Where is the Focus?

Transcript

I’d like to ask you this magical question, where is the focus?

So many times in life things happen to us in some form or another. Maybe many days go past without incident, we don’t even think about the things that happen in that day to make it go smoothly.

But then one day someone is mean to us and cuts us off in traffic or we have a customer who is quite disagreeable and of course the natural tendency, I don’t know why but this is what tends to happen is that naturally we focus so much and even though that’s one person out of 20 or 100 or 1000 we give that person so much of our mental energy and focus.

It’s kind of a cruel trick of the brain. The good thing is we have the ability to exercise our presence and discernment in how we use our mental energy. So we can say that person was quite disagreeable, they didn’t speak to me in the best way.

This is not to excuse being rude or anything like that but the point is within ourselves there is this ability.

When these things do happen we can say one thing is “I hope I never behave that way”. A lot of times people will do things unconsciously. They’re not trying to bother us but they are not fully aware of how they affect other people.

Say if you’re walking down the street, I remember once my friend Bob had a broken arm and he’s walking down the street in the cast and he noticed how many people were so oblivious to what was going on and sometimes would almost walk right into him even though he was there injured with a broken arm in a sling.

So in that situation we have this opportunity to say “I commit to being more conscious when walking down the street, I will be aware of the people around me. I will take extra care for those around me.”

Not always easy to do, hard to follow through on it. Little by little we make these small changes and commitments in our lives and at least we can begin that transformative process. Then we can also say “I focused on that one customer who was mean to me, what about all the others?”

Next time you have a pleasant customer or even just a regular customer, even if someone just orders what they want and moves along you might say to them “thank you” and make it a genuine thank you not just exchanging a pleasantry but literally thanking a person for being calm and present and especially if they’re pleasant, wow, so much the better.

We all have that opportunity every day to ask where is the focus, what do I want to focus on? And which direction is going to give me the most joy and gratitude?

Where is the focus?