Focus

Daniel Goleman

What’s in the book for you?

We are prone to umpteen distractions in the modern world. Focus (2013) gives you guidelines in sharpening your focus on important things amidst various distractions in your professional and personal life.

High performance requires attention.

Most of us face an urge to respond to WhatsApp messages or Instagram posts while working on something important. This will result in our state of partial attention where our focus intermittently shifts from one thing to another. Distractions waste our time and capacity to concentrate on a subject, thereby reducing our flow in discovering and learning new things. Distractions will also weaken our ability to select the important things to be focused on, in our life. Build up strong selective attention. When you can select your focus area, it will help you work focused, amidst any distractions or stimuli. When you work fluently, it will enable you more time to reflect and insight, which will aid your better performance.

A balanced mind helps to be attentive.

There are two kinds of minds; bottom-up and top-down mind. The bottom-up mind is responsible for your automatic and routine mental actions. Driven by our emotions, these actions are very fast and impulsive. A top-down mind is responsible for slower actions like planning, reflection, learning new skills, etc., which requires your voluntary attention and self-control. Paying attention to one thing involves a push-pull action between these two mindsets.

Open awareness and outer focus is a necessity. 

Maintain an open awareness. This will help you to be receptive to new ideas and develop creative ideas that may help you to do tasks that require imaginative, inventive, or original thinking.  Preserve some time to self-reflect, organize your memories, and get new insights.  

Don’t restrict your focus just to your immediate environment. This will make you prone to distant threats. Extend your focus and have an idea of the future scenarios that may arise so that you can be proactive in accounting for them.

Improve your willpower

Achieving a goal requires willpower which results from strong focus, motivation and determination. Willpower can be developed throughout your childhood and adulthood by doing what you love, something that reflects your personality. This will get you focused, determined and motivated to win it. It will gain you willpower and self-control to face anything while on the way to achieving it. 

Be empathetic.

To be fully interactive with others, be empathetic. There are two kinds of empathy; cognitive and emotional empathy. People who have cognitive empathy will see the world through other’s eyes yet they won’t be able to feel others’ feelings. This allows them to manipulate others for their interests. Emotional empathy is a physical phenomenon in which we can sense others’ feelings within our bodies.  Even though these empathies allow us to see and feel others’ situations, it won’t make us sympathetic, that is, it won’t let your spirit be affected by others’ feelings. So an ideal way is to have an empathetic or detached concern.

Who is a good leader?

You become an efficient leader based on your level of focus and self-awareness. A good leader should be aware of your limits. Stop merely focusing on your team’s output, try to identify and develop your workers’ potential. Rather than being so critical of your employees, appreciate their small achievements and hard work. 

When you are leader focused and clear about your organization and its targets, you will be able to clearly communicate and convince your subordinates about their work. 

Moreover, a good leader will focus on all aspects of the company so that it enables the exploration of new opportunities for their organization.  This will help you build a strong and productive organization.

Meditate to be focused. 

You can strengthen and grow your attention with the help of meditation. The key is to have meta-awareness which is the awareness of your mental actions. This will help you keep track of your attention. Attain the ability to sense when your mind starts wandering. When you notice yourself drifting away from your area of focus, register it and attempt to refocus your attention on one particular thing, say your breathing. Whenever you lose your focus, repeat this exercise. Practicing this one-pointed focus meditation will help strengthen your ability to focus on your important targets.

Happy thoughts aid your success. 

Positive thinking will make you imagine your feelings when you finally succeed, this will change your mentality towards taking risks and open up your mind to explore new things which will motivate you to move forward. 

Focus on your strengths and the things you would enjoy doing rather than focusing on your drawbacks and impediments you are likely to face. This will make your long term goals possible. 

Summary

A focused yet relaxed life will ensure you success.

#IAS Academy in Chennai
#IAS Coaching in Chennai
#Best IAS Academy in Chennai
#Best IAS Coaching in Chennai
#IAS Coaching Centre in Chennai
#UPSC Coaching in Chennai