Circumstances can prove quite distracting, making it feel difficult to focus or be productive. However, high performers know how to navigate distracting circumstances, and anyone can develop the habits that help them do so.
Distracting circumstances run the gamut, from political news to weather-related disasters to family or work-related conflicts. Whatever the situation, it behooves you to learn to manage yourself—not the circumstance—so you can return to doing what matters to you.
Develop High-Performance Habits
A Certified High Performance Coach, like myself, helps clients develop six specific “high-performance” habits. Each can help you go from distracted to focused in any given circumstance. Combine all six, and you will never find yourself distracted again…no matter the situation in which you find yourself.
Research has shown that most high performers—people who consistently excel and succeed beyond standard norms over the long term—have developed these habits. They are:
- Seek clarity: Clearly define your goals and priorities to guide your actions.
- Generate energy: Engage in activities that recharge you.
- Raise necessity: Create a sense of urgency and purpose around achieving your goals.
- Increase Productivity: Optimize your time and efforts to maximize results.
- Develop influence: Build strong relationships and communication skills to inspire and motivate others.
- Demonstrate courage: Step outside your comfort zone, embrace challenges, and take bold action.
Although cultivating these key habits helps you succeed in any life arena, they come in handy—and prove enormously effective—when you find yourself in distracting circumstances.
Seek Clarity
When you possess clarity, you become able to make decisions and take actions that move you closer to your goals. Any lack of clarity leaves you wondering if a choice is good or bad, wise or stupid, or in your best interest or not. When you are indecisive, you remain stuck.
To lessen distraction, clarify what you are striving for or want. For instance, you might want to meet a work deadline or get in shape.
Whenever you find yourself distracted by circumstances, ask:
- What is it that I want?
- What goal do I want to achieve?
- Why do I need to be focused?
Then, you can place your attention on that thing or task. Also, once you have clarity about what you want or your goal, it’s easier to develop the following five habits.
Generate Energy
Distraction places your attention on things that don’t truly matter to you and helps you avoid the things that do. Both require energy—mental, emotional, and physical. Thus, distraction zaps your energy.
To counter that effect and feel energized and ready to focus on your priority, raise your energy level. You can do this in various ways, but movement tends to be the most effective because it increases your mental, emotional, and physical energy.
Try:
- going for a walk
- cardio exercises
- yoga or tai chi
- lifting weights
Other energy tools, like deep breathing or meditation, help as well. They may or may not increase your emotional and mental energy levels as well as your physical ones.
With more energy, you will find it easier to turn your attention away from distractions and toward whatever task or activity you choose to tackle.
Raise Necessity
Distraction often happens when we feel our circumstances urgently require our attention. As we shift our focus away from what matters to us, we get off track…off purpose.
However, you will find it much easier to stop being distracted when you learn to habitually raise your level of necessity. Let me explain.
If you have a looming deadline, your level of necessity increases. After all, you committed to turning in work or doing something by a specific date or time and must demonstrate integrity. In such situations, an urgent need to complete the job or task on time makes it easier to shut out distractions.
Add clarity about your goal, priority, or need and energy to accomplish it, and distraction will fade into the background. Focus takes its place.
Increase Productivity
You can find lots of advice on increasing productivity, such as time blocking, using a planner, scheduling priority tasks first thing each day, and only checking email at designated times. Tips include sleeping eight hours per night, eating a healthy diet, and exercising, which are additional ways to increase your energy so you tackle tasks efficiently.
Also, productivity increases when you reduce distractions. While you may not be able to remove the circumstances that cause distraction, you can do things like:
- turn off the internet while working
- shut off your cell phone or place it in another room
- don’t answer emails while focused on a task
- tell co-workers or family and friends not to bother during specific periods
- stop watching the news
Develop Influence
Influence increases the chance that others pay attention to what you say and do or perceive you as a good role model. However, when navigating distracting circumstances like a high performer, turn your influence up in relationships with yourself.
It’s your job to influence yourself to turn away from distractions and focus on what you need to accomplish. For that to happen, you might need to develop more self-integrity and commitment. You might need to increase your level of motivation as well.
You can implement rewards to get yourself to do what you say you’ll do—despite distractions. You can even try using punishments to keep your promises to yourself. But one way or another, you need to influence yourself to focus rather than remain distracted.
Demonstrate Courage
It’s comfortable to be distracted…unless what distracts you makes you uncomfortable instead. In either case, if you prefer to focus rather than remain distracted, you need to do something that feels like a stretch.
You must courageously turn your attention away from distractions. That may feel tremendously uncomfortable because you may habitually allow yourself to be distracted. And you may firmly believe this circumstance demands your attention.
But only when you meet that challenge and take bold action to focus on what matters to you more will you break those unhelpful habits and develop a new one.
Become a Focused Person
Developing these six high-performance habits gives you the clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, and courage to navigate distracting circumstances. Then, you approach such situations like a high performer and focus on what’s most important to you, even in situations that appear difficult to ignore.
You will ignore distracting circumstances because your identity has changed. You are no longer a distracted person. Instead, you are a focused person, someone who places their attention on what is essential, even in distracting circumstances.
How do you navigate distracting circumstances? Tell me in a comment below. And please share this post with those who might benefit from reading it.
