It’s also a noun. And, as well as being our magazine’s moniker, this beautiful little word encapsulates our vision for this magazine. The women we focus and shine a spotlight on and the articles we feature are designed to encourage, inspire, empower, connect, educate and entertain you, our readers.
One of the acronyms for FOCUS – Follow One Course Until Successful – is particularly apt for our team who have to focus on all aspects of the magazine to ensure its continued success and growth. You’ll have heard the expression, ‘What you focus on grows’ – in other words, whatever you focus on, you can expect more of it.
If you focus on success, love, happiness and achieving great positive things, then you should expect more of those things to come into your life. The converse is also true – whatever you worry about will grow. Focus on the failures, problems and negative things happening in your life and these will become more apparent and cause you more stress, anxiety, fear and frustration. The questions we ask are intrinsically connected to our emotions and how we react to things throughout the day.
You’re in control of your life and you choose where to put your focus but it’s not as simple as telling yourself to focus on something else – you need to put your brain into a resourceful state by asking yourself the right questions. Your brain can be a real nay-sayer that tells you nothing ever works for you or that you can’t possibly reach your dreams, and when you’re reflecting on why you’re such a failure, your brain will be really helpful and come up with answers for you.
Ask yourself positive questions
The vast majority of your day is made up of asking yourself questions. Whether it’s what you should eat for breakfast, what time you should leave for work or what shopping needs to be done, our brain is constantly active. If you ask positive, solution-focused questions you’ll find your perspective and awareness of things expands and you’ll become more aware of the possibilities available.
The questions that usually make us feel sorry for ourselves are the loop or ‘why’ questions. Why does this always happen to me? Why should I even bother? Why am I so stupid? The ‘why’ questions are limiting and lead to self-doubt and blame – of others, objects, events and the circumstances in your life.
The ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions help us overcome obstacles and challenges because of their ability to expand our thinking. By asking empowering questions such as ‘How can I improve this?’, ‘What is great about this?’, ‘How can I overcome this?’ or ‘What can I do to turn this around?’, you tap into strengthening questions that expand your awareness, opens doors to new insights and ideas and focus your mind on problem solving strategies that direct your thoughts to the goals and outcomes you are trying to achieve. It’s the process of turning lemons into lemonade.
If you engage your whole mind, body and spirit into the process of finding the positive answers that you seek, the more readily the answers will come to you.
The outcome and level of success we have, the happiness we surround ourselves in and the fulfilment we experience within our lives comes down to the choice of questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis.
