“Be where your feet are” is one of the sayings given to me for my book “Winning Words: Speaking Life to Influence Others.”
What do your feet have to do with being where you are? Well, first, the logical—if you are like me, your feet are attached to your body, which means that your feet are, in fact, wherever you are located. But another connotation of the saying is “focus on where you are at the time.”
Let me explain further. Bringing focus to your present situation or location is so important. When have you had a recent situation where you talk to someone in front of you, and yet, you knew they were not paying attention? That is a perfect example of not “being where your feet are.” You and I can be that person that is not focused on where we are standing physically. How does this happen? It happens when we have our mind running a thousand different directions, when we are thinking about our next appointment, or when we are concerned about tomorrow’s schedule. All of these are human nature and affect you or me. I can speak from experience!
“Being where your feet are” is really an exercise in bringing your mind to focus on your current setting or circumstance. As a college football coach, I used to exhort our players to “focus” on each minute of our practice time, knowing that we only had 120 minutes to get our practice done well. We also divided our 120 minutes into five-minute periods, and every five minutes a student manager blasted an air horn to signal that another five minutes had gone by and that we were moving to the next period so our focus needed to change. This was our way of signifying that time was moving rapidly and to focus on the present period.
Bringing focus to the present gives you the best opportunity to get the most of our every interaction, every appointment and every relationship. Maintaining focus is a discipline that few people have, especially throughout their day. The norm is for people to drift in and out of focus, as a result, the battle within their mind is continuous—because their mind is wandering constantly.
Let me give you a coaching point—maintain your eye contact in the present or on whoever is in front of you. As you control your eyes, you honor the other person or people, and you also narrow your mental focus. As a leader, I want people around me that bring focus to our goals as a team, and I also want to do my best to honor people by giving them my undivided attention—their time is valuable and so is mine.
My goal is to improve every day, and writing this blog is a means of narrowing my focus on improvement. I hope this topic helps you “be where your feet are.”
Greater days ahead,
Ross
