Written by: Maya Zack, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Focus skills aren’t just about learning, work or tasks you need to get done with minimal distractions. It’s about taking charge of where your attention is placed. And if you can direct your attention intentionally and at will, you can become the director of your whole life story.
Now you might be thinking – ‘Damn. I’m rubbish at focusing’. But it’s not an ability you either have or you don’t. It’s a skill you can learn and improve.
So first, how will taking charge of your attention change your life?
1. Be more in control of your thoughts & emotions… by not controlling them.
Thoughts come up from the mind with or without your authorisation or even participation. It’s just what the mind is there for – to offer us an infinite source of ideas. Some are useful and positive, and some are limiting, negative & sabotaging. Problem is, without being aware and in charge of what our attention follows, you often ‘accept the invitation’ to follow unhelpful thoughts.
But if you train your focus, you can choose which thoughts to follow. This doesn’t mean resisting or trying to stop thoughts. That doesn’t work, because that would actually be placing your attention on them even more, consciously or not.
Instead, being in charge of your attention, you can simply allow the thoughts to pass by, without following them around. You simply decide which ‘invitations’ to accept and which to decline, while acknowledging they’re simply options, ‘offers’ from the infinite pool of ideas of the mind. You’ll find that the thoughts then simply move on without you having to fight. So you get to be more in charge.
2. Become the master of your mind
Being more in charge of your thoughts means you gradually become freer of the mind altogether. It continues bringing up thoughts but you react far less. Slowly but surely your mind becomes naturally quieter. Like with any relationship, when you stop trying to control it, it’ll stop trying to control you. It begins to follow you instead of you following it. It becomes your servant, waiting for your instructions.
3. Be more unlimited
One of the things that make you an extraordinary human is that you’ve got creative imagination. This means you have the ability to create any thought whenever you want.
Because essentially everything happens inside your perception, your mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and imagined. This is key because it means that whatever thought you focus on, your mind accepts as true – and it responds accordingly.
So let’s say you focus on a time when you felt confident. To bring up this memory, your mind has to automatically create more confident feelings. So even though that confidence was in your past story, it’s being created here and now in the present.
So any positive feelings are in fact always there inside you – as resources & potential of your imagination. Once you’ve accessed the resources you want, you can increase them even more.
Now let’s say you can’t think of any confident memories. This makes no difference – you can still imagine what it would feel like to be confident. Or you can imagine what another confident person, maybe a role model, would be feeling. As long as you’re bringing it up in your mind, you’re automatically creating the resource.
So since your imagination is unlimited – so are you!
4. Be more accepting & let go of judgment of yourself and others
Now that you’re more in charge, you’re no longer going to be bothered as much by challenging thoughts, events or people coming into your life.
Why? Because you no longer feel threatened by them – you know you can allow them to be as they are – taking on what’s useful to you and removing your attention from what’s not. You’ll also care less about what others think of you and compare yourself less to others, as you can simply move your attention away from them back to yourself and your own mission – minding your own business.
5. Be free of limiting beliefs
Your beliefs drive everything you do, as well as your perspective and the resulting experience. And they’re simply the result of repetitively focusing on specific thoughts or interpretation of events. This has turned these thoughts into habitual and automatic. But they’re no more real or ‘true’ than any other random or new idea that your mind can come up with at any given moment.
Imagine your awareness is like a camera you can direct anywhere you like. You’ve been habitually using some sort of filter (which was probably placed without your conscious consent), and so you continue to get same-styled images. You’ve been using this filter for so long, you forget it’s there and the images seem to be a true reflection of reality.
But if you just shift your focus from the images to the camera, you can very easily remove the filter or change it as you like – opening up wider possibilities and getting completely different pictures.
6. Be more of a creator & achieve your goals more easily
Aiming towards a goal is the conscious directing of your focus around these three areas:
Vision. It’s a good idea to use your focus skills to get super clear and specific on what or where exactly you’re aiming for. Otherwise, it’s all a blur… you just can’t see where you’re going and it would be tricky moving forward towards this unknown.
Commitment. Having the right focus skills means you’re more able to concentrate on tasks, overcome distractions and procrastination and increase states of inspiration & motivation.
Expectation. Aka the ‘Law of Attraction’, which can be explained very simply in logical terms, this isn’t some ‘spiritual woo’ as some might think. You choose to focus on positive expectation; on what you want, not on what you don’t want. Because when focusing on what you don’t want, your mind still has to come up with that negative thing you want to avoid in order to understand your preference. Ever heard the saying “Don’t think of a pink elephant”…? And, going back to 4 on this list, along with the unwanted object, your mind will also bring up any negative thoughts and feelings associated with it, ultimately creating more unwanted states, feelings & events. Whatever you focus on – expands.
