81 PART FIVE - THE 5 GUIDING PRINCIPLES Improve Your Focus Direct Your Attention Throughout the day, pick one thing to direct your attention to and try to hold your attention on it completely for three minutes. Allow only the thoughts that pertain to what you are focused on to remain in your head and gently move all others out. Notice when thoughts begin to lead you away from what you are focused on and consciously move yourself back to focus. Be Fully Present Another way to say this is to be completely immersed in the moment. The best way to practice this is to move through each of your senses and inventory what each one is experiencing in that moment. What are you seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing, tasting, right in that moment? Our minds like to drift to the past and the future and need to be disciplined. Like a small child, the mind wanders in curious exploration and needs to be brought back. Notice Common Distractions In a study on distractions at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, it was found that subjects were 20% less effective in their ability to focus on tasks. Each of us has our unique distraction triggers. Again, our senses come into play. Some are highly distracted by certain sounds or some by things that catch our eye. Notice what distracts you and then make note which of your senses are engaged. Quiet Things Down What goes on inside of us deeply affects our ability to focus. As the day wears on, what is happening inside can become quite frenetic, even without crisis or threat. Stilling the mind is the last thing we’re thinking about in our fast paced day, so it is important to consciously move it to the forefront of all those other thoughts and find a practice that can be done a few times a day to clear things and quiet things down. It could be as simple as just breathing deeply for five minutes or learning some meditation techniques. When you are able to be quiet on the inside it becomes much easier to focus on the outside. Increase Your Reception The ability to fully focus connects to your capacity to take things in without filtering, censoring or reacting. Like a radio, the better the reception, the clearer we hear it. Judging, reacting and reorganizing what is coming towards us to fit our comfort level or perceptions is like static. It takes away crystal clear focus. Listen to your self-talk as you are communicating with someone you feel is difficult or frustrating. Then make a conscious effort to stop all that chatter and just take in what the person is trying to express without struggling to formulate your own idea of what that is.
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