Shift Your Focus – Shift Your Life: The Power of Focus

Welcome to Format Free Fridays at AskDrDarcy.com, the one day a week when I break the format of answering your questions and I dispense that which we rarely welcome in life:  Unsolicited Advice.

We become what we think about.  When we think about pleasant things, we feel good.  When we think about unpleasant things, we feel down.  Not rocket science, right?  Why then, do we ever allow ourselves to focus on negativity?

I’m not advocating becoming a Pollyanna.  Reality has its place in the world, and sometimes reality isn’t positive.  What I’m suggesting is that focus is an ability – an emotional muscle if you will, and that there comes a point in every situation, scenario, and intellectual concept wherein one should ask oneself whether a line of thought is promoting productive thought or unproductive thought.  Let me clarify the difference.

Productive thought can involve analyzing an unpleasant situation so long as there is an actionable end-point.  Let’s say, for example, that I wrote my wife an email in which I badmouthed some friends, but instead of sending the email just to her, I accidentally responded to an email with multiple recipients and I pressed “reply to all.”  Short of following up with an email to those additional recipients to apologize, there isn’t much I can do by way of damage control.  Focusing on what a fuck up I am is only useful if there is a lesson I can take away from the situation.  Perhaps my lesson is, slow the hell down, Darcy. Stop multitasking, because you clearly can’t. Beyond that sentiment and making a personal commitment to limiting my tasks to one at a time, there isn’t much I can do change things.  So why continue to focus on my mistake?  I’ll tell you why:  Because humans have weak emotional muscles and shifting one’s focus away from negativity, even when the negativity can’t lead to something useful, takes more self control than most of us have.  

I can take the same scenario and find something positive about it.  What if my level of embarrassment over my mistake were such that I found inspiration in learning how to single-task?  When I focus on what I want rather than on what I want to avoid, I feel motivated, excited and goal-oriented.  Not only is this a sign of resilience, it’s a sign of honing the power of focus.   I’ve taken a negative situation and I’m not ignoring it, rather, I’m using it to fuel me to do things differently in the future.

When we focus on what we want rather than on what we don’t want, we also tend to get ideas about how to get what we want.  We’re more likely to notice resources that can assist us, we’re more likely to feel motivated and we’re more likely to take action toward getting what we want.  Conversely, when we focus on what we don’t want, our creative juices don’t flow as freely, we tend to feel down, negative, and apathetic.  In addition, people who might otherwise become resources in our lives don’t want to listen to us bitch and moan which results in us feeling isolated, unsupported and lonely.

Let me take this a step further:  I’m going to say that whenever you’re feeling badly, it’s because you are thinking about something that you don’t want or you’re thinking about something that you want to avoid.  And I’m making the audacious statement that this line of thinking not only makes your feel like shit, it’s self-indulgent.  That’s right.  It’s an example of someone who has weak emotional muscles.  Furthermore, adding insult to injury, this line of thinking promotes and attracts more of what you want to avoid.

Now I’ll return back to my original point: We become what we think about.  When we think about pleasant things, we feel good.  When we think about unpleasant things, we feel down.  Now that we’re all in agreement about the importance of focusing on what we want as opposed to focusing on what we don’t want, spend the next week paying attention to yourself when you’re feeling down and ask yourself the following 3 questions to break the cycle of negative thought:

1.     Is this something that I can change? If so, what actions do I need to take to change it?

2.     Is this something that I can’t change?  If not, how can I accept it?

3.     If this is something that I can’t change, am I willing to put forth the emotional energy to change my focus?  If not, I have no one to blame but myself for my lousy mood.

Happy Friday.