Tips 068: How To Improve Your Focus (Part 1 of 2)

I sometimes find it difficult to focus. I also feel this lack of focus is holding me back from achieving my goals.

But is focus something that is only reserved for a certain type of person? Or can we all learn to improve our focus? 

For me, focus comes in two categories: focus for emotions and focus for productivity.

Sometimes we only focus on things that make us feel angry, sad or afraid. Despite this lack of utility, we continue to focus on these things anyway.

I believe that we need to look for strategies to remedy this kind of focus. The kind of focus that affects our emotional well being. And we need to remedy this type of focus before we can start to be productive.

So in this week’s mindset podcast, we will be exploring the type of focus that affects our emotions. This episode will be part one in a two part series on focus. In next week’s mindset podcast we will look at focus for productivity.

What do you focus on when it comes to learning Spanish – what you get right or what you get wrong? 

Do you think about your mistakes in a positive light or negative one? 

I often find myself lamenting mistakes. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big mistake or a little one. At times I can spend hours frustrated by some silly little moment when I forgot a preposition or made another typical error with a masculine or feminine noun.

If you are at all like me, you need to find tactics to take your mind off small mishaps because this kind of frustration will only slow your progress. You need to improve your focus around mindset because once you can do that, you will be able to find quality focus for productivity and improvement.

So have a listen to this week’s podcast and take me up on my mindset challenge. The challenge is to try to answer the following questions everyday for a week.

Questions:

• What is the thing you know best about Spanish? Where is your strongest area? (If you having a hard time with that question, If you were to have a strongest area what would be?)
• Why can you be successful in Spanish?
• What are you most excited about with learning Spanish? What are you looking forward to doing the most?
• What are you grateful for? About Spanish, language learning or anything in your life?

If you find the technique helps you with your focus for emotions then keep going. There is no need to only do it for a week. If it is working for you, then keep going and building that language learning mindset.

Quote from the episode:

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” – Daniel Goleman

How else can you improve your focus?

Podcast: Play in new window