What do you choose to focus on during the day? Your future? The present? Fear and anxiety? Do you even know?

Your focus can impact your thoughts and actions. It can hinder your progress and keep you stuck or allow you to achieve amazing results. The key to getting what you want is to focus on:
1) What you want, not what you don’t AND
2) The present, not the mistakes you made yesterday or the life you want in the future

What You Want
What do you do? Do you concentrate on what you want and determine the actions that will help you get there? Or do you spend your time fixated on how to avoid what you don’t want?

Many of us spend our time and energy on what we don’t want and make decisions out of fear or avoidance. For example, you want to become financially independent. Yet, your fear of running out of money keeps you from investing it; keeps you in a low-paying, dead-end job; and keeps you from doing what is necessary to become independent. Your thoughts, actions, and even beliefs, when focused on the fear of losing your money, are completely different from the thoughts, actions, and beliefs you need to have to become financially independent.

Another perfect example is for those who want to lose weight. When you fixate on your weight, or how fat you are, or how much you don’t like your body, you make decisions that are different from those when focused on your health and treating your body with the respect it deserves. The same is true whenever you concentrate on what you don’t want.

The Present
The next key to getting what you want is to focus on the present. This doesn’t mean you can’t analyze what you did in the past to learn from your mistakes, or that you don’t want to set goals for your future. What it does mean is you want to concentrate your efforts on what you can do today, right now to meet your goals for the future. It’s easy to obsess about whether what you did yesterday will get you where you want to be or to daydream about the life you want, but doing that will keep you from what you need to do right now.

“…the future is created in the present.”
Deepak Chopra

Action Exercise
1)If you haven’t done so previously, write out your goals.
2)Once you’re finished, make sure all of the goals are focused on what you want and not on what you don’t. For example, instead of writing, “I will not allow my paperwork to pile up on my desk,” you write, “I will organize my desk at the end of each day.”
3)Now, answer why you want what you want. The more compelling whys you can come up with, the more motivated you will be to stick to doing what is necessary to get what you want.
4)Determine what you can do right now to meet your goals and get going! The right focus, with persistent, consistent action, will get you what you want.

Author's Bio: 

Laura K. Bryant is a speaker and author of, “Trust Yourself to Transform Your Body: A Woman’s Guide to Health and Weight Loss Without Diets.” She combined her over 20 years of research in health and fitness, her passion for empowering women, and what she learned from her own 40-pound weight gain and subsequent loss to form her business, Inspire Fitness, designed to help women create their own customized plans to reach and maintain a healthy weight. Visit Laura at www.TrustYourselftoTransform.com.