and ideally more) who will hold your purpose in their hearts. That means: you tell them about it, they care about you and what you’re doing, and they’ll ask you about it, maybe support your mission in some way. They’ll challenge you if they feel you’re not doing everything you can or living your best life. They’ll share their mission with you. They’ll be on the journey with you, because no one fulfills their deepest purpose alone.
6. Connect to your fulfillment. Reflect on the meaning you get from fulfilling your purpose. Don’t just go through the motions — feel it, deeply. Feel the love you’re offering (and receiving) as you push into this purpose. See the good you’re doing for others. Live your life as love.

It’s not something that happens overnight, and it’s not always simple to live a life of purpose. But putting these ideas into practice, you’ll feel a greater sense of meaning in your life.

BY LEO BABAUTA

Four Essentials to Maintaining a Healthy Mind 

 Our Mind is one of our most precious possessions; it's also a possession that is easy to take for granted.
 
Rarely as human beings do we take stock and hold inventory of our thoughts and perpetual mediations.
 
But this simple habit can mean the difference between a healthy productive mind, operating at optimum, a servant able to enable the manifestation of our destiny. Or a troubled storm-torn vessel, unable to assist us is in the vicissitudes of life.
 
In this article, I want to highlight four main elements I feel will be deeply useful to consider when we are endeavoring to corral our minds in the direction that will produce the most desired results.
 
To further lay emphasis on the opportunity we have before us, I would have you consider the fact that a healthy mind more often than not is fundamental to a healthy body. A healthy mind enables us to think creatively and circumstances will invariably bend to the upbeat attitude of a healthy mind.
 
A healthy mind will attract to it not only healthy circumstances but also healthy company. It's been said bad company corrupts good habits. I charge we should choose our thoughts as carefully as we choose our friends and vice versa.
 
Our thoughts will either take us to our desired destination or plunge us to our dreaded fates. Our thoughts will ennoble us to feats of courage and determination or rob us of vital energy when life requires an extra push.
 
Lets look together at the four things that can greatly improve our thought life and enable our minds to maintain a healthy virile tone that will infuse all of life with purpose, meaning, worth and peace.

Attitude:

Let's begin with attitude; it's been said that in all of life's happenings, the one thing we can choose is our attitude. A negative attitude is one of the surest ways to eschew destruction through our whole system and destroy productive relations with our fellows. Even if we attract many other negative people to our pity party, the ensuing conversations will be so detrimental, we can be sure no positive thing can result. Likewise, when we choose in the face of a negative appearing circumstance a positive response, the lessons in the circumstance are learnt, the pain quickly passes and we are ennobled, energized, invigorated. And by default, those we come in contact with will reap the benefits.

Self Esteem:

A positive attitude is hard to maintain without a healthy self-esteem. Self-esteem is something so deep it affects our thoughts immensely. First please realize that who you are has tremendous value and worth. You may have been told otherwise all your life, and circumstances may have conspired together to compound this notion. But please stop and look into the mirror, tell yourself you love yourself, tell yourself you forgive yourself, tell yourself that you are the most valuable possession you have at your disposal, and invest in yourself. Allow you're self to change all the destructive self-loathing thoughts; they won't help you or those around you. The moment you accept yourself and see your worth and invest in yourself the world will become a better place.

Meditation:

The next key thought I want to cover is our mediation, our constant mental fixations, what do we spend our time thinking about? Amidst the various pressures and circumstances, life poses, beneath the surface can be a volcano of anxieties, concerns and misgivings. If we don't discipline our minds and choose to maintain focus our lives can become bogged down in a mire of frustration from which we long to escape. It's very important in life to have vision. Take time to really consider your aims, purpose and reasons for doing what you do. Allow the sometimes disorienting process of change to operate in your life; be prepared to jettison dead weights that are stifling your progress. Establish your destination, and as you press towards it maintain a healthy meditation on your focus. When anxieties arise meditate on your focus. When you go to bed and when you rise, meditate on your focus. And you will find your thoughts steering your mind which in turn will steer your course and you'll make it.

Courage:

And last but by no means least I hope this final thought will add the so needed Icing to the cake; Courage. We addressed anxiety which is a form of fear. Fearful thoughts seek to paralyze our best efforts and sabotage our endeavors. Whether it is a case of self-doubt or the fear of people, apparently insurmountable obstacles or the great unknown. I encourage you to add courage to your arsenal of productive thoughts. Believe you can achieve and you will. Be brave enough to believe you have value despite naysayers. Press beyond the dead past and enter the yet unseen future, confident your going to make it, and life will bend to your faith.

Ultimately choose your attitude, recognize your intrinsic value. Take stock of your daily meditations and focus on your vision and purpose, and rise to life's challenges beginning in your mind, with the courage of believing thoughts and hopeful expectations. And you'll maintain a healthy mind that will serve you throughout your life.

Omar Z. Phillips



Omar Phillips writes articles aimed at helping us live the abundant life we were put on the earth to live. He firmly believes, God is on our side and that life is to be lived to its fullest. He invites you to join him as he documents his journey. Visit him at:http://www.facesetlikeflint.co.uk to find out more.

Article Source: http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/Four-Essentials-to-Maintaining-a-Healthy-Mind/249142