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2. Keeping your Eye on the Road
2a. Maintaining Focus
Maintaining focus simply means directing your attention
towards your goals and game plan. A good focus helps you stay
motivated and know what you need to be doing. If only it was
that simple! Your focus will be strong at times and lacking at
other times. You also have many other priorities,
responsibilities, emotions, and unexpected situations which need
your attention. The real skill of focus involves being able to
pay attention to your game plan when you need it, while
your busy life is going on.
To help you focus
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Strengthening your focus
"muscle". Your focus can
drift when you are tired, hungry, stressed or dealing with other
problems. That’s part of the challenge. Think of your focus as
a muscle which gets stronger with practice. You can strengthen
your focus by being very aware of what you are focusing on and
calmly redirecting yourself when needed. Try yoga or mediation.
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Caution Areas! 
Your focus can be weakened by a number of factors. Review the
following common challenges to being focused. You may benefit
from directly tackling the following problems
To learn more about developing your focus and other
assistance for your challenges to maintaining focus, click on
Tools.
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2b. Taking Responsibility
Think how many decisions about eating or exercise you make in
a day whether to finish your dessert, put the fork down or go
right to the next bite, go for a walk or sit on the couch.
Taking responsibility means that you recognize these
"moments of choice" and see yourself as in control of
what happens. You choose what to do and how to react afterwards
whether you choose to learn from it, blame others, get mad at
yourself, or ignore what you did. Taking responsibility isn’t
easy and can be much harder depending on how you react.
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To help you take responsibility for your many choices
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Believe that you always have a
choice. Many choices you make happen
in a very impulsive, automatic fashion. In fact, you may often
miss the fact that you had a choice, saying to yourself, "I
just didn’t think about" or "It just happened".
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Remind yourself that what you do, any action, large or small,
is under your control.
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Recognize the moment of choice.
Practice being aware of all the choices that you have in the
day. Keep a log for a few days. Many choices are acted upon so
quickly that you don’t even think you made a choice.
Increasing your awareness of these choices allows you to make
mindful, deliberate decisions more in line with your goals.
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Accept responsibility for what to
do next. So, what resulted from your choice? You may
feel uncomfortably full, not like what you see on the scale, or
regret another week without exercise. You can ignore the
results, get mad or down on yourself, blame something else, or
use what happened to learn and motivate yourself. Only by calmly
accepting responsibility for the outcome, can you thoughtfully
choose how best to respond.
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Don’t make responsibility too
difficult. It is easy to make it too
uncomfortable to take ownership of your choices. How angry do
you get when you make a bad choice? Do you judge yourself
harshly? No one would want to acknowledge that they made a bad
choice, if it means being beat up for it. Taking responsibility
means saying I did it and learning from what happened, while
still treating yourself with the fairness and respect that you
deserve.
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Don’t think it is all your
fault. There are numerous things that
influence what you do. Hormones and your unique physiological
make-up, significant others in your life, and situational
factors can have a big impact. Take responsibility for
just what you can control. Don’t think it is ever 100% your
fault.
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Caution Areas!
The following habits can interfere with effectively taking
responsibility for your choices. Are any of these interfering
with your taking responsibility?
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Feeling ashamed about what you did
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Taking too much responsibility in
other areas of life
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Feeling helpless or believing you
can’t make good choices
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Quickly dismissing, making excuses
or deflecting responsibility
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To learn how you can improve your responsibility, order
The
Ten Hidden Barriers to Weight Loss and Exercise. If you
would like assistance with your challenges to taking
responsibility, click on our coaching
services.
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