Whether you make resolutions or not, most of us experience a sense of newness as the year launches. January is a time leaders often think, NOW I'm going to do this: get the desk clear, spend more time with staff, launch this or that back-burner project.

And then: life intrudes. A crisis erupts. Or the day-to-day routine gets in the way of doing anything new. All our time is eaten up. And we think: It's only January, and I'm off-track already. I'm distracted, and I'm never going to get focused again.

The practice of quiet, meditative prayer can teach us a lot about how to deal with distraction. It instructs us always to pay attention to the breath, or to the prayer word or phrase (such as Jesus, or The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want). If you find your mind wandering (as I do, every single time), gently come back to the breath or the word. The approach is not: this prayer is a failure because I got distracted. Rather, the task is to notice the distraction, and come back to focus, again ...