“Hope is not a strategy.” It’s an old adage used in military, business and political spheres (as well as the latest Mission Impossible movie).
It’s true. Hope alone won’t get you where you want to go. You need to plan and execute. Hope is not a strategy.
But you can be strategic about hope.
According to the UN, International Women’s Day “is a day to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go to truly achieve gender equality.” I believe it is a great reminder that, today and every day, we are strongest when every member of our community is free to make their greatest contribution.
I went to a wake recently. I didn’t know the deceased, but she was loved by someone I love.
It’s all really just people, in the end, isn’t it? The people you impact up close through your relationships, and the people you impact either directly or indirectly through your vocation.
It’s all people, and their lives that we’re either adding to or detracting from.
It’s all people, which seems simple when you boil it down to that. Except that it’s all people, which means it’s not simple at all. None of it.
We’re a few weeks into January. It’s that point where you’ve probably already encountered a few hurdles to the goals you set yourself at the start of the year.
Don’t beat yourself up. Life will throw an excess of demands and distractions at us as we pursue our goals. We must relentlessly say ‘Yes’ to our goals if we are to hope to be able to say ’No’ to everything that isn’t of equal importance.
To do that, we need a way to ensure that even when things get (sometimes unavoidably) in the way or we drift off track, our goals, and the larger purpose driving them, never slip too far from our attention.
A tool I have found incredibly helpful in equipping me to do just that is the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt. That’s why I want to give you the chance to win one!
Here are three simple ways anyone can keep saying ‘Yes’ to their goals, and how the Full Focus Planner helps me do that –
Each December I share a round-up of the books I’ve found most compelling throughout the year. If you’re looking for ideas for your 2019 reading list, here are the ten reads I would most highly recommend from the last year, as well as my full list.
If there’s a theme in my reads for the year, it would probably be ‘Attention’. The issue of what we choose to pay attention to (personally, organisationally and socially), what forces are at work to influence that, what is at stake, and how we can be deliberate in focusing our attention, is a thread throughout a number of the books below. I believe it’s a critical issue for us all within our current social context, and I believe there is great hope to be found in the potential for positive change when we are, in a sense, attentive to our attention.
