Tag: focus

Let’s get 2015 started

Posted on by philipdodson

You might have looked at the title and thought, has this bloke lost the plot, it’s February 5th not January 5th!!!

We’ll I have to admit I’ve had better starts to a year to be honest. 2nd week of January, my knee swelled up like a football, the redness, the pain….yes I knew immediately it was a gout attack. Now for those who’ve never suffered from gout, imagine a really, really, really nasty pain and then times that by 10. It is without doubt the most miserable thing I’ve ever experienced. I have not had a bad attack for many years, as I have been careful and tried to cure it through changes in diet etc etc.

Unfortunately, without realising it, I have not been looking after myself, so it’s all self-inflicted. Anyway after a week or so of being laid up with a very swollen sore knee, it decide to move into my foot and toe too. So another week of being laid up followed.

Thankfully, I have some good people in my network and people helped covering the business. So Last week of January arrived and on the Monday I hobbled back to work.

Then the next bit of the nightmare start to 2015 arrived, in shape of a phone call from my Mum in France to tell me that my Dad had passed away at lunchtime, thankfully in his sleep and without pain.

He had been unwell for sometime, so while it wasn’t a shock, but even so it still is very upsetting.

By the way I’ll get to the point in a minute and I am not writing this so that you feel sorry for me.

So the last few days have been spent still recovering from the dreaded gout and sorting out all the stuff with the family and taking time to grieve about my father.

So Tuesday, I finally got back to the hub and back to working a ‘normal’ day again.

The point of all of this is, that bad things happen in life, thankfully no where near as often as we fear and anticipate and it is how we react to them is so important.

It will obviously take a while to heal from the loss of a parent or someone very close, but it is also for me a motivator too. What I mean by that is that losing a parent brings into focus your own life, as a parent myself, and it makes me realise in the natural order I am next. Therefore, it is time to really focus on getting on with my life and get on with doing all the things that I want to achieve.

The other thing in all of this is that you can either wallow in the bad things or just say that these things happen, you can’t control them, just accept and then get on. We can all choose what mood or attitude to have when things go wrong.

So I am super positive about 2015, I know that my gout will go away soon, I know that I have to get back on the focus on my health and looking after myself. I am determined, which I know my father would have wanted, to use his passing as a motivator to me to push myself and get on with life.

My father died at age 86, he had a great life, he was mainly happy, always able to laugh and not take life too seriously. He didn’t suffer and he spent his last Christmas together with all his family and grand children. He didn’t chase material things and money, he focused on the important things in life. Even in his final days he still was able to laugh and joke, including his pleasure of persuading the hospital to let him have some beers.

So whatever, you are up against, it will pass and we all get just that one opportunity to make it happen, don’t be an extra in your own film, step out of the shadows and become the star.

The ‘F’ button has helped me become an albatross

Posted on by philipdodson

OK this is it, the big one, the big 30.

I have been building up to this one and I am aiming to do it in record time too. So excuse the fcuking seplling mistkaes!!

So when I have written about another 710 words and the magic green square pops up to say I’ve completed my 750 words today, then I will be awarded my albatross badge.

Yessssss!!!

Now all I’ve got to do is come up with another 670 words. This sometimes just flows nicely and now I am under the pressure of writing fast and well, to hit a target, the brain is ceasing up, the words aren’t coming……arghhhh!!!

Well isn’t the weather nice for September.

OK, enough fooling around, time to write properly and seriously, whatever that is???

Shame adding endless question marks doesn’t add to the word tally. So I am flying now in terms of speed and the typos aren’t too bad, yet!

I have been asked to write a few articles recently for various people and previously I might have said I would do them initially, then panicked about the work load and gone back to them rather sheepishly saying ‘sorry but no time’. Now having done this for 30 days in a row, I am more confident that I can write decent stuff (OK a bit of an exaggeration) and do it at speed.

I am really getting the writing bug now and that is something I have always wanted to do, however,I told myself the usual excuse of ‘never enough time’. Well, as a book entitled ‘Get off your arse’ by my mate Brad Burton will tell you, there is always enough time. You have just got to stop ‘dicking about’ as Brad puts it.

What he means is, if you are really determined to get something done, then look at what you’ve been doing over the last 10-15 minutes write it down and keep doing that, until you actually realise just how much time we do waste in our day-to-day lives.

I have realised that. It is sooooooo easy to lose focus, as we are all constantly distracted by vibrations. I don’t mean the sort that come from some mystic cult or from earthquakes, I mean the alerts that come on our phones. An new tweet, a Facebook Like, a RT, email, text and so on.

This is the challenge for all of us, as we realise the value of staying connected and making new connections. I do talks about the Connected Generation, how it is all now about the shared experience and how vital this is for the future of our businesses.

However, when you’ve really got to get something done, then you need to switch that stuff off. When I am doing my 750 words, I always try to find somewhere quiet to do the writing, however, if I can’t, then I just put my headphones on and shut out the world around me by playing music.

So I have now decided to write down an action list of all the things that I absolutely need to get done that day and I make that a short/achievable list. So this isn’t my much longer list of things that are to do. This action list is what I start with each day and I have learnt from reading ‘Eat That Frog’, that you pick the biggest/ugliest frog to eat first and you eat it bite by bite until it’s all gone.

However, sticking to that, is easier said than done if you allow the distractions to come in and then the dicking about will start up again.

So I have created an ‘F’ button, you heard it here first by the way, and this is an imaginary button that sits on the dashboard in my brain. The ‘F’ stands for focus. So the minute I start to feel that I am going off track………..press ‘F’ and then back on to it.

This might sound a little weird and might not work for everyone, but since I have been using it, my focus, productivity and results have all improved.

So I am into the home stretch now, just 50 words to go to get my albatross badge. I am imagining them opening the envelope on stage at the ‘750 Words all time greatest writers award’ ceremony. They are calling out the names of the contenders and then yes, they call me to the stage to get my award. There it is an albatross.

photo (8)

That’s it done, sadly though, 1 minute over my fastest writing time of 19 minutes.