A Mason's Work

A lot of folks are confused about what focus is because we usually describe focus as a true

false.

Either you have focus or you don't or you're focused or you're not.

And while there is some truth to that statement, there is a ton of things about focus as a concept

that are a little bit more sort of interesting.

For example, focus can be done at different depths.

So you can focus on objects near to you or in the middle ground or far away.

You can focus on things in time that are along similar kind of distances, right?

What's happening right now?

What's happening in the future?

What's happening in the distant future?

When we talk about focus as a tool that works together with attention, we can really start

to make some covers of meaningful ground.

So focus is one of those things where if you can figure out what the appropriate level

focus is for the task you're trying to do, you can really make a ton more headway.

If you use the wrong type of focus for the task, things don't work.

So if you remember, perhaps when you are maybe younger learning how to ride a bicycle or

drive a car, you may remember focusing on the ground right in front of the vehicle, right

in front of where you were driving or riding.

And when you did that, you had a tendency to do something called oversteering where you

would steer more than you needed to accomplish a smooth ride or get to your outcomes.

And that hyper steering that oversteering prevented you from having that smooth ride.

And it also put you in a position where you weren't able necessarily to make proactive

decisions about upcoming turns and things like that.

And in fact, it made changing direction much, much more sort of dangerous and risky as

a behavior because you were steering relative to the pavement directly in front of you.

On other circumstances, that type of focus and where you put that attention is entirely

appropriate.

For example, if you're walking on uncertain terrain or in shaking ground or you're walking

through like a tree covered swamp or any of those kind of scenarios, that type of direct

focus on the ground immediately in front of you is entirely appropriate.

In fact, if you don't have that, if you are looking too far in the distance, you'll find

you end up with a twisted ankle because you've missed a placement of your footing relative

to a rock, etc., etc.

And what happens with attention relative to focus is attention is going to pull your focus

to a different spot.

Oftentimes it'll pull it to the present moment when you don't want it there.

It'll pull it to a past moment when you don't want it there.

It will pull it pretty much anywhere the engineers of that attention grabbing sort of mechanism

want to take you.

And so if attention has the ability to pull away your focus, then what you develop as you

cultivate focus is the ability to retain your attention in a given domain or given space.

So when we look at things like the doom scrolling kind of behavior where you're on your phone

kind of perpetually, you're not cultivating focus there.

And in fact, you're giving away attention.

When you do this, your focus becomes kind of wherever your attention demands and not where

you want it to be.

Which means you're not able to direct your actions to the best possible outcomes.

So if you can start to cultivate your own attention and then determine where your focus should

be, then you should be able to be much more enabled to achieve the outcomes you're looking

for in life.

Now, how do you determine the right level of focus for what you're doing?

How do you know you need that near term focus or that longer term vision, which is more

useful in driving or more useful in achieving longer term objectives?

It really depends.

When winning every single step is critical to success, you want a focus that is directly

in the present moment at all times.

When you want to have a bunch of at-bats to build a capability so that you can develop

in the longer term, you want some of the behaviors you undertake to become less confident

and more conscious, then perhaps a focus in the middle ground might be more appropriate.

When you are developing plans for how you want to go about achieving your longer term objectives,

obviously that long-range focus does make a ton of sense.

And so when you move from planning to doing, you'll move from the longest term focus down

to the shortest term focus.

And again, stopping at the level that it makes sense to in order for you to achieve your

goals.

But if you have a mechanic here or at least an understanding of how these things fit together,

you should be better enabled to achieve stronger outcomes.

When you couple that with a strong sense of the present moment, like we discussed in

the last episode, you should be able then to really move to a higher level of performance.