How to Focus

I was trading voice notes with a friend recently, and they were becoming lengthier and lengthier with each turn. Almost like a competitive sport, hitting the ball back harder by going deeper in our reflections and shares with one another.

We were exploring and sharing our respective intentions for the year ahead. We quickly progressed beyond the surface level ‘what’ and dug into the juicier ‘why’.

It’s vulnerable to share what’s important to me. It’s even more vulnerable to share why it’s important to me, at this moment in my life.

Once I take the time to dig into why something is important to me, there is a resonance and connection to it that makes it feel real and even urgent. It becomes less of a ‘this is a good thing to do’ and a ‘this is really important to me, and I’m clear on why’.

For example, I’ve decided to prioritize my physical health this year. A simple intention and probably one that the vast majority of the population have also set in the past few weeks for themselves. However it becomes more interesting when I dig into why and I realize how personal such a commonplace intention can be.

My why is from a place of fear.

Today, I am healthy and feel great. Sleep, exercise and nutrition are all in balance and feel stable. However I understand intellectually that as I continue to age, my body and brain will continue to deteriorate. And ahead of the decline beginning, or perhaps it’s already begun and I have not yet felt it, I want to give my body the highest possible starting point to decline from.

I was on a date the other day and the woman said to me, “I feel like you’re going to live to one hundred years old”, to which I didn’t bat an eye at and confidently responded “probably”.

Living well for a long time is not the natural course of life though. The natural course is to decline. Looking at my parents, who I feel have not aged particularly well, I’m reminded that I want to be proactive and preventative with my health.

Again, my why is driven by a fear of my eventual decline. And fear can be a really effective motivator. One that brings about intense focus. The fear only became clear to me through reflection though.

Reflection is the most powerful tool I have found to focus.

Reflection can take many forms. For me, it is most often through journaling, meditating and conversing one-on-one with close friends.

Through open and vulnerable reflection, I find clarity. Clarity of how I feel about something, some place, or some one, and from that clarity can make decisions that are more grounded in my present reality.

For example, last year my investment portfolio did not do as well as it could have, should have, would have, had I had greater clarity on what was important to me in this dimension of life. The market went up 24% and my portfolio did not.

Over the past few weeks, I have taken some space to reflect and audit my decisions over the past year and can see clearly now why I made whichever choices I did. Which ones turned out to be positive and which ones were negative. I now understand my choices and have made peace with reality, versus beating myself up about it.

Just having the experiences without taking a moment to reflect on them will likely lead me to repeating the same experiences blindly. The experiences I have don’t turn into lessons and learnings I need unless I reflect about them.

Focus is often thought of as a way to improve productivity. And we live in a productivity-obsessed culture. I know at least I’ve been obsessed with productivity my entire adult life.

Productivity though isn’t about getting more done or working more efficiently, or working longer hours (on whatever the intention is, be it professional, health, financial, etc.).

Productivity is about getting the right things done, well. And to get the right things done, it starts with being able to focus on the right things.

I have had many examples professionally where I was working very efficiently towards the wrong thing. It’s counter-productive, as it gets me faster to the place I don’t want to be. Reflection helps me focus on the right things.

How to focus is often talked about. How to reflect is rarely talked about and I believe is the key to focus.

Back to the voice notes with my friend, I reflected out loud to him that it doesn’t really matter what intentions we set. It is our ability to reflect on them regularly which is what turns our intention into reality.

And that is how I learned to focus.