Five Steps To Refocusing Your Life

Determined or drifting?  Those are our two choices.  Life will throw curves.  We either re-calibrate or we drift.  Drifting is; at face value, easier.  Going along, reacting, coping.  If you are on track, then you can coast a while; that’s not drifting because you are heading toward your desired goal.  Drifting implies aimlessness.  Determination implies a stated target you are aiming at.

The Dillo household is re-calibrating.  We’re in process---don’t know if it’s a day, a season or a year.  We face aging and sick parents.  Work issues (tension and stress) are beyond normal this year; so that they bleed into our normal outside-of-work living (having to work to 10 pm; classroom with large population and beyond-bell curve behavior issues).  We left our church family of ten-years after communicating our concerns.  So we ask ourselves questions.  We wrestle with answers---take small steps.

Here are five small steps that may help you when refocusing your life:

1) Question. Ask yourself questions.  Have friends ask you questions.  What are you looking for?  What works?  What ignites the fire in your heart?  When deciding to leave our church we kept asking questions: What’s personal preference?  What’s scriptural?  What do we feel we’re missing?

     2) Get feedback from your community.  Vacuums suck.  Don’t make your decisions by yourself.  Get other people’s perspective.  Ask friends for input.  Ask enemies for input.  Get input.

     3)Set goals.  Brainstorm if you have to; set a bunch of goals. Soon you’ll recognize the ones that don’t apply. 

     4) Make the goals measurable.  There are a bunch of great techie tools to measure progress; word counters for books, heartbeat monitors for workouts.  I’ve found Strava to be a great training tool for solo workouts.

     5) Recognize the process.  Wrestle.  The answer probably won’t come overnight. I’m still trying to prioritize actions I take and activities I chuck.  Give yourself grace.