Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Where is your focus?

The other day, I was having a conversation with my daughter about mistakes. She was very concerned that she could lose my affections if she wasn't perfect. It led to a great conversation about learning. When she was a baby, she didn't know how to do anything. Walking came early for her, 9 months, but not with out it's bumps and bruises. My question to her was what if she had been so afraid of falling, that she never tried to walk? What if she said, "I know I will fall, so I won't try."
 She laughed and said, "I would be asking for you to do everything for me still." 
"So do you think that venturing off the coach and allowing yourself to fall, was a good thing or a bad thing?" "It was a good thing mom."
Some times we allow ourselves to focus so hard on the fact that we might fall, that we never venture off the coach. 
We are focusing on the mistakes and not the direction we are going. A perfect example is a word that most of the world gets very hung up on. That word is sin. For most people sin is this big black thing in the corner to be avoided at all costs as it is all evil. Technically, the definition in its original form, is a very different thing.
The word sin is translated from the Greek work Harmatia (not 100% sure on the spelling but close!). It is an archery term that means to  miss the mark. It makes sense right, when you "sin" you are missing the mark. Ok but lets look at it as the archery term. If I am aiming at a target and I miss it, whatever I was aiming at, I made a mistake. This is normal when you are learning a new skill. You  can't expect to pick up something new and be perfect at it. However, we often expect that of ourselves. I should be able hit the target the first time I pick up that bow and arrow.  In all reality, It's probably not going to happen. You have to learn how to aim at the target and get everything else to line up correctly so that you can hit the target. It takes time and practice.
Now what if you were to do what most of us do in life while learning. What if you stop looking at the target after you shot your arrow, and began looking at your mistake.f You are no longer aiming at the target. Now you are aiming at your mistake because it has captivated your attention.
We bang ourselves over the head with every mistake. "I should have been able to get it perfect the first time." "I should have known better." "I can't believe I messed it up." "I didn't stick to that diet or exercise program again." 
In all fairness, you havn't learned how yet and if you can't get your focus off of your mistake, that is where you will keep aiming. If you are aiming there, then you are training yourself to shoot that target, instead of your original target.
So what do we do? We learn from our mistakes. We take our focus off of beating ourselves up and what we don't do right, and we focus back on the original target and actually allow ourselves to learn how to get where we want to go. We accept that any new challenge or learning experience is going to come with scrapped knees and a bruised ego. We only fail if we fail to get back up or if we allow our mistakes to steal our focus.
This new year, find your target again! Get your focus back on where you are going and the steps you need to get there instead of how you have fallen in the past. I hope to hear what those goals are and I look forward to hearing how your arrow is closer this year than it was last year, even if you haven't gotten a bulls eye yet. Use your mistakes to train you how to do it right.



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