Have you ever wondered what is your most precious resource in your life? For me, it is my time. Time is everything, and therefore maintaining focus in my daily life allows me to be efficient and make the most of my time. Focused moments are easier to come by when I want them and when I want to find ways to keep my focus. This can be as well your choice. You train your mind and master it.
Focusing is essential for anyone who is serious about doing great work. In our daily lives, we all battle to keep attention. Handling distractions prevents our brains from focusing on a task as we struggle to get things done. But how can you train your brain to minimize those distractions and induce that focused state in yourself?
Using entertainment as a training program for your brain
It is a great way to teach yourself to break free of distractions, enjoy a good story, and learn what it takes to focus. Why that you might wonder. Imagine what is happening when working toward the work goal actively or reading actively. Can you go from engaged to bored and mentally drifting at any point? Yes, of course. We all know this. Can this happen when you are reading or listening to a great story? Yes, of course, it can, but just decreases when you absorb what you are consuming and you actively pay attention.
This is why creating a story will be a great tool to maintain your focus. It gives you more engagement and provides a means for visualizing ideas and questions. When you decide to focus on something, the brain goes through two steps to sort and understand information. Visually you take in all the information in a scene and start processing what will be your main topic, then the main topic branches, what you need to start with. The second part involves focusing on one aspect you want to pay attention to for each branch of the respective topic.
Here are 07 exercise stories that you can create in order to maintain your focus:
01. We can start by creating a story about what you think it means to maintain your focus. Be creative. Have fun when fervor telling this story to your friends. Make a free ride out of this. If you do this, it can be a source of inspiration for maintaining your focus in your day-to-day life.
02. Write about what inspires you and what you feel. If you do this, you’ll be able to define the main focus of what inspires you and get a mental picture of the action plan structure to get where you want to be.
03. Write a story about one of your failures. Tell it to one of your friends and not forget about the fun part. When creating such a story, you learn to anticipate to be prepared for challenges and to maintain your focus until you reach your objectives. If you make a wrong choice if you have a bad day, you will learn to see it as an opportunity to learn to review and try to figure out what went wrong. Try to learn from your mistakes.
04. Tell a story on why you believe your life is a wonderful gift. If you do this, it helps you enjoy life to the fullest. It can also increase your focus on your personal objectives and your effectiveness.
05. Create a story about how good you feel when you accomplish what you are trying to do. Write about how great you feel. You may want to think about how our people have done this and so can you. If you do this you will learn to have goals clearly before you start. You will start to have clear results in your mind. If you create this story, you will also get clear on what the guidelines are for the task ahead. Clarity makes it easy to focus. You get clarity on what level of quality you need and what constraints you might face.
06. Create a story about something that makes you happy. If you do this, you will learn to focus on the good things in your life, that make you happy. You will also learn to recognize negative thoughts and find positive thoughts to replace them.
07. Create a story centered on why it is important to be able to achieve your goals. You lose focus instantaneously if what you are doing is not important. Therefore, such a story will help you find interest in the work you do and maintain your focus.
In the end here are 5 benefits of creating stories for maintaining your focus,
- You will become better at prioritizing what’s indeed important for you and planning the day.
- You will gain a better ability to master your high-level priorities and your daily to-do list.
- You will better identify if your techniques, schedules, and relationships are working and you will better focus on making the best out of them.
- Creating stories helps reduce stress and increase your effectiveness.
- These stories will contribute to building your confidence.
So, I hope we have convinced you to do both exercises provided in this article. In the end, visualizing a story keeps you more engaged and provides you with a means for visualizing ideas and questions therefore increasing and maintaining your focus. Thank you very much.