“He who grasps too much, grasps too little” is the famous popular saying that reminds us that our ability to achieve what we want is not based on deploying skills or strategies that help us to be “in everything”, but rather the opposite: the greater our ability to focus, the better our ability to achieve results and obtain what we set out to do.
However, although this idea is simple and we can verify it over and over again in our daily lives, the truth is that the ability to concentrate and allocate energy and capabilities to a single purpose is not an easy task. My intention, in this brief post, is to share with you three recommendations that you can start practicing immediately and that will help you educate your mind to be more focused and, thus, enhance your ability to achieve the results you are looking for.
The first thing we have to consider is the enormous amount of information or distracting elements to which we are exposed in our current life. The internet, a long list of applications on our phones, where social networks play a relevant role, plus the elements of life and the “real” day to day life of each one, brings a huge amount of elements that distract our mind, confuse our thoughts, stir our emotions and lead us to dissipate what will help us achieve what we are really looking for.
For this reason, the first thing I want to invite you to do is to choose well what sources of information or distraction you are going to leave in your daily life and what you will take out, what things you will stop consuming mentally to keep your thoughts “clean” of that which does not add value to your life and that on the contrary, only contributes to you being in a state of low capacity to expand your potential. Just as a fact, people who obtain higher results in happiness studies do not consume news, what will you take out of your environment so that it does not hinder your mind?
A second element that is very important to be able to define, has to do with the “What”, that is, to establish a goal or objective that you want to achieve. To be able to be focused we need to establish what we will be focused on, so I recommend you to make a list of the things you want to achieve in your life (in the different aspects of it, health, finances, relationships, personal development, career plan, etc) and you can prioritize them, so you can put first on the list what is really more important to you. Please, do not be guided by other people’s criteria or “what people will say”, finally it is your life and your own challenges, the only competent person to give an opinion about this order is you.
Having this list will help you to know on what subject you will put your mind and your energy, and in this way you can move forward one thing at a time. Many times advancing in your first goal will help the second one to become more concrete as well. On other occasions they are goals that do not have a direct relationship, however, being able to conquer goals helps us to improve our self-esteem, boosts our confidence in our own abilities, increases our motivation for achievement and helps us to learn about ourselves and how to achieve better results in other areas of ourselves.
Finally, it is essential to keep in mind that the ability to put perceptual focus on something is like a “muscle” that we can train, so it is important that you can apply this constantly in different things you do during the day. Just as that other famous saying goes “every day has its eagerness”, it is important that you apply this in blocks during the day. Put more simply, if you are going to cook, your head and capacity is in that, if you are going to watch a movie focus on it, if you are going to work that your mind and talent is focused on that task. The focus can be trained in every moment when we give ourselves with commitment to achieve a specific result at a time.
In this way you will not only learn to concentrate more and better, but you will begin to concretely expand your ability to achieve the results you want in the most diverse areas of your life. I invite you to focus on this because it will help you achieve results that until now you may not have imagined that you have the capacity to achieve.