The Power of Focus

"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." 

-Marcel Proust-

Focus is one of those words that gets a lot of play in the personal development field, and even though it is a somewhat cliche topic, it is talked about a lot for a reason.  Let's see if I can put a new spin on it for you.

I heard the word focus a lot growing up from parents, teachers, coaches, and culture in general.  It usually showed up as someone telling me "just focus harder", or "you've got to buckle down and focus more".  Well, believe it or not, that was not always the most useful of advice, firstly, because I wasn't entirely sure what I needed to be focused on, and secondly, I didn't really know how to focus harder, or where to go to get more of it.  They don't exactly sell it down at the local department store do they?

I've since learned a bit more about the power of focus, so let me share with you the best of what I know now.

The first question that it seems to me is worth asking is, what is focus?  Well, good old dictionary.com says focus is 'a central point, as of attraction, attention, or activity'.  I would phrase it in terms of our brains capacity to observe and attend to information coming in through the senses.  Now, we can't be simultaneously aware of all of it at once, so we take the flashlight of our focus, and shine it in different directions around the dark room of life.  For instance, you can have the majority of your focus on what you physically see right in front of you, like I see my cat laying on his back on the floor, but I'm not simultaneously aware of the physical sensation in my left middle toe. Suffice it to say, we have the capacity to be aware of things, but not everything all at once.  

Okay, now that we have a better idea of what it is, my next question is, how much focus do we actually have to work with.  If we can't be aware of everything at once, which would likely cause us to go insane, how much can we focus on at any given time.  Well, it turns out there was a bit of research done by a guy named George Miller, on just this very subject.  According to him, we are taking in approximately 2,000,000 bits of information through the 5 senses every second.  He then determined out of those 2 million bits, we have the capacity to focus on approximately 156 bits in any given moment, which is roughly translated into 7 +/-2 chunks, or 5 to 9 things.  So, let me ask you this, is 156 bits different from 2,000,000 bits?  You bet it is!  

This makes it painfully clear that not only are we not aware of everything, but we can only focus on a very small portion of the whole in any given moment. This clears up one of the problems surrounding focus, and that is believing that we can be aware of everything, and see all possible angles to any situation or circumstance.  This is a big problem because the second you believe there is no other way to see it, you close yourself off to possibility and creativity.  On the flip side, when you see that where you are shining the flashlight of your focus is only illuminating a very small piece of the puzzle, that affords you the option of looking in a new direction, and finding different perspectives and possibilities.

Think about it this way. Imagine you had never seen a computer before, and you came upon one that had a search engine displayed on the screen and someone had just searched for the words 'struggle and hardship'.  There would be images and phrases relating only to those words right?  Well, if you had never seen a computer before and didn't know how a search engine worked, you might mistake what was on the screen for all there was on the computer and the internet.  This is how most people use the powerful search engine that is their mind.  When we were young the words struggle and hardship got typed into our minds, that's our 7 +/-2 chunks, and then we go around thinking all there is in the world is struggle and hardship.  But we don't realize that if we simply began to search for love and abundance, that is what would begin to come up on our screen.

We live in a huge quantum soup of potentials, and there is almost everything you could imagine in this world.  The reality is, your experience of life will be based on what you've got the search engine of your mind searching for.  And whatever is not typed in, that doesn't mean it's not there, it just means you won't have an experience of that.

If you're wondering how to tell what your mind is searching for, it's easy, whatever experiences you keep having over and over again, those are the ones you are searching for unconsciously.

In very simple terms, you will always tend to see, whatever it is you are looking for.  How is this useful?  Well,  if you don't like what is coming up on the screen of your experience, then look for something else.  I invite you to suspend the belief that what you want isn't possible.

WEEKLY EXPERIMENT

Here's how you can begin to put this to use in your own life:

1. Notice that what is showing up in your awareness is a very small piece of the whole, and the whole likely contains what you want as well as what you don't want.
2. Decide what you would love to see and experience more of in your life(peace, acts of kindness, love, warmth, opportunities, learnings, etc.)
3. Actively search for what you want:
• Use a real search engine for examples.  
• Ask questions that will steer your focus, like 'Where is the opportunity in this?' or 'What do I love about him?'
• Print and Post what it is you want to see and experience more of in your life.  Post it in the car, in the bathroom mirror, on the fridge, on your desk.
• Ask other people about where ________ shows up in their life?
• Make a list of all the ways that what you want is already in your life.
4. Enjoy your new experience of life

The more you bombard your conscious mind with what you want to focus on, the more you will see it in the world, and the more you will create of it in the world! 

So, if you are feeling stuck, before you go rushing off to tell your friends and family how stuck you are, simply focus your gaze in a different direction.   You may begin to notice that you're not actually stuck, you just forgot to look around and see the way forward.

Love and Light,

Tyler