How to Focus Your Self-Determination Skills

Your self-determination determines how far you go. There is popular rhetoric that says one should never give up. It takes grit, perseverance, and endurance to achieve this. All of these traits are summed in self-determination. Self-determination is a strength of character and the mind. Therefore, it is a trait that can be learned, taught, and developed. Put differently, it is a skill. and if you want to stay motivated on your goals in life. you need to build it.

Building self-determination starts from inside—from the mind and next to the body. One who is competing for a medal in an Olympics tournament and does not believe he is worth winning any prize in a race competition will not win. even if he has the biggest fan club cheering him at the stadium. Even if he believes he can win but did not make any effort in preparing for the race. he will not succeed. From the analogy, you find that self-motivation and hard work have a place to play in self-determination.

So, if we believe self-determination is a skill that can be developed. We should agree too that it can be focused appropriately to achieve our goals. Focusing self-determination for the achievement of goals involves focusing on all the traits that one must apply towards realizing their goal. We have discussed some of these traits below:

Stay Disciplined

There’s no better way to put it than to say do what needs to be done when it needs to be done even if you don’t feel like it. If you have goals and have them written down with timelines. Avoid procrastination or negligence by setting alarms or calendar reminders.

Sharing with people to checkmate your positions at intervals. Or keeping reward gifts with people to give to you only when you have successfully completed a task or achieved a goal. Staying disciplines at all times helps to focus your self-determination to work and not be lazy.

Build An Ecosystem

It doesn’t matter whether it is a small system or a big one. What matters is that it is a platform to demonstrate all the things you have learned from books and blogs about self-determination. Building an ecosystem from scratch to a viable state is just one aspect of it.

Try to teach people how you have learned what you know. Until you practice some of these things in an actual project involving strangers you may or may not have met before. You may never be able to focus your self-determination skills fully.

Have The End In Mind

Implementing strategies to achieve your goals is really important because that is what would help you achieve them. But never lose focus of the end mind. The “why” of what you are doing. How you are doing what. And for whom you are doing what. For instance, a student who has to ace an exam to qualify for a degree in a course. Will consider the consequences of cheating in an exam. If the “why” for her graduating school is to make her parents proud.

When she feels it critically. She would realize that she needs to put in the hours at studying to pass her exams. And graduate with a clean record. Having the end in mind helps to add integrity to the processes. Where self-determination is the critical factor. Integrity will take you where efforts won’t.

Continuous Evaluation

Sometimes, we may be so engrossed in our commitment to ourselves and the different parties in our lives that we forget to check if we are still working or aligned towards the overall goal. We need to evaluate the different energies we put into our work and check if they feed into our overall objective or are worth the output. Not giving up is a slogan in self-determination, but when there is a need for external support or guidance on repeated actions, it should be sought to avoid wasting time and scarce resources.

Continuous evaluation is essential to identify and eliminate wasteful or unproductive activities in goal implementation. This can be done via having a quiet time with oneself or seeking opinions from others.