I spent an enlightening weekend at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of NLP. John Overdurf gave quite the pre-conference workshop. One of his main themes was that of focus.
The idea of focus is very popular in personal development literature. Where you direct your attention determines largely how you will feel. If your focus is on all your troubles (the “bad stuff”) you will probably not feel so great. If you focus on good things, solutions to problems and things to be grateful for you will feel good. We all have “good” and “bad” things in life, but our focus is crucial in determining our emotional state. So, what are you paying most of your attention to?
John added a new twist to this. He explained that when we have a problem, we often make it our focus – it becomes the foreground of our experience and everything else is in the background. But if you think of that problem in comparison to everything else in the background in that context, everything that is not the foreground, the problems seems quite small.
Test this out. Take a problem you have and notice what you are focusing on. Do it now while I wait. Ready? Now, consider everything else in that context that you were not focusing on.
And let’s take this one step further. Consider EVERYTHING else hat you were not focusing on; everything in existence that is the background; the weather, what you had for lunch, the sky, the planets, your goals, your friends and family, squirrels… EVERYTHING!
Any problem you have is tiny compared to the totality of existence. By recognizing this you can balance things out instead of making a mountain out of a mole hill.
John created a simple technique based on this which I used to assist a client this evening. He had had an unpleasant discussion with a family member and couldn’t get the conversation out of his head. In about 90 seconds he was feeling completely different and a moment later was telling me about the great night he had last night out with friends as if nothing bad had happened.
So, out of all of existence, what will you focus on?
