Runaway Bride

I have this weird knack for taking random scenes from movies and applying them to completely different pieces of my own (or others’) life.

I recently watched The Runaway Bride again. This movie, featuring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, is about a journalist named Ike Graham (Gere) who writes a less-than-flattering story about Maggie Carpenter (Roberts) and her penchant for leaving men at the altar. Predictably, when Ike goes to Maggie’s small town to defend his story, he falls in love with her, and they are set to marry. He is standing at the altar when Maggie starts down the aisle toward him. She hesitates a moment, and he locks eyes with her, forcing her to focus on him and ignore everything else going on around her. As long as she does that, she moves down the aisle toward him. However, when a guest takes a flash photo, it momentarily blinds Ike, and he breaks eye contact with Maggie. Immediately, she loses her focus and bolts.

Running your business or your life is a little bit like that, I’ve found. As long as I can stay focused on my goals and the tasks at hand, I can move forward towards that goal. When I am distracted by life’s little (and sometimes not-so-little) “interruptions,” it’s easy for me to lose my focus and get off track. Depending on the distraction, it’s sometimes hard to get refocused, and I end up wasting valuable time.

That’s why visualization of your goal every day is so critical. Visualization is not a valuable tool because it magically makes things appear in your life; it is valuable because it keeps you focused on the goal and its achievement. Failure to visualize can cause the goal to become fuzzy; you will lose focus and can, like Maggie, eventually abandon the dream.

Stay focused; achieve your dreams.