Willie Horton's Personal Development Ezine

THE THREE STEPS TO FOCUS

At its most basic, focus is about paying attention or being fully aware of what you’re doing now.   Watch top sports people in action – you’ll notice, before your very eyes on television, the methods, routines and rituals that they use to ensure that they are completely engrossed in what they’re doing just at that moment in time.   But they’re doing it in a particular context – you only see the tip of the iceberg because highly successful people are focused on a number of different levels.  In other words, their present focus has been directed by, perhaps, a whole career’s focus based on what they want out of life.  In other words, whilst people like Ekhart Tolle – in his books which extol the virtues of ‘The Power of Now’ – talk about focus as something that you must do right here, right now, there’s a little more to focus than meets the television viewer’s eye.  

Like onions, focus has layers!   In working with my personal development clients, all highly focused people, I have discovered that there are three main layers to focus – and three steps that you must take to enable you learn how to focus and direct that focus in a productive way.

Strategic Focus

Simply focusing on the present moment is highly rewarding – research confirms that those who know how to do it are effective and productive and, as a result, happy and content.   But, whilst only focusing on the present moment produces those kinds of results, a life of focusing on now can lead to an existence of aimless bliss.  I’ve no problem with bliss – it’s something that should be part and parcel of everyone’s life.  But I do have a problem with the aimless bit.   If you’re like me, you’ve got to put bread on the table each and every evening – in other words, your focus must be practical.  If you’re like me, you’ve other people depending on you to be practical – so aimless, selfish bliss is not an option.

What I’m saying is that your moment to moment focus – which I’ll deal with later on in this article – needs direction.   Some experts call this direction your goals.  However, the problem with goals is that they might just result in your living a life of perpetual dissatisfied expectation.   And that assumes that you’ve set the right goals!   As normal people, we’ve little or no perspective on what is best for us, so it’s best not to cast your goals in stone.  Give some expectation the power to make you happy and, by definition, if you don’t get it you’ll be unhappy!   So you need to focus your mind on what it would be like to have arrived – what it would look like, feel like and sound like to be on the right life path – whatever that right life path might be for you.

In other words, your strategic focus should be touchy-feely – captivating your subconscious mind with an excitement that drives you to be more and more focused on a daily basis or, ultimately, on a moment to moment basis.   You should write those touchy-feely outcomes down on a regular basis.  They should be handwritten – because handwriting captives and motivates the subconscious mind.  This is how you should set your strategic focus.

Operational Focus

Once your subconscious mind knows the direction you’re headed, you need to get your head around the important things that you need to do today.   There’s a world of difference between important and urgent – and, all too often, we find ourselves being overwhelmed by the urgent to the extent that we’re left with no time to do the important.   Or, even worse, we waste our time – reading emails that nobody was meant to read, gossiping with others about bad news, channel-hopping, talking nonsense on Facebook – you name it, we’re great at finding ways to do things that are totally unconnected to the life that we want to have.

Operational focus means that you know the difference between doing the right thing and wasting your time and energy.   You’ll only realize whether or not you’re doing the right thing if you stop yourself at various points during the day and ask yourself the question: “Am I doing the right thing?”   If you are cool!   If you’re not, stop it and start doing the right thing!

Task-Based Focus

Once you’re doing the right thing, you need to do it right!   All too often, when we set about doing the right thing, we get easily knocked off course – by distraction, by others wanting to waste our time, by taking on other people’s problems, by not saying ‘no’.   Task-based focus is about fully engrossing yourself in what you’re doing.  This doesn’t come naturally to the normal mind and it’s only on the rare occasion that you become so engrossed that the time flies by.  You need to learn how to focus moment to moment. 

By far the best way of learning to pay undivided attention to the present moment is meditation.  Meditation disciplines an otherwise undisciplined normal mind.  When you meditate, you engross yourself in what some or all of your five senses are telling you – in other words, you learn to shut out distraction and you become extraordinarily focused.

In other words, the right thing to be doing every morning – the one thing that will ensure that your day is directed by your strategic focus – is to meditate.