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.

Is your focus on winning or not losing?

I just finished T. Harv Eker’s book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I strongly urge you to read it if you haven’t yet. Although it’s clearly about making money, many of the principles apply to other areas of life, so even if you’re as rich as Oprah, you can still gain valuable information from it.


One quote that struck a chord with me was this: “Rich people focus on what they want, while poor people focus on what they don’t want. What you focus on expands.” He also says, “Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.” Although this sounds like arguing semantics, it’s actually an incredibly significant difference, both in mentality and outcome. I realized that I was someone who was trying very hard not to lose, and that I was focused on how much money I lacked. Because what I focus on expands, I was getting a whole lot more of “not enough.”

This mental habit is something I “inherited” from my childhood experiences, and is very difficult to change. General consensus in the scientific community is that it takes 21 days to change a habit, although others believe it takes at least 90 days to really solidify the new habit. But because it is a habit, the good news is that it can be changed.


What about you? Are you focusing on what you want (abundance, joy, success), or on what you don’t want (to be broke, to lose your job, etc.)? What habits do you need to change to get back on track?

A Planner Succumbs to Action!

I am a huge planner – sometimes to my detriment. I say that because sometimes I spend so much time planning, that I never get around to doing. When I decided to start my own business, however, I decided things were going to be different. I did plan, but not to the death of the business. The interesting thing is that the focus of the business has evolved fairly significantly over the short year it’s been open, but only because I was actually working on it, and talking to people. Had I just tried to plan the business as it is now, it would never have gotten to this point. Clarity and focus required questions and input from new people, not closed up in a room by myself.

I also vowed to take advantage of opportunities that came up along the way, even if they weren’t part of the original “plan.” If I thought it would move me closer to my goal, I did it. Even if I was scared, even if it was different from anything I had done before, I did it. Although I haven’t reached my goal yet, things are definitely moving forward at a much faster pace than I might have expected.

What about you? Have you found that once you “committed” to your goal it has brought things into your life to support the achievement of that goal?