focused effort/ broad awareness

There are times when we get one part of our life going well and another starts to go south. The key to keeping this from happening is being able to focus our efforts while having a broad awareness. In other words progress and growth come best from taking specific actions to resolve specific issues: focused effort. At the same time we must be vigilante in every area of our lives: broad awareness.

Unfortunately we tend to look at what we are working on and tune out the rest of the world. This goes for writing a blog, hammering a nail or trying to grow. One way around this is to get in the habit each day of taking stock; this could be part of your quiet time or your morning ritual. But it does not have to be anything more than a daily practice of asking am I happy in my professional, personal, social, family life and go from there. A no answer causes us to dig deeper why aren't we happy? If we have big issues in these areas that we are not working on yet we set those aside for now; this process is not about expanding our list of things to do but looking for the maintenance of day-to-day life.

By constantly attending to the little details we can keep them from becoming large issues, this gives us fewer crises to deal with and more time to work on what we want to fix.