I believe there are thousands of articles, books and courses about how to focus better, adapt focus, focusing on this and that … you got it. I personally found most of the information available either non relevant or pure based theory so I thought about putting things in a new perspective based on my findings and my own experience. First, what is focus? By the way, I’m viewing things as an entrepreneur, speaker, trainer & coach, I don’t have any medical credentials so please keep this in mind.
The roots of understanding how focus works stay in having a basic knowledge about Reticular Activating System or RAS so take a look an what Wikipedia says about the subject. So if everything around us is 100% our conscious mind can process only about 15% of the information available to us at any moment. I will not dive here into the subject conscious mind vs unconscious mind, this is the topic of another article but will let Wikipedia to tell you more about what the unconscious mind is. One example: if you want to buy a convertible, from all the cars you see on the street you will start to spot the convertibles or if you want to buy a certain car brand you will start seeing more cars alike. Those cars were also available before but you didn’t focus on them.
What focus does is to shape the 15% of the information which anyway is processed by our conscious mind and perceived the way we want. So, in life we can focus on the positive and we will see the positives or we can focus on the negative and we will see mostly the negatives.
What comes next?
As my favourite coach Tony Robbins says “Where focus goes, energy flows!” so this is the reason why when you focus on the bad things in your life, you will spot more of them, will allocate a lot of energy in the area and as result you will get more and more of them.
Fortunately focus works like a muscle, it is trainable so if you find hard to focus on something use my story as an example and progress further.
For me, what works for growing my investments and the passive income sources is to keep money in investment accounts or to automatically direct money into such accounts from my active earnings. I’m doing this especially due to the fact that if I keep them in bank deposits so they are easy accessible I find a lot of reasons to break the deposits and spend the money. But with the investment accounts the withdrawals take 3 to 7 days so the process is a little more complicated. This worked for me and helped me to become more organised with my finances.
Also I keep a reasonable stake of cash at my disposal all the time but there are periods when even this stake drains and even if due to my investments I am rich by most standards in the real life I encounter moments when I am broke. Of course, if there is a life or business threatening matter I access the investments accounts, otherwise I don’t. So, you will ask… what this have to do with the focus? Here comes the story: I was very close to concluding a new real estate transaction with a commission in the almost 10k usd range.
It was the beginning of the year and the investments were ok but my regular cashflow not so good. We had two amazing family parties, finished my cash stake, used the debit cards of both my parents and so on. By the way we as family don’t develop ourselves using loans or credit cards. We have some credit cards with collateral cash deposits but mainly we create our own economy with the advantages and the challenges which are assumed doing this.
So the transaction was concluded and signed over two rounds of negociations but I just want to tell a little bit about what happened over the two days.
Day 1: Big rain and snow and … by happening the wipes of the car I’m using stopped working. I barely could reach the place of negociation, and took my daughter from the school without producing any accident. In the meantime the gas from the car was so low that it showed me “0” kilometers left but finally or by chance managed to reached home safe. So I didn’t use the car for the next day. There are other cars available but they are used by my colleagues so didn’t have other options for the next day.
Day 2: I used the undergroud going in the city and spent one hour before meeting in a fast food restaurant where I worked and also consumed something with the last 1$ and something from my account — it was a chocolate shake, the smaller size. When I came home I took the underground towards my daughter’s school and after that as the pass expired I had only the option to take the tram (and didn’t actually paid for the fare but it was a short one). In the morning or the next day the bread was low do I bought one regular bread — which I rarely do and went to my parents to work for two hours because the internet at my house was restricted due to non payment.
Fortunately at the end of Day 2 the deal was concluded and everything went back to normal as the commission was paid very fast.
Probably you will say that I’m insane because I put myself in such situations just that i’ve found the moments before breakthroughs very useful to my own growth. I say breakthrough because it was the first real estate transaction concluded in the beginning of a new year.
But in the middle of this little nightmare I’ve directed my focus into giving all I could give during the negociations, the value added was recognised and the deal was beautifully concluded because I’ve selected from my surroundings only the information, thoughts and feelings which could help me to conclude that transaction and just did everything I could to pass all the other situations and not be affected by them.
What I want to point here is that no matter where you are in your life or business focus on the good things, on the important ones, on the stuff that matters and you will succeed. The path can be weird sometimes but don’t be afraid to look bad in the eyes of others because it will not matter long term.
Also, don’t stay in comfort zones because you will not grow there. Put yourself out of the comfort zones as often possible and you will encounter massive growth.
Originally published at medium.com