Take Back Your Mind: Greater Focus In 30 Days

In this economy that we're living in now, in this world of technological abundance, our attention is in high demand. It’s the most valuable resource for a company to try to win. In fact, there are billions of dollars to be made in the attention economy. And there's nothing wrong with that...except when we lose control of our mind. So throughout the next several days, my intention is to provide a simple guided meditation and a few exercises to help you take back your mind and focus your attention. That way you can decrease the distractions and be more present with what matters most in your life. The design of the course is simple. It’s meant to take around 20 minutes per day. Each day includes an overview like this, a guided meditation, and a simple reflective exercise. It’s specifically created to move from internal awareness to external action. In other words, to move beyond the meditation pillow and into your daily life.

This meditation series is designed to integrate into your everyday experience whenever you feel your ability to focus slipping away. That way you can consistently come back to focus your attention far more than if we simply allow the advertisements to take our mind from us. With that in mind, consider instead of sitting on your meditation pillow or laying down on a yoga mat, completing the meditations and exercises while sitting up, ideally at your office desk. Likewise, I worked with David Benjamin Sound in creating the soundtrack for this course. So do use headphones to get the most out of this experience.

In this course, I present a simple technique that will redirect the way the body reacts to the buzz of a notification. It will take effort on your part. Yet, over time, you will be able to use what was once a distractor to be a reminder to focus more intently. The journey begins with awareness. We have to become aware of what is really going on. And that's what we're doing right here. You became aware of it yesterday. During the meditation, you took a look at how your body reacts when the vibrating notification sound occurs. Then you took a look at how the sound interrupts your ability to focus your thoughts. That's step one, awareness. Step two is what we will be taking a look at today: rewiring the body’s reaction. We’ll explore how we can rewire the way that our body responds to the notification sound. At first, this may seem difficult. It’s a muscle that you're going to work on far beyond this meditation journey. Once we become aware of how to build this muscle, we gain back our power to choose where to direct our attention. And it’s time now to take back our power. Now, we can react in a way that empowers us. Now, we can choose where we focus our attention. So on day two, we step deeper into this practice. We rewire the way that our body responds to the notification sound. And we upgrade our operating system.

In this series, I present a simple technique that will redirect the way the body reacts to the buzz of a notification. That way, you will be able to use what was once a distractor to be a reminder to focus more intently. The journey begins with awareness. We have to become aware of what is really going on. You became aware of it in the previous meditation. During the meditation, you took a look at how your body reacts when the vibrating notification sound occurs. Then you took a look at how the sound interrupts your ability to focus your thoughts. That's step one, awareness. Step two is what we will be taking a look at today: rewiring the body’s reaction.

So far in this journey, we’ve taken a look at how the notification sounds we hear every day have an impulsive control over our brains and bodies. And the reality is, we've had many bells ringing for so long, that it's hard to keep track of where they all began. But we do know now that our bodies are reacting in ways very similar to Pavlov’s dog. The great news is that we can take back control, because unlike Pavlov's dog, we're able to choose our reaction to the stimulus. This is why over the last two days I've introduced The Rooting Technique. I asked you to take a deep inhale, curl your toes, and press into the ground. When we do that, from a state of relaxation, we remind ourselves to breathe. We retrain the body and the mind to see the stimulus, the buzzing notification, as a reminder to be present.

In today's meditation, you're going to be asked to take a look at one specific focus that you have in your life. This could be a personal goal or a professional goal. It may be helpful for you to take a moment before heading into the day’s meditation and ask yourself, “What is really important to me right now that would benefit from greater focus and attention?” You could always change it later on. In fact, the design of this course is so that you can return to it whenever you have a new project you’d like to focus on. You're going to apply The Rooting Technique to this focus. So that after this meditation is over, and you face stress, you'll be able to stay strong. That way, you'll be able to withstand the wind.