Four Ways to Focus Your Mind – and four practical applications to motivate you
Written by Craig Elliot http://www.Craig Elliot.com
Your mind is a powerful tool that can be used to keep you focussed, motivated and energised – whether as an athlete improving your performance, or someone wanting to lose weight.
But first you have to make things clear to your brain. You must “programme” it to be on-side with your goals.
You must determine what you want, and then be clear on why you want it.
1. Get clear on what you want
This goes beyond traditional goal-setting. We need to take things to another level to properly engage your mind-body system.
First, recognise the subtle difference between “doing something” and “what doing will give you”.
Start with this question:
“How will you know when you are there?”
Think about what you will see, hear, feel and know when you have achieved the changes, experiences and results you want. This forces you to go there in advance in your mind.
Begin with a brainstorm of all the things you want and pick out the most meaningful scenarios and experiences of being there – draw out the things that have the most meaning, emotion and energy. Choose scenarios that, when you think of them, make you well-up with emotion. Know that these are the things worth shooting for – the things that are going to move you and keep you on track no matter what.
Write it out as if it is real now. Write it like a movie or a great book that lures you into the story. Read it through morning and night. Make sure you are the main character in the story; seeing it through your eyes. When you read it out; do it in a “say, visualise and feel” fashion. You really have to feel the feelings of being there.
When you do this you create new cells of recognition, you begin to literally create new roads in your brain that will take you to your goal.
This is one of the most powerful things you can do. In all my experience with modern psychology, I have found nothing better to engage your system and create a more efficient and direct path to the behaviour and results you want.
2. Harness the WHY! Power
The next ingredient adds more power and energy to what you want.
When you look behind what really moves someone to do something and keep doing it, you’ll find it’s “why” power that drives “willpower”.
Simply put; if you have enough reasons, and big enough reasons to do something, you will do it.
Here is a quick way I recommend to get in touch with what you could call the real drivers of your behaviour. It will take your motivation to another level.
Grab a piece of blank paper, at least A4 size.
Draw a circle at the bottom of the pag to and write your goal inside (e.g. lose weight) Beside that write some of the things you need to do to ach eve your goal.
Then begin asking why (losing weight) is important to you. Then write what is important about (that) i.e. each of the things that come out of your initial question – then question that too and so on.
Write these in rising and fanning circles, so you move up the page with a new word or phrase in each bubble as you continue to question why each successive thing is important all the way up.
Here are the four central questions to use in this process:
1. What’s important about ? what else is important about……?
2. Why is …….. important ?
3. When I have ………what will that give me ?
So, for example, if health is something that comes up as important to you, then you must ask the same questions about health.
Keep questioning until you are sure you have exhausted all relevant reasons – I suggest even when you think you have it all, keep going or come back to it later.
You will know what the most powerful drivers that come up are for you. Then sit inside these most powerful reasons – imagine and feel what that will be like and view what needs doing from that perspective.
Once you have this, you have your most important reasons at a glance and in a way that usefully connects to what needs doing. This then becomes a powerful tool for staying connected to and coming through your most driving reasons each day to stay motivated.
3. Make your view serve you
Most people get lost relying on fresh desire, discipline, willpower and even logic to get them through.
In fact these faculties of mind are responsible for less than 10% of your behaviour. They will only really serve you well if you are attentive to your goal all the time – which would be well and good if other aspects of life didn’t demand your attention too.
What I’m about to share now is the real secret to what most people call, motivation.
If you want to really stick to a more rigid eating plan or introduce training or more regular/intense training into your life; here is the bottom line. It’s how you view it in mind, (what it means to you) what you link/associate in mind to doing it versus not doing it (or staying how you are).
Your mind drives your behaviour by association not by logic.
This is why no amount of logic seems to change anything. What becomes paramount then is; what do I associate to my goal? What have I linked in mind to my goal?
And here is the real crux of the matter – when you bring your goal to mind, how does it feel?
The most crucial part of the “will I do it or not do it?” deal is emotion.
Ultimately it comes down to how what you associate to something, feels. If the feeling is positive, you will consistently move towards it, if the feeling is negative you will move away from it.
We are pretty simple. We gravitate towards pleasure and away from pain. So, on a personal level, you need to ensure that what you link in mind to your goal supports the behaviour, daily choices, direction and results you desire. How it feels to you is your guide and the telling factor – if you are not doing what you know you should then you need to change what you link in mind to it.
Doing this will literally set you free and allow you to break out of any negative cycles of the past.
The liberating thing to know is that it has little to do with what’s outside of you and everything to do with how you present it to yourself inwardly.
4. Keep it to the fore
Anyone passionate and consistently motivated in a certain area, knows the importance of keeping their reasons for being passionate and motivated at the forefront of their mind.
Reminding yourself of, connecting to and coming through your “why” on a daily basis is the most powerful and effective way of staying on track. It will also connect you to the “what” in the most positive, motivating and useful way.