The importance of self focus and minding your business.
I am finding that it is difficult for me to just focus on myself and what I am doing. I find myself drifting away from this possibly all of my life and it is just now becoming apparent.
Growing up there is one 'morality' that I was taught which was to think of others, don't be selfish about what you want. While there is a lot of truth in that I think that this can also become a habit of paying too much attention to others and what they do.
Today there are so many ways to do that 'remotely' online. Like any media, the internet has become a place to escape your own life and live vicariously through the lives of others by watching their videos, following posts, and so on. Sometimes it is easy to spend so much time watching things way outside of your control and forming your own opinions about it rather than focusing on the life one is leading and addressing the issues that come up.
I speak for myself in this post because I realize that not everyone does this. All I have found is that I don't get very much out of watching the screens from other people's lives and squander time escaping my own reality.
We can be many things. But it is important to know what we are not. For instance there is so much that I have no clue about, yet I have my feelings about areas that I don't even know anything about. At some point you get to where you have set beliefs or ideas about the way things go in life. The problem with that is when you experience people not acting in harmony with those principles you have a tendency to share your philosophy with them. This is neither helpful nor appreciated.
Let others live their lives. Focus on yourself and life will be much easier to live. After all, you can't fix the world you can only fix yourself.
This July 2022 I have set aside as GYST month. Get your s*#t together. I have a lot to get together. Honestly, sometimes it seems like the easiest solution is to just chuck it all and move to another city/state/country and start over with a clean slate. Go somewhere that I have no history, no ties from the previous life, no self-created expectations that I think others have for me.
In a way for the first time in my life I am free of the weight of living under the weight of making sure that everything I did was approved of by my parents. I could tell they were always restrained from in telling me what they really thought. I protected them with the illusion of myself that I felt they wanted me to be. However, as long as I live and associate with those who knew them it feels like I have to keep the illusion going. It is a Southern Baptist thing I guess for me, which of course is a completely different theme.
I want to build a business. If anyone ever wondered about building a business let me clue you in...it is a hard thing to do. Especially when you are doing it for the first time. You quickly discover that "Energy" is a resource you need in a huge amount. There are so many things to do, so many things to keep track with and so many things to develop. It takes a lot of time and my problem has been, or rather, my excuse has been, that caring for my Mom and Dad over about a 6 year time span often distracted me from focusing on it. Of course the acute situations in caring for my parents that often arrived would require my full attention and it would mean at least a week of absence in my business. The events were often very stressful that it blew everything else I was doing out of the water.
If there is anything that a business requires is consistency and maintenance. There really are no days off and. your mind is always thinking about it. Someone has to be minding the shop and since it is my business that someone has to be me. So, stepping away for a week or so kills momentum and you have to make up for lost time. In the meantime the customers or clients just wonder where you are, and why isn't your business running. You sort of have to rebuild the ship again. This fact is very draining. You have to stay on task or just not do it.
Minding your business is not glamorous. It can also wear down over time. I know from my years in singing how it is when you are in a production of a new opera that you are excited to do but over time up until the premiere you begin to get sick of working on it. You just get tired of the repetition the continued stresses that develop over time and of course the pressure of doing the role well. Being on the boat with others makes this process a bit easier to endure, but when you are building a business you are alone and the only thing that keeps it going is yourself. Plus there is the added pressure of being called selfish and caring only about your business and nothing else. All of the inner voices of negativity begin to run rampant and you become discouraged.
I can see where it would be very easy to drown in the flood of things you have to keep track of. You must come up from air.
Probably the most important thing is to know that people are watching you just like you are watching them. But if you don't want people throwing suggestions from the peanut gallery then start by not doing the same. Pay attention to what you are doing and that is enough. Don't think that anything you say to others, especially those you don't know, is going to be valued nor understood. It probably isn't.
The most important factor is trust. People want to know that they can trust you. The best way to get there is to focus on yourself and what you are doing.
Being a good and successful person is hard enough. Work on that. It is too much to try and do it for others. At the end of the day, "I am responsible for myself."
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Matthew 7:3.
So for me, probably for the first time in my life I am trying to focus on myself and my business in the many areas that manifests itself.