How to establish your focus

Life is short…..so live for today. That’s catchphrase you often hear. But I don’t like it. Life is short….carpe diem! Seize the day or seize the moment. Better…but not great. Life is short…..so make every shot count. This I prefer. This I like. The problem with the first two is that they direct your gaze to consider now and only now. If that is your only horizon and your only concern, then most things people do make no sense. Make every shot count. That directs you to take aim….or to establish your focus. That directs you to first make a decision on what it is that actually does count and then shoot for it. But….how do you decide what counts? How do you establish your focus?

Homing in on the question

I have used this one before, and I probably will again. It makes the point. Jaws the Movie. Chief Brody is on a sinking ship. Jaws (a giant and angry Great White Shark if you didn’t know that – oh and spoiler alert!) is in the water intent on lunch. Brody doesn’t have long left to live. Balanced on the last beam jutting out the water, he has seconds before he is in the water and in the teeth of the thing of all our nightmares. He has one shot. He HAS to make it count. But, what he doesn’t do is shoot the shark. He makes a tactical decision. A strategic move. He shoots a gas canister wedged inside the shark’s gaping maw. BOOM! That is how you make every shot count.

In life and in ministry, there is always far more to do than their is time or capacity to do it. So the question is, what do we shoot for? How do we make tactical and strategic decisions? How do we make every shot count? How do we establish our focus?

I have previously made the point that to do so is essential – see You Cannot do everything …. FOCUS!! so all that is left to work out is what we should be focussed on.

Well, we could try the Office Space question. Another corker of a movie. In that the team discuss the question, if you had $1 million dollars what would you do. The point is, if you didn’t have to work for a living, what would you do?

It’s a stupid question.

I really do not think this approach is helpful. Firstly, our hero in this film answers on behalf of most of us. “I would do nothing”. I think, if we are honest, most of us would probably opt to scrape by on the bear minimum effort. Well, that assessment may not be fair in the long term.

But, life can be brutal and it can be relentless. Have you ever thought it strange that in a world where we all have to have money in order to live and then have a job in order to have money, that the amount of time required in order to make enough money to live is pretty much most of the best waking time we have available? I find that a strange coincidence to be honest! And so, when we answer “I would do nothing”, I think more often than not it is borne out of a craving for just a moment’s respite from the obligation to be somewhere and do something almost all the time.

But, I still think it is a stupid question.

It encourages us to base our decision making on a world that does not exist and in a bubble of reality that we do not inhabit.

Let me burst a few bubbles.

Throughout most of history, work has been about survival. It is about having capacity to provide for basic needs.

In Western culture, during the 20th Century, as our wealth grew, it also became about acquiring comforts and luxuries that made normal every day life easier – that’s a whole other post right there.

Then, it evolved further into this idea that our job needs to be fulfilling – self realisation etc etc.

To be frank, that is simply not a reality for many people. Therefore, I will not be writing that if your job is not fulfilling you, then the way to establish your focus, is to get another job. Most of us, do have to work to earn a living. Therefore, to establish your focus by considering what you would do if this wasn’t the case is shooting yourself in the foot before you start. It builds discontentment with your life, frustration with your future and then leads on to bitterness.

NOT a good idea!

Areas of Focus…Domains of Stewardship…Zones???

Next, we consider the approach advocated by many. Carl Pullein calls it ‘Areas of Focus’. Reagen Rose labels them ‘Domains of Stewardship’

This is much better. To be honest, the terminology doesn’t really matter. I suspect there are nuances between the different terms that go beyond just re-labelling an idea so it provides some originality. But, the basic concept has been around for longer than most of my readers will have been alive.

The way these areas are set out is quite similar across all versions of this.

For Example – Carl Pullein has these:

Family and relationships
Career
Health
Spirituality
Personal development
Life experiences
Finances
Purpose in life.

And Reagen Rose has them like this:

Spiritual
Relational
Vocational
Physical
Financial
Recreational

You can see the overlap here.

This is actually a pretty good approach. The basic idea is that these areas or domains, are the things which determine our focus. We should be striving wherever possible to achieve some kind of balance between these areas across our lives. It’s good because:

It encapsulates all of life – it aims to define the areas to provide comprehensive coverage
It seeks to identify things that are common to us all and so can be applied very simply to our lives
It’s realistic as it is all rooted in the life and situation you are actually in
It requires you to think, to be intentional about how this applies to you.