7. Suffer less
Pain is a natural & inevitable part of life. But it’s also subjective – and this too depends on where your attention is.
For example, top sports performers are trained to temporarily distract themselves from any pain by focusing on the end goal. Or think of a toddler who accidentally gets hurt but stops crying once their focus shifts to that intriguing flying thing in the sky.
Even more importantly, pain doesn’t necessarily mean suffering. Suffering is the continuous focus on & holding onto pain.
So sure, you’ll have some painful times in your life. But you don’t have to suffer. Being in charge of your focus means you can choose and decide to move your attention onto more positive stuff when you’re ready. Back to the camera analogy, whatever you focus on – you experience more of. When you zoom in onto an object, it fills the whole frame. So you might think it’s the only thing there. But if you only zoomed out, you’d realise it was just a small part of the bigger picture.
8. Have better communication and healthier & more productive relationships
So maybe it’s starting with paying more attention to names during first introductions. Or you might focus on genuinely listening or even shifting your focus to another’s point of view to understand them better, instead of just planning out your own response in your head.
You can also choose to focus on the positive in people instead of on what you dislike. You could focus on others’ positive intentions rather than their action mistakes. On giving & sharing instead of taking or wanting.
9. Be a solution finder rather than problem dweller
Your mind thrives on challenges, dramas and problems. This is because it wants to serve and so these keep it busy thinking & being ‘useful’. It’s also more ‘entertainment.’
So when you’re faced with a challenge, just keeping your focus open & directed towards the possibility of getting an answer, makes all the difference. Being able to zoom out into the bigger picture also helps. And since your mind loves questions, another trick is to focus on the right ones so that it comes up with right solutions.
10. Be more present
When you’re in charge of your focus, you can direct your attention to be Here and Now at will. So instead of getting caught up in thoughts reliving the past or imagining the future, your attention is in this very moment.
Not wasting time dwelling on past pains, losses or regrets or worrying about stuff that hasn’t happened yet allows you to enjoy life a whole lot more and to deal with anything you might be facing in a far more resourceful way.
Here are 8 things you can do to start training your focus:
Look. Try staring at something for as long as you can, be it a spot on the wall or candle flame, just look at it while minimising thoughts, concentrate on whatever it is you’re seeing, keep bringing yourself to what you’re looking at.
Listen. Attentively. Whether in conversation, or to music to the exclusion of everything else. If in a busy or noisy place, try to zoom in on some specific sounds or voices for as long as you can, or alternatively simply try to ‘shut out’ the noise as you place your attention on only the space you yourself occupy.
Feel. Any sensations coming through your experience, either internal or by external touch. Pay attention to them, pleasurable or not, and simply note to yourself what it feels like. You can also then try to zoom out and focus on the space in which this is all happening.
Break small routine habits. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Get dressed or wash yourself in the shower in a different order. Drive or walk somewhere using a different path to what you’re used to and notice any details about this journey.
Find your ‘centre’ in the mess. Whether it’s walking through a busy street or being surrounded by people stressing out, bring your attention to the space you alone occupy and try to ‘isolate’ yourself in that way.
Mindfulness. This is training to bring your focus back to just one thing – whether it’s your breathing or an activity you’re doing.
Meditation. Trains you to move your focus from the thoughts, to you, the thinker, or the space that allows for the thoughts.
Hypnosis. An even more powerful and quick way to take charge of your attention. Think of it as next-level meditation – easier, faster, deeper states that are also focused towards certain outcomes more directly.
With some training and practice this freedom of choice will become more automatic and I promise you, it’ll profoundly change your life.
So focus skills literally affect every aspect of your life. Learning to direct or hold it, you become free to create your whole perspective and therefore experience. It’s far easier than it sounds when you’ve got the right tools.
Maya Zack, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Maya Zack is a peak performance specialist and expert mindset coach & hypnotherapist. Based in the UK, she works internationally, mainly with women entrepreneurs as well as with businesses that aim to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
She helps business owners, leaders and teams free themselves from mental & emotional habits or blocks that prevent them from experiencing more success or slow it down. She has developed her unique signature 8-week step-by-step mindset makeover programs for aspiring as well as already established entrepreneurs that change thinking & feeling patterns on the deepest, subconscious level, reprogramming their minds for success so that new habits & behaviours quickly become automatic and effortless. She believes it’s so important to our lives, joy and fulfilment to be doing what we love and daring to go for it regardless of the outcome. So many are held back by fear and she wants to change that. She believes success happens from the inside out alongside mindset mastery, and that as humans with imagination, we have the incredible capacity to become free, powerful creators of ourselves and our lives.
