Sharpen the focus

April 28, 2009

It’s a cool, damp spring morning following a scorcher of a day.

Today’s lesson is to sharpen my focus on re-educating myself.

Unless something jumps out of the weeds at me, I’ve suspended my active job search in favor of concentrating on school and developing a free-lance business and my own Web site. The Blessed Wife and eldest daughter laid down the law yesterday after I struggled with anxiety attacks again. Put the money worries on hold for year, narrow your focus to retraining yourself, take it a day at a time and let the rest work itself out over the next year.

So that’s it: Study, success, teach, excel. Have a focus like a laser beam. Whatever doesn’t further your goal of earning a master’s degree, teaching students and sharing your writing and editing with the world is not under consideration. Turn up the volume on the mental toughness.

“You’re just going to have to power through it,” advised eldest daughter. (That includes shutting down the monkey mind that keeps me awake at night.)

That means a stop to papering Western New York with CVs for jobs I don’t really want right now and to stop trivial pursuits that don’t get me closer to my goal. Outside of school work and building a free-lance business, everything else is just a distraction.

In that vein, I stopped for a job interview yesterday for a summer position at a venerable Western New York institution. While the young man who interviewed me seemed accommodating, a six-day-a-week job during the middle of summer didn’t appeal to me, at least this year with two weddings and classwork bound to take up quite a bit of time during July and August. So I immediately shut that proposal down with a quick, polite e-mail last night.

So that’s it, folks. A year of hard work ahead, but labor that is going to grow my stock, not Warren Buffett’s.

Again, I going to affirm my vision: I see myself next August in front of a college classroom sharing my writing and learning skills with eager students.

I’m going the Post-It note route as well, with little affirmations going up around the house, the car, etc. Here’s what they say:

Study, success, degree, teach, excel. Study, success, degree, teach, excel. Study, success, degree, teach, excel.