The Magic of Focus Power

When we are fully engaged with something so that our focus of attention is strong, riveting, and sustained, it feels good and is magical. We experience an economy of effort. Every thought, emotion, and action seems smooth and elegant. Our actions flow as if in an effortless fashion. We’re "in the one." We are in flow.

Casting a Spell for Focus-Power

What is the spell that needs to be cast upon us so that we enter into the magical state of focus power? What are the component elements that make up this empowering state? In Neuro-Semantics we call this laser-beam focus state a genius state. That’s because being all there with our resources and showing up so that we are fully present enables us to act with more congruence, alignment, and engagement.

1) Sensory Awareness in the moment.

Being in sensory awareness means being fully present with our mind and body. It means seeing and seeing, hearing and hearing, feeling and feeling. While that may sound easy, it is not. While any child can do that, most adults cannot. Most adults have lost that ability or only retain it minimally. Why? Because we can so easily move up the levels of the mind and get lost in the ozone of abstractions. When that happens, our mind gets in the way—our concepts, beliefs, understandings, etc. When this happens, we can no longer see the world innocently. We see th world as colored by our concepts and beliefs. The solution is to "lose our mind and come back to our senses."

Via sensory awareness, we are able to see and hear and feel afresh. We are able to just be aware and observe what is. This is a rare gift.

2) Running our own brain.

It’s hard if not impossible to focus if you are not in charge of running your own brain. Do you have that option opened to you? Is that a choice you can choose? Of course, to run your own brain, you have to know how to run it. To move to the place where we truly have choice in our live we have to have the ability. Without the power to choose, there is no choice. And choice means that we have multiple options. To only have one option is to have no choice. When we have two options, we have a dilemma, this or that. It is only through having a multiple choice list of options that we have choice.

3) Clarity of what we value as important.

Focus also emerges from clarity of priorities. If we do not have a clear vision of what’s important or choice of our priorities, we will not have a focus of attention. What’s important to us? Why is that important? What do we get from that? What do we understand about that? Focus weakens at the rate and degree that our clarity of purpose becomes less and less clear, more confused and ambiguous.

4) Trust of ourselves and the focusing experience.

The spell for focus must include self-trust. It is self-doubt that distracts. It is self-fear, self-contempt, self-worry. For us to focus on one thing and give our full attention to it, we need to believe in ourselves, and trust our ability to learn, decide, and choose. Anything less weakens focus. When we release ourselves to that which we’re engaged in and let go to the experience of focused engagement—we experience the flow state of top athletes in the zone. Then the magic happens.

5) Resilience in returning to focus.

In focusing our aim is not to create an focus and never lose it. Focus ebbs and flows as the stream of our consciousness moves and flows. Our aim is to more quickly return to our engagement when we lose focus. Losing focus is just part of the way "mind" works, returning to focus means we’re able to catch ourselves and re-evoke the focused state.

6) Challenged to sally out from one’s safety zone.

Czikszentmihalyi postulated that the flow state operates between the extremes of challenge and safety. With too much safety we feel bored; with too much challenge and we are overwhelmed and so feel anxiety. When we have a balance so that we have enough challenge to our skills to be drawn and attracted we move into "the flow channel" that’s just right for optimal engagement and learning. This keeps the excitement up without threatening the basic security.

Focus fades with the negative emotions of anxiety, insecurity, and demandingness as it does with boredom. In boredom, our focus weakens until we fall asleep, alertness fades.

7) Practicing the skill of focusing.

Focus is a skill and, as such, is learnable. The nice thing about learning how to "pay" attention is that as we learn to focus and then come back to our focus and to ignore distractions and let follow our interest, we become more skilled at it. Doing so necessitates becoming meta-aware of our focus so that we notice where our attention goes, what grabs it, how strongly it is grabbed, and what we can do to keep returning to our focus. What are the key variables in your awareness that supports a more intense focus? When thought balls pop into the court of your consciousness, just notice them and decide—decide what you most want.

8) A energetic sense of decisiveness.

It takes a decision to focus our attention on an event, person, or idea. And it takes a decisive state of clarity about intention, understanding, and purpose to say Yes to our attention and No to everything that would interfere, interrupt, or distract from that intention. Decisiveness is the state that drives focus. Indecision weakens focus and nurtures inattention and distractive attention.

In practicing focus, most physical acts (i.e., exercise, gardening, hobbies) because they are willed give us a way to develop our intentional capacity. William James suggested the practice of "the useless exercise" for those who want to strengthen their will power.

"Keep alive in yourself the faculty of making efforts by little useless exercises every day. Be systematically heroic every day in little unnecessary things; do something every day for no other reason than its difficulty; so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. ... The man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentration, attention, energetic volition and self denial in unnecessary things will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." (From Personality and Personal Growth, James Fadiman)

So What are the Secrets for Focus Power?

It was in my research on resilience that I first happened upon many of the key secrets of focus power. It was really an accident. I was looking not to understand focus, attention, or concentration, but how to model the state-upon-state structure of resilience. That led to the discovery of Meta-States. This model describes the levels of the mind which explains why and how we never just think. No. We think (and feel) about our thoughts and emotions. This reflexiveness of the mind creates our frames of mind and layers of frames—the matrix of our frames.

Accessing Personal Genius is a three-day training that enables participants to mix 12 essential factors or prerequisites of "mastery" to create the emergent experience of focus power. This describes the genius-like state that every top-performer experiences from Olympic athletes to world-class leaders and speakers, to inventors, to successful entrepreneurs, and even lovers. With focus power you will be able to do so much because you will be all there, in your best states, in the zone, in "flow." This is the state that makes attention deficit problems, stress, feeling defeated, blocked, etc. redundant.

Summary

My invitation to you is to check you the Accessing Your Personal Genius training. It is now being taught around the world by many Neuro-Semantic Trainers ... it is your introduction to Meta-States ... and it is your introduction to a world of focus power.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. invented Meta-States to give structure to self-reflexive consciousness in 1994 and so launched the Meta-States Model, Neuro-Semantics, and more recently the Matrix Model. See for much more about this ... and for a calendar of upcoming trainings ... and for Neuro-Semantic Trainers around the world.

FOCUS POWER