If you don’t appreciate how important it is to focus your mind, you can never live the dream. You’ll never achieve anything great and you will be forever plagued by the self sabotaging thoughts and voices in your head that are an essential part of normal everyday life. How you focus your mind, how you control your mind is the key that unlocks all the abundant things that can flow freely in your life. It’s up to you to let them flow. So, you need to learn how to focus your mind, for becoming an expert ‘focuser’ is the ultimate self improvement.
Focus is paying attention. Some people will tell you that you have to focus on your goals – but those goals of yours, whatever they might be, will only be achieved in the long run if you discover how to focus your energy right here, right now. Focus is a now thing. What you do right here, right now doesn’t only influence if you’ll achieve your goals, it determines the very course of your life. I’m not exaggerating – if you don’t pay full attention to what you’re actually supposed to be doing right now, not only can you not do it to the best of your ability, more importantly, your mind, by default, will pay attention to your inner voices – the nonsense that not only is completely irrelevant to the here and now but stuff that constantly constrains you from being all that you can be.
You must understand that the normal default state of mind is to focus on what a psychologist might term our ‘stored knowledge’. This so-called knowledge constantly informs our minds in relation to what’s happening in the world and then determines how we react. The only problem is that all of our most important stored knowledge was learned when we were young and impressionable – some of the most important stuff being learned before we were three years old! So, if my dream is to rise to the top of some big company, or bring my breath-taking new software to an eagerly waiting world, or to settle down in my dream home in the South of France, what has what I learned when I was three years old got to do with the adult me?
The short answer is ‘no’ – the long answer is worse! Think about it, we get all our preconceived notions of our own inadequacy from our stored knowledge. You’ve got to consciously and deliberately, stop your mind focusing on that out-of-date stored knowledge – and the only real alternative is to pay full attention to the real world – the now. It’s not just the only time and place in which we all actually live, paying attention to now makes everything easier and makes you better at whatever it is your currently supposed to be doing. But focusing on now does not come naturally – so you’re going to have to cultivate it. And as the word, cultivate, suggests, this is something that you must do constantly and consistently.
And your best starting point is right at the beginning of each day – the old Irish proverb that a good start is half the job is spot on. If you don’t tune your mind in first thing every morning, you’re on a slippery slope that’s just too easy to slip down. Why’s that? Quite simply because you’re used to it, that’s how you’ve been existing for all your adult life.
So, tomorrow morning, take five or ten minutes to turn off the noise in your head. Sit down, somewhere quiet, shut your eyes and feel what it’s like to breathe. Feel how it is to sit on the chair. Hear how it is to really and truly hear all the background noises that your normal mind doesn’t notice. Take a few minutes out two or three times in the course of the day too to repeat the exercise. You could sit down in the park and see what it’s really like to actually simply look at what’s actually happening, you could hear the birds, smell the roses.
The secret to your success is found in your ability to concentrate – not on the future, not on your ambitious plans and dreams, but on the only what’s real, right here, right now.
