Compartmentalize your day. Before you find yourself going off the rails (our minds are designed to derail us at a moment's notice) make sure you're still firmly on the rails. Between the various different "set-pieces" of the day - between meetings, calls, blocks of work, coming home - take just a couple of minutes to steady the ship. Remember, a few deep breaths will always do that!

I've mixed my metaphors already in today's Quick Tip - trains and boats! We might as well add another form of transport to the mix because, if you really want your day or life to take off, you've got to do a few concrete things about it. Wishing, hoping and wanting are not concrete things - they all boil down to the aspirational. When I say "do something", I mean DO! The first thing we need to do - at the start of the day and at various points throughout the day - is take a couple of minutes to clear our cluttered minds. If you don't do this, your day and your life will be grounded... owing to fog! The fog in your own head!!

But, when a plane takes off, the pilot generally knows where he or she is headed... no point in reaching take-off speed without knowing where you're going. If you did, you'd simply wander around in circles and, ultimately, crash and burn! You need to have a destination in mind. That destination might be a short-hop... "I've seen myself coming out of that important meeting self-satisfied with the outcome"; "I feel that I've just done my very best presentation!". Or, it could be a long-haul destination... "I'm sitting, sipping a cool drink, watching the sun going down, without a care in the world" - the kind of destination you might have in mind having achieved a grand goal.

However, when it comes to "grand goals" you don't want to copper-fasten the destination, you want to immerse your mind in what it would like to be there, without knowing where there might actually be. Let me explain: if you say to yourself "I must achieve X" your mind will focus on X and your autopilot (not a metaphor this time, that's actually how psychology describes the modus operandi of the normal mind) will produce the behaviours that will lead you towards X. But what if Y or J were actually more exciting and, indeed, "best for you" (whatever that might mean!)? Setting your sights on X will blind you to every other possibility and you'll stare greater opportunity in the face and not see it.

Even though we need to keep our mind "on the rails", when you reach take-off, there are no rails in the sky. In fact, the sky is not the limit. You need to enable yourself be focused enough to fly towards that beautiful sunset, wherever it might be.