Starve your distractions and feed your focus. That advice is genuinely golden. Lately I have felt myself being pulled in a million different directions. Whenever that happens in my life I inevitably end up feeling less happy rather than feeling happier. I think the reason for that is that when any of us are distracted with a million little things we don’t feel like we are accomplishing any one big thing and we start to feel like we are running in circles, leading us nowhere…

When we start to feel that way it is important to step back and ask ourselves:

Am I actually accomplishing one big thing by doing all these little things?

If the answer is YES then we need to make sure we are recognizing that these little things truly are leading us to a big thing and we should feel happy about that. A perfect example is Motherhood – Mother’s often spend their day doing a million little things that can feel unimportant, like folding laundry, or wiping runny noses, or delivering forgotten lunches to the school etc. As much as those days being a Mom might feel like you are doing everything yet nothing, the reality is that all your little things truly are feeding into one main accomplishment of raising a child – and nothing is more important than that!

If the answer is NO then we have got to be willing to recognize that and determine to make changes in our current activities. We need to be willing to remove the distractions that keep us busy all the time but don’t move us forward toward accomplishing something. Then we need to sit down and really map out what is it that we are hoping to achieve here and what are the activities that will take us toward that goal. We have to commit to putting our entire focus on those things that take us toward our goal and block out all other distractions.

I know that advice will be easier said than done, but I just have to remind myself that “Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.” And so I am deciding to try 🙂

~Amy Rees Anderson