Busy as a Bee - Focus on Action Creates Results

From my newsletter (visit www.simonsmithcoaching.com to sign up) - June 2007

Summer is well and truly here and the activity of nature is all around us.

Over the last few days, with this glorious weather, I have been enjoying my first cup of tea of the day in the garden, watching nature at work. We have a dozen or so bees that are there every morning, busy busy busy, collecting nectar from our flowers and one plant in particular.

These wonderful creatures have an attitude of focussing on results, that if we were to replicate each and every day, it seems to me we could not fail in our efforts to succeed.

The bee is never distracted from its mission, regardless of what is going on around it. It finds an appropriate source of nectar and applies itself to the task, collecting its prize, filling itself up until the time it can not collect any more. After returning to base, depositing its fortunes in the safety and security of the community safe, it returns to apply its labour once more to the task in hand. It is absolutely focussed on results and does so taking full responsibility for its actions.

The bee does not blame its surroundings, its colleagues, its family, it simply stays focussed on its goal, and achieves, time and time again. Granted, when it is threatened, it reacts to protect itself and when left to its own work, it just stays on track and delivers results.

As I watched the bees do their work, focussing on the results they want, I realised that we are so often distracted by events or people that keep us from what we truly want. Most of the time, we don’t even realise we are allowing ourselves to be diverted, and then we create reasons for why we haven’t achieved that which we set out to create.

We are bombarded with 2,000,000 bits of information per second and we use our internal filters of attitudes, values, beliefs, memories, decisions, language and meta programs (the way we think and operate), to filter all those bits of information, to create our internal map of the world. The challenge is that we can only consciously focus on 7 things (+ or – 2) at any one time.

It is no surprise therefore that the most successful people in life are absolutely focussed on those things that are most important to them. Studies of people like Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Richard Branson, Donald Trump, Dr Stephen Covey, John Gray, Denis Waitley, Mark Victor Hansen, Jack Canfield, Anthony Robbins, and so on and so on, show the common factor with all of them is just this; they are all clear and then focus on, what is most important to them. They know their top five “passions” and take focussed action towards them.

It is obvious to me therefore, that like the bees, once we take complete responsibility for the results in our life, get clarity on what is most important to us, and then take action, completely focussed on what we want to achieve (as opposed to what we don’t want), then we can only lead a successful, happy and fulfilled life…