Attention – The Focal Point Of Your Life
Want a more enjoyable and successful life? Then be aware of what you are paying attention to and focusing on.
You carry around an invisible magnifying glass and use it when you apply your attention to something or someone. The attention is where you place your focus, and it grows in importance in your life depending on the amount of attention you focus on it and the length of time you do so.
In the gym, you may decide to develop your bicep muscle, so you grab hold of a suitable weight, and you do curls. The more you do in repetitions over days, weeks, months and years will be directly proportioned to the size of your bicep. You are putting your attention and focus there, and the results become apparent after a few weeks.
You do the same with your thoughts if your thoughts are focused and attentively applied to something or someone this to grows due to your desire to concentrate your mental energy in this direction.
When you fell in love with someone were your thoughts not exclusively on them and your budding relationship? When your child was born your thoughts were on them at the exclusion of all else, and your love and bonding with this newborn baby developed rapidly.
Attention is non-judgemental, it is merely the magnifying glass enlarging the importance of something or someone in your life.
However, attention, although non-judgemental, is still subject to the emotional feelings of being positive or negative about something or someone. Whatever thought process you choose, whether derived from positive or negative emotional feelings, is what will grow and likely eventuate in your life.
I must confess that I have a secret hobby. I used to be a low handicap golfer in my youth and enjoyed the pressure of playing competitive golf. I seemed to thrive under pressure and put it down to my father, a past National Golf Champion, placing the equivalent of 5 dollars in the cup of a hole on the practice green. If I could sink ten out of ten putts from 15 feet away from the hole, then I could keep the money. Putting like this took concentration, focus, attention and a positive mindset of self-belief.
My confession of a secret hobby? When I watch any sport on TV, I study the body language of the world’s top sportspeople and how they allow their attentive thoughts and actions to influence their play. I then have secret bets with myself as to their current attentive behaviour affecting the remainder of the game they are playing.
Those sportspeople who get annoyed with themselves and show frustration put their attention on their annoyance and this usually negatively affects their mindset, tenses their muscles and stops the free-flowing “no- mind” process of simply trusting their swing and being “in the zone” where effortlessness and non-attachment to results occurs.
Those who keep a positive mindset, have a smile on their face, have well-founded self- belief, stay loose and relaxed, remain focused and attentive and achieve the state of “no- mind” by getting “into the zone” usually win the day.
Do you have the ability to respond to what is occurring now with a positive mindset of attention, focus and self-belief or do you react with frustration and annoyance and have a negative mindset of attention and focus on what went wrong and keep your thoughts there?
For those with the positive attention and focus to ensure that what they are within, as their well-founded self-belief, is superior to any external circumstances that occur and affects them in some way. For these people await the laurels of victory in life.
Two quotations I often use in my various free books that deals with such a positive attentive mindset are:
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me- adapted from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I will either find a way or make one- Hannibal circa 218 BC when told by his Generals that he can’t possibly cross the Alps with his elephants.