Whatever you Concentrate on becomes your Reality: The Power of Focus

To concentration upon something, whether real or imagined, is to focus on it. To focus on something is to attend to it or simply put, to pay intense attention to it. You and I if we wanted to could get sad at a moments notice, couldn’t we? Yes we could and we can do this just by concentrating on something we may have experienced in our past that made us sad. If you focus on something enough, picture it and think about it soon you will begin to feel it. The same is true for things that have not happened yet.

How you feel about things and the meaning you attach to a particular experience is all dependent on your focus. So how you feel about food and your feeling of pleasure when you eat is so because your focus is on eating for pleasure and comfort.

Focus must never be considered true reality simply because it’s just one view, one perception of the way things really are. Consider this, one day you get into a bus and see a young woman crying, we are likely to believe that she is sad or had some bad news or bad experience. You approach her and ask what’s wrong only to be told she just got the job of her dreams and that’d why she’s crying ‘tears of joy’; she is still in disbelief about getting the job. You see, because you were focused on her tears and what crying generally means we were sad for her, until we learnt the truth. So how you feel is based strictly on what you focus on.

What if one day your eleven-year-old son or daughter didn’t arrive home from school at their usual time? Fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes passes, how you feel is going to be determined by what you focus on. Do you begin to think in your mind that the reason they are so late getting home is because something dreadful has happened to them or maybe the bus broke down and another bus is picking up the stranded passengers and that takes time? Whichever situation you focus will directly affect your emotions. What if you had gotten upset with them and you then found out that they had soccer practice and you had forgotten about it? So be careful what you focus on as it determines how you feel.

It’s important to note that when we change our focus many times we don’t change our direction right away. There is often a lag time between when you change your focus and when your experiences and your body catch up. So we need to quickly start concentrating on what we want and not wait.

Your focus determines whether your perception of your reality is a good or a bad one and whether you feel happy or sad. So it’s important to learn ways to make sure you condition your focus to be as positive as it can be. You must take control of your mind and discipline or else it will play tricks on you.

To control your focus the simplest and most powerful way is by asking yourself some potent questions. You see, whatever you ask it your brain provides you with an answer and whatever you are looking for you will find it, but only if you ask. The more empowering the question, the more empowering the answer will be. So instead of asking, “Why did I fail my exam?” Where you are focusing on your exam failure, consider asking, “What do I need to do to get the grade I want?” this will bring to you a more empowering answer. It is very important to always use questions as a tool too change your life. They can literally change the way you feel about anything and hence change the direction of your like very quickly.

Psychologists will tell you that it’s not only what we focus on but also how we experience the world, which is dependent on how we gather information via the use of our five senses. We all have a tendency to develop and favour a particular way of focusing. Some of us are more visually impacted so what we see influences us more. Other people are more auditory, where sounds trigger our life experiences. These modes of experiences have within them specific elements of sounds, pictures, and other sensations that can be modified so as to increase or decrease the intensity of our experience. These elements are called submodalities. So we can create a musical rhythm in our minds and then take any part of that rhythm (a submodality) and change it to change your feelings about it. We can change the loudness of the drums in the rhythm, immediately changing the amount of intensity you feel about the experience.

By manipulating submodalities you can raise or lower your intensity of feeling about anything. This is so because they affect your feeling about most things be it happiness, sadness, or pain. When you have an understanding of submadalities you will be able to change how you feel about anything you experience in life and also change what It means to you and by extension what you can do about it.

You must discipline your mind and what you are thinking and also the way you are thinking if you would live a better life.