Manage Your Focus

Manage Your Focus The way you think drives the way you feel. When faced with a difficult or frustrating situation, you can choose to focus on the problem, engage in negative self-talk, and focus your emotional energy on worrying and complaining; or you can acknowledge what is challenging, discipline yourself to see the big picture, engage in productive self-talk, and focus your emotional energy on finding a solution or on enduring the challenge. Make a note (this is important) that a positive attitude does not ignore problems. It does not gloss over hard issues or disregard what is challenging. In fact, a positive attitude actually sees the situation more accurately and thoroughly because it does not lock-in on the negative aspects of the situation. A negative attitude tends to be narrow, limiting, and rigid. Once a negative attitude finds what it is looking for (which it almost always does), it stops looking and stops thinking. A positive attitude, on the other hand, tends to give greater perspective and insight because it stays fully engaged in the search for a solution. If you think managing internal thoughts to produce a positive, proactive attitude is merely a hyped-up motivational technique, consider the research that confirms the effectiveness and power of this mental discipline. The works of Martin Seligman (see his book Learned Optimism) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see his book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience) are good beginning references. Here is a snapshot of what Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his studies: “How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experience. A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness. The most successful people, the happiest people, are those who learn to take charge of what happens in the mind.” Simple discipl