How To Protect Your Attention and Develop Laser-like Focus

Summary

If you don’t want to waste your potential, you must learn to control your attention In this video I will show you how to.

Transcript

If you don't want to waste your potential life, you absolutely must learn how to protect your attention. Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance, will transform the unproductive, overwhelming and focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So we want to talk about one of the most important topics in this channel, it is how to essentially design a life that you're actually proud of how to create experiences are important to you. And everything starts by mastering your ability to pay attention to the things that matter, like you think about it. And we've discussed this time and time again, at Channel, there's a 7 trillion digital economy that is built upon the successful hacking of your prefrontal cortex. Some people call it limbic capitalism.

So essentially, these are the apps and data or services that rely on giving you the right dopamine head so that you get hooked into service and you keep using them. And obviously everything that is addictive, it is not well suited for you to build something great in the long term, right? So you need to fight against that you need to learn how to use those apps how to navigate this attention, economy, this limit capitalism to create the life you want. And this discussion, which may seem very contemporary may seem very modern has been at the heart of the psychology field from the very beginning.

In fact, one of the first psychologists, great psychologists and 18th century William James America, he said that man essentially create experience by choosing what he pays attention to. So in other words, if you want to control your life and control the quality of your experiences, you need to learn how to control your attention so that you can prevent others from hijacking it and getting you hooked to things that just do not serve you in the long term dirt skill is called attention management. And once you learn how to do it effectively, you can do a radical 180 Turn in your life because getting what you want, and essentially influencing the reality becomes much easier once you know how to master your attention management. Once you do this life becomes more meaningful productivity skyrocket, you experience a lot more life satisfaction, and essentially, everything else becomes easier.

So this video is all about teaching you exactly how to do it. It is a primer of the same framework that we walk clients through to help them achieve exactly this transformation go from undistracted and unfocused to laser like focus in just about eight weeks.

But before we get into it, remember to LIKE subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss on any of the juicy videos are released every week, we have no upload schedule.

So ring the bell, if you want to be notified and be the first to learn and apply everything we share. Every mastering your attention essentially boils down to controlling your environment, both the external environment and the internal environment. External is what sits outside of yourself internals, what sits within and outside of yourself, we can find physical and digital environment, a physical environment is you guessed it, everything that is physical that has an impact on your attention. So that can be other people that may come to distract you that can be just nudges that you may have in your day to day environment that can distract you from the task at hand. It can be pings can be rings, it can be everything. And anything that just does not lead you focus.

So the first step is to make an audit of your environment in which you work to see if there's any element that is conducive to distraction. Now you're talking about people, there's probably that co worker or that teammate that always come visit you or interrupt you in some way. Well, you need to create curfews boundaries that you can enforce, to do deep work, because only through deep work, you can get to high quality work that essentially builds carrier capital, as Cal Newport would say.

So once you've mastered the physical environment, there goes the digital environment, which is the culprit of most problems with attention management these days, what we encourage our clients to do is to understand what are their patterns of behavior using digital devices. So what are the things that they do that compromise their ability to focus? How many tabs do they open at once? How many apps do they check everyday? How much time do they spend on their cell phone? What's the total time usage they have across all digital devices, not only the smartphone, make an inventory of the time you spent there and you most likely find that if you are the average entrepreneur, you'll probably spend upwards of three hours just on your smartphone, all of that needs to go because all of that that business model is based on keeping you hooked to the screen. As soon as you unplug and you train your brain to not get hooked again you will find the ability to control your internal environment right. So step number two is all In your digital environment and remove all sources of distraction, what I do specifically myself is I check the phone twice a day one would be right before starting work. So I can catch up with anything that happened during the night or in other parts of the world. And then I will check it again before bed. So it's a two hours before bed after I'm done with my workday. So if you try to contact me at 11am, on random Tuesday, good luck, you I'm never going to pick up the phone, what I'll do is I will gather all the phones and I will call back those that I believe makes sense. I call them back at the end of the day.

Now, once you have mastered the physical environment and the digital environment, time comes to master your internal environment. And here I like to separate between three things. One are your behaviors, your natural tendencies, to your emotions, what things create strong emotions that may derail you from focus. And then your thoughts I'll start with behavior behavior is crucial. As you know, we are creatures of habits, the things we do repeatedly are what will eventually build our characters. And throughout life, we may pick up behaviors that are not conducive to the state of deep work and focus that we'd like to foster in our life.

So again, just as we audited our environment, both in the physical and the digital, it makes sense to understand what are your key behavior patterns, one just start working example will be how long does it take you to open a new tab on your focus? Do you have any nervous twitch of checking something new? Once you are trying to get focus? Chances are you do because if you're in training, high performance, you have these natural behavioral tendencies that you need to tame if you want to create that high quality focus. So make a list of all the behaviors that are preventing you from staying on task for two hours, which is the ideal goal.

But then two emotions, what things happening in the external environment, creating strong emotions, every time you feel surprised, or fear or anger, what are the triggers? What are the things that are triggering those strong emotions so that you can either remove those triggers or understand how to create a better emotional response towards them both approaches work, emotions are the key in long term success. Those that learn how to lower their emotional violence and remain in control at all times will eventually have the upper hand so do not disregard this as something that you shouldn't be focusing on. We all experience emotions from time to time, and it really pays off to understand what are their natural inclinations, so that we can devise an environment that doesn't bring negative energy into our lives.

And then finally, your thoughts. As you might imagine, we all have thoughts, the mind is always wandering. And some of these stores may be recurring, maybe even obsessive, and they're not helping you focus on the task at hand. They're not leading you to complete attention management mastery. So in the same way that you will audit your emotions, I will encourage you to what are your thoughts? What are the things that are recurring in your mind that you should address, if you truly want to liberate that capacity for focus, something that is very helpful here is having some sort of meditation routine or something that brings the stillness into your life. So you can learn how to audit your mind from an external perspective, catch yourself mid thought, and make sure that thought doesn't prevent you from getting so this is it.

This is a primer on what is a framework or work our clients through so they can gain control of their attention because unless you do this, it is very hard to make progress. If you're constantly battling against distraction. If the entropy is all around you, and everybody's getting a slice of your time and attention, you will not achieve the goals you set for yourself. So make this a number one priority. If you spend more than 30 minutes everyday on your smartphone and you allow yourself to get distracted by co workers or family members if you do not have proven protocols to cut any negative behavioral thought or emotional response in order to foster better focus. You should definitely focus on that because that's a key of peak performance in business.

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