Improve Mental Focus to Help Solve Your Business’s Biggest Problems
I caught myself in an old pattern last week that really makes me frustrated when I see it pop up from time to time. It’s a pattern where I’m struggling to remain focused on the thing that’s most important in my life and in my business in that moment. It wasn’t an issue of prioritization where I was working on the wrong project, or a pet project on the side instead of the most important thing that maybe I dreaded working on. Instead, I had all of those pieces right - I have my strategies in the right order, I have my tasks in the right order, the most important thing that I needed to be working on in the moment is what I was working on.
Yet, as I was trying to focus my mind on this work - which wasn’t five minutes of work, this was a three or four hour project that I needed to complete - I found my mind constantly drifting back to something that made me really frustrated from earlier on in the week. And this happened time and time again - I’m working on the project, I find myself daydreaming about what had happened before, I find myself a little emotionally activated, I’m actually feeling angry, I’m feeling a little bit tense, I’m feeling upset about the situation that bothered me, although the situation had nothing to do and did not apply to what I was working on.
I had in that moment a crisis of focus, and a crisis of mental focus. I had all my business strategies and my tactics correct, but I didn’t have my personal mental focus in a way that I could really thrive in the project I was creating. I found this really frustrating, and I developed a little mantra around this and it just sort of popped into my mind, and it was kind of my own way of having a laugh about this problem that I noticed coming up time and time again through this project and through this work. I said to myself out loud, “Purity of thought. That’s what I need right now. I need purity of thought, I need to be focused on thinking about the things that will help solve the problem that’s right in front of me.” And then I’d find myself distracted again a few minutes later, and I literally said out loud, “Purity of thought.” I had a little laugh about it, I don’t know where the phrase came from, and pulled it back into what I was focused on in the moment.
It’s so interesting, and made me think about how much energy we use thinking about these things that have nothing to do with what we actually want to be thinking about, or worrying about these things that have happened in the past and continue to pop back into our minds again. Focus and mental focus, which is something we can train for, is key to making sure that our emotion and also our cognitive ability, our conscious mind that’s thinking about and solving the problems right in front of us, are focused on the task at hand.
So, this week’s challenge is to use a focus tool called Tongue, Finger, Breath. The concept centers around lining up three different activities that you’re doing with three different parts of your body, and then using your mind to follow those activities. It’s a bit of a hack in that it lets you slightly overwhelm the parts of your mind that might want to be distracted and wander off to something else, and practice focus on these specific activities that you’re doing intentionally as part of the Tongue, Finger, Breath tool.
Enjoy this focus practice this week. Hopefully it helps bring you back to the mental focus that you need in order to apply the best, most brilliant parts of your mind to the biggest problems that you’re solving in your business right now.
The Tongue, Finger, Breath 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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