How To Improve Your Focus as an Entrepreneur
Let’s talk about the concept of focus. Not just focus like we might traditionally think about it, maybe from the standpoint of prioritization or having a to-do list and being focused on the things that are on that to-do list.
Let’s talk instead about focus in our minds and the ability to have our mind be specifically working on a thought or a project or even thinking about a specific emotion we want to have. The challenge can often arise when we’re not meditating, when we’re not using the process of meditation to focus our minds down around something specific. You can do meditation using the focus technique when you’re looking at a very specific object, or you can do a type of meditation where you’re simply trying to let the mind be empty and then observing the thoughts that pop up.
Either one of those, if you think about it though, still require a certain level of focus and returning the mind back to something, whether that something is a thing or whether that something is nothing, as for the other type of common technique used in meditation.
When you don’t have good mental focus, you might be haunted pretty regularly by a couple types of demons that make a little harder inside of your head to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish:
The first one of those demons is negative thoughts - that moment when you realize, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t thought that,” or “That’s a scary thought.” Maybe you’re thinking about the failure of your company, or you’re just having some sort of emotion pop up that’s telling you something scary is coming up or that you should dread something. But when you’re meditating regularly and training that logical, focused, thinking part of your brain - which is our neocortex, the newer, developed part of our brain - instead of that underlying, emotional part of our brain. Meditating regularly and training and building that muscle around focus can make it a lot easier to look at those negative thoughts and let them go and bring your attention back to the things you want to think about or the things that you’re working on.
The second demon that can pop up on a regular basis when you’ve fallen out of that practice of regular meditation is racing thoughts. This could be racing thoughts of any type, even really exciting thoughts. We spoke with an entrepreneur recently who shared that he was having trouble sleeping, and we talked about what was going on in his life, and it wasn’t a bunch of bad things, it was actually a bunch of amazing, really exciting things in his personal and professional life. His mind was racing about all of these thoughts and he was having trouble falling asleep because his mind was just going, “Thought A, thought B, thought C,” and just back around again with new thoughts popping in, and there was so much energy and excitement with that racing thought pattern. Again, that’s another opportunity where focus, the ability to break out of that pattern of whatever might be popping up into our minds and instead focus our minds on the things that we want to think about and the things that help move us forward in that moment.
Here’s your challenge:
Use the Meditation tool in the Founders First app and meditation practice to work on training that ability in your mind, that ability of the neocortex to make decisions about what we want to think about, and to look at and analyze emotions that pop up into our mind. It’s our mind, but we can also observe it and through this meditative process, we can look at those thoughts and emotions that come up and decide which ones serve us and which ones don’t.
When we have a strong ability to refocus the mind, often built through this meditative type of practice, we can refocus our minds, let go of the things that we don’t want in there, and move towards the things that we do.
The Meditation tool is one of many tools available in the Founders First mindstate tracking app for entrepreneurs. See all the tools and get personalized recommendations on how to best invest your time each day based on your current mindstate by trying the app free for 7 days.
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