It does allow a certain degree of personalisation and flexibility as well. Different areas will mean different things to you than they do to me. Over the course of life, the relative importance of each areas against all the others will vary. So, it is also flexible, and personal….to an extent.

But, even in this approach, I see some huge flaws. I think it is helpful, but not enough.

The areas are quite general. They are vague.

Whilst this is good because it allows for flexibility and personalisation, in my view they are just not specific enough or focussed enough. A lot of leg work is still required in order to have something useful at the end of the day. To be fair, both Carl & Reagen understand this and are explicit about it. This is more a starting framework for you to build within.

The approach tries to identify areas common to us all. But it is heavily influenced by our culture and time.

In some ways, that is fine. We do after all live in our culture and time. But we need to sit loose to this. To give you just one example, it hasn’t been too long since concerns about vocation, life experiences, personal development and recreation would have been well beyond the care of the vast majority of people in this land. There are huge swathes of this planet where that is true today.

Some versions of this place all of the emphasis on self determination.

i.e. you get to decide for yourself what is important. I don’t like this approach for a whole host of reasons, some of which I will come on to. For now I will just say that some things demand our focus and attention whether we want them to or not. We need to humbly accept this. And, some decisions that we make, commit our focus for years and even decades to come whether we realised that and are happy about it or not. Responsibility matters, not simply self focussed choice.

How to determine your focus

So, here is the approach I have adopted. To be totally honest…this is an approach I have ‘reverse engineered’ from the path I have taken over the past 7 years. My own path meandered quite a bit. Perhaps that meandering was necessary, I certainly have learned a lot from the process, but for the purpose of this blog post, I have tried to convey the essential points. And this is a pattern I will follow, in my own way, as ‘repeat, reflect and review’.

1. Determine and discern what is important to you and in your life.

I need to say what I do and don’t mean here. I do not mean ‘decide for yourself what is important’. Hence I say determine and discern. This is not all about choice, this is also about discovery and clarifying what certain things actually mean in your life. There will be influence and authority outside of yourself that will be a big part of this. There will be responsibility you have that you cannot simply ‘decline’.

When I say ‘to you and your life’ I don’t really mean that the only thing that needs consideration here is yourself and your own life. Your life connects with and impacts dozens if not hundreds of other people. It can be hard to determine what influence you might have, but it all forms part of your values as you seek to serve others and not just yourself. This will obviously be a lot more significant, the closer you are with people and the more involved you are in their life and they in yours – for example family and colleagues. MY focus and choices will impact them. We HAVE to consider this carefully.

And so…..This is all about understanding your values. The guiding principles of life.

A personal take and example

As a Christian believer, much of this framework is set out for me in the bible and in Jesus. So, a big part of my time here goes on seeking to humbly listen to all of this and to try and align the priorities and values I live by, with this revelation. But, even in this, there is so much leeway with many of the specifics that to an extent, even that doesn’t help me determine my focus. To illustrate this, I know a number of people who have gone into some kind of full time Christian service. Across the board there are people who are missionaries abroad, planting urban churches, planting rural churches, setting up ministry training schemes, serving as trustees on multiple boards, translating material into other languages, developing apps to serve Christians, serving as finance managers for Christian charities, writing blogs, teaching academically etc etc.

There is so much leeway in the specifics.

2. Ask the questions….

I laid down a series of questions to simply brainstorm out answers to. The idea here is to write whatever comes to mind for each question pretty much until things stop coming to mind. If you have the time for it, only when you haven’t written anything new down in the past 20-30 minutes will you know you have plumbed the depths of your thoughts on this.

I say this in a lot of situations and it is really hard to do in practice but I say it again. Try not to place any kind of filter on your thoughts. Write down everything and write down anything. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Without evaluation. Without fear of being told it is not possible. Without fear of being told it is not worth doing/seeking after. No filter. No evaluation. That comes later. For now….just write it down.

