A Statement of Focus
Living a Life of Focus – Part 16
One of the key ingredients to our growth plan is what we call a focus-statement. A growth strategy or growth plan is what you use to intentional about your own personal growth. What’s your plan for growing in every area of your life? How can you become better, more improved, and get more efficient? In what area can you grow? Using a simple word, term, or phrase, a focus-statement is something that you are going to use all year long. It will be your center point or rally cry for you to focus on. Pamela and I, select one phrase that we use to work on so that we may grow in this one area together. Everything should grow. A lack of growth is a sign that something is wrong. Growth is an indicator that we’ve gotten better and have improved. Look at it this way. How in the world are we going to go to the next level this year? What’s the plan to go to the next level? To become more in 2023, we need a strategy. We need a plan and one of the key ingredients in our plan, and our approach is to have a key phrase.
As you know, I’m a big fan of Jim Rohn. One of his phrases went like this. Plants, trees, and things of nature grow as tall as they can. Human beings, on the other hand, don’t have the same internal instinct. People have to be intentional about growing. Otherwise, we stop growing. I want to grow and continue to grow as far reaching as I can. And I believe you do too.
What could it (my focus statement) be?
Here’s how we grow. We do this through a focus-statement. We have done this for years. Therefore, we’ve had over a dozen statements that we’ve focused on. Each one of those represent an area or place in our lives that we have positively impacted with growth. We’ve grown on purpose with intention.
Allow me to share with you the choices that we had in selecting our focus statement for 2023. It came down to two choices. The first one, which we decided to table for now, is called “The Power of One More.” The goal of that focus-statement is to teach us how to capitalize on every opportunity as if it was the last. Think of it in this way. Let’s say you were in a war zone, under fire and you only had an opportunity to make one phone call. Only one more. Who would that call go to and what would you say? If you knew this was your last opportunity to impact someone that you love and they were on their deathbed, what would you say to them? If you knew it would be the last meal you gotta eat, how would you go about that meal? What if you only had one more? I think of Serena Williams in this regard when she played her last tennis match. How would you play if it were your last match? How would you go about it, if you just had “one more” opportunity? How would you go after that opportunity? It’s the power of just one more. I realized that was going somewhere and getting good, but unfortunately we didn’t select that statement. We’ll have to save that one for another year.
Intentional About Becoming Something on Purpose
Pamela and I both agreed on the statement we’ve selected. It is simply the term “Becoming.” I have to admit I was inspired by this word from the book. In fact I thought it was called “Becoming Michelle Obama.” The actual title is just “Becoming” and it’s written by Michelle Obama. That book inspired me to some next level thinking and is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It talks about how a person, specifically with examples from Michelle Obama’s life, is constantly becoming.
You must pay careful attention to what you are becoming. You are becoming something regardless of what you think you would like to become. The question is what are you becoming? What am I becoming? What are we becoming? You have to be intentional about becoming something on purpose otherwise you become something by accident. I don’t believe in leaving my life to chance and neither should you.
Life is not about who you are or who you have been, but what you are becoming.
You have heard it said this way. It is not about the destination, enjoy the journey. You should enjoy the journey of becoming. It’s more about the journey, the process of becoming. I can only imagine that Michelle Obama didn’t become Michelle Obama when Barack Obama became president. It was a process of them becoming which led to the presidency. Using this as a focus statement, Pamela and I have decided to put a plan in place to guide what we are becoming in 2023 in the grand scheme of who we really are.
Have a growth plan for your life. In other words, continue to grow. Growing is becoming. Don’t ever stop growing. Use each year of your life to grow, to become, therefore you want to always focus on what and who you are becoming. I’m becoming something, but what is it? I want to be intentional about what I am becoming so each month of this new year, I will create 12 different monthly targets to be thinking about what am I becoming. What is it I can or cannot do this month to get closer to what I really want to become? We’ve decided to work harder on ourselves than on anything else. This means we find ways to figure out what it is that can help us become. Jim Rohn was asked by his mentor to have a goal of becoming a millionaire. Like anyone else, Jim was excited about the idea of having such resources to do whatever he could dream or desire. Jim’s mentor stopped him and gave him a different perspective. The reason to have a goal of obtaining a million dollars is not for what the million dollars can do for you, but rather what the million dollar goal will make of you. In other words, what will you become by having such a goal? Having this focus-statement as our goal pushes us to become something greater, something better. We will take this whole year and impact our lives with growth, so that we can become the persons we have not become. We will rid ourselves of something old, put all something new, and become something greater. That’s what it means to live life to the next-level.
Question: What are you becoming this year?
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