Making It Happen: Shifting Your Focus from Something Else to It

See if this sounds familiar. You’re trying to focus on a task at work, but It just won’t leave you alone.

It seizes some significant mental real estate and prevents you from being fully present in the moment. You attempt to suppress your thoughts about It with countless less important activities, but It simply won’t leave. You hope to escape being a mental hostage to It when you are spending time with your family or friends, but still It hangs around, diminishing your ability to enjoy these moments, as well.

Its presence, however, can most strongly be felt when you are trying to rest. You want to physically, emotionally, and mentally relax from the break-neck pace of the day, but thoughts of It keep robbing you of these much needed moments of sacred idleness.

“What is this all powerful It,” you ask?

Simply put, It is your most “Important Thing.”

Those tasks, activities, goals, dreams, and plans that are neglected almost daily in the overwhelming world of working on “something else.” You don’t consciously try to avoid It. You really want to work on It, whether it will take five minutes, five months, or five years, but you aren’t for many reasons.

Because a funnel narrows at the bottom, all of these possibilities vie to become It. In other words, you only have so many hours in the day. So, without a structure or process to manage all those possibilities, you struggle to determine what is important, urgent, or unnecessary. “That’s my world,” you might say. “Every day is full of a million things I could do.” And how you determine what actually comes out of that funnel and gets DONE may be one cause of your dilemma.

It’s time to make It happen!

If you are serious about making It happen more often in your work and life, you need to start doing 6 things every day.

>> Download Jones Loflin’s solutions for getting to It here.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jones Loflin

Jones Loflin is an internationally-recognized speaker, author, and trainer, and the coauthor of the award-winning book Juggling Elephants. For over nineteen years he has developed and delivered solutions for many Fortune 500 companies in the areas of time management, focus, motivation, change, and work-life balance. Todd Musig is a senior training industry executive, consultant, and author with extensive experience in marketing and business operations. He has worked with such authors as Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, and Dr. Spencer Johnson, and he is the coauthor of the award-winning book Juggling Elephants.

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comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you Ed for sharing your insights into the Church Growth Movement. I have my reservations with Church Growth models because it has done more damage than good in the Body of Christ. Over the years, western churches are more focused on results, formulas and processes with little or no emphasis on membership and church discipline. Pastors and vocational leaders are burnt out because they're overworked. I do believe that the Church Growth model is a catalyst to two destructive groups: The New Apostolic Reformation and the Emerging Church. Both groups overlap and have a very loose definition. They're both focus on contemporary worship, expansion of church brand (franchising), and mobilizing volunteering members as 'leaders' to grow their ministry. Little focus on biblical study, apologetics and genuine missional work with no agenda besides preaching of the gospel.
 
— Dave
 
comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you for sharing such a good article. It is a great lesson I learned from this article. I am one of the leaders in Emmanuel united church of Ethiopia (A denomination with more-than 780 local churches through out the country). I am preparing a presentation on succession planning for local church leaders. It will help me for preparation If you send me more resources and recommend me books to read on the topic. I hope we may collaborate in advancing leadership capacity of our church. God Bless You and Your Ministry.
 
— Argaw Alemu
 
comment_post_ID); ?> Amen!!
 
— Scott Michael Whitley
 

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