Here are some questions you can use:

What do you want to put into the world?
What achievements so far in life have mattered most?
What achievements still to go are things you consider significant?
What things do you consider to be of value in this world and matter to you? – from the sublime to the ridiculous.
What would you add to this list if it was going to be read by a person whose opinion of you really mattered?
What matters within the context of your current vocation? What long term vocational hopes do you have?
What don’t you like about the way you currently live?
If you asked someone to describe your character – what would you want them to say? e.g. your spouse or child
Which people do you admire and why? Which people do you find off putting and why?
What long term commitments and responsibilities do you have?

What you will have at the end, is several quite messy lists of nonsense and gold. But hopefully, all of it authentic.

3. Try to summarise your values.

From what you have written down, try and work out what your values are. I don’t see the point in saying something like ‘Write down 10 values’. The amount doesn’t matter. Just try and summarise. Look for repeated themes or ideas. As you read over them, note the things that particularly resonate and allocate more significance to these things.

Write a summarised list of values.

4. Evaluate your list

The aim is not simply to dispassionately come up with a list of values. I said before that self determination and choosing what matters to us is not where I am at. However, when you look over your summarised list, you may see there is a disconnect between what you have written your values to be and what you consider that your values should be. Perhaps, when you sit back and apply wisdom, discernment and intentionality to your list, you evaluate some things to be values that you do not want to have.

So, as you evaluate your list, you want to be looking for a shorter list to be your guiding principles. Your primary values. Your vision if you will.

Ideally, as you have gone through this process you will have something written down that has submitted itself to the wisdom and leading of God, submitted itself to external authority, owned and accepted responsibilities you have, plumbed the depths of your thoughts, feelings and instincts and been subjected to rational thought on what you ultimately want it to look like.

We’ve come a long way, but we are still a distance away from determining our focus. Because what we have, will not tell us what to actually do on Tuesday morning at 11:30am. It will not tell us what to say no to in order to protect our values.

5. For each guiding value, establish some goals, aims and objectives.

This is where you need to determine what you actually need to do in order to reflect the values you have in your every day life. As we do this, we need to remember that different things need to be framed differently. So, if one of your guiding values relates to relationship with your children, you might find this is more about time given and less about specific, measurable outcomes.

Once you have done this, you might find that even these are not quite ‘ground level’ enough for you know exactly how to act on them. I have written a few posts on implementing goals that I link to below for more on this:

6. Reflect, Review, refine….

Once you have completed steps 1 to 5, leave it a week. Do nothing more and try not to think about it. Then, come back to it. Skim over your whole process so far, everything you have written down. What needs to change? What doesn’t seem quite right? Allowing yourself a week to sit on things before progressing just gives you the time you need to be ever more sure that what you have is something solid.

I would also recommend doing something that personally I find very scary. Talk about it with someone. This could be your spouse or a close friend. Explain to them what you have done, why you wanted to do it. Share your conclusions with them. Ask their wisdom and advice. They may have something to contribute that is helpful. They may not. Talking to someone about it makes it ever more real to you that this is how you intend to determine your focus now.

Then, it needs to become part of your planning process.

What this looks like for me is:

I re-embrace this when I do my monthly planning. I don’t really change anything in it at this point, I just refresh my mind on it, and try to reset and recalibrate my focus in accordance with it.
When I do my quarterly planning, I will usually tweak it for anything obvious. This might mean one of the steps or something like that has been completed, or perhaps something has happened that means I need to readjust.
I will reflect and review the whole thing when I do my yearly planning. I won’t go through the whole process again every year, but I do tend to examine the goals, aims and objectives and also the guiding values.
Lastly, I would/will/have repeated the process when life circumstances significantly change. If you get married, or change job, or have a significant relocation, become a parent or children leave home. These are all things that precipitate a big change to life. The process needs to be started from scratch in order for things to continue to be relevant.

In doing this you are able to establish some guiding principles and values for your time and life. From these, you can figure out some goals and objectives and then from those, and from working out what it looks like to achieve and reflect these in daily life, you are able to determine your focus.

The truth of the matter…..

But, having reached this point, we can simplify things even further. How do you determine your focus? Ultimately, your focus is determined by what you say yes to and what you say no to. At the end of every day, you can look back and reflect.

What you focussed on are the things you actually did, the things you gave time to.

The things you said yes to.

This process, aims to give you the tools to decide day to day, moment to moment, what those things will be.

How to establish your focus