Choose Your Focus

In every moment you have the power to choose your focus. How will you focus? Where will you focus? What will you focus on? These questions almost seem too difficult to answer. There are so many options. But in the big picture there are always only two options—love or fear.

Most of us will say, “Well of course I choose love, who wants fear?” Yet in an internal sense this is not what we tend to do.

Love and fear are broadly generalized feelings. To get more specific about what I mean, love is positive and feels good, as in clear, open, peaceful, optimistic, confident, inspired. Fear is negative and feels bad, as in confused, closed, frustrated, tense, angry, depressed.

Our thinking minds (left brains) have an ingrained tendency to serve us fear. This habit is passed down from the generations before us and has been developing for our whole lives. When we’re not paying attention, the left brain feeds us one negative thought pattern after another, because that’s what it knows.

We don’t question this because it’s been happening for as long as we can remember, and now it seems normal.

It’s also easier. We go with the negative flow because we either forget that we have another option, or we decide that it’s too hard to think any other way. We let our brains do the thinking for us.

You don’t have to constantly replay every situation from your past that didn’t work out, or beat yourself up over the things you should have said but didn’t, or obsess over all the things that might go wrong in the future.

You are the director of your brain, and you have the power of focus.

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” – Mark Twain

Take worry as an example. Are you worried about something? Notice that your left brain has served you scenarios of all the things that might go wrong in the future, and you are focused in and feeling some degree of fear about these possibilities. Right now you are reinforcing your brain’s habit of negative thinking.

Is this what you want to be thinking about? Do you like feeling stressed out and afraid?

If not, now that you see what’s happening, just stop it. Stop engaging in negative thought patterns that feel bad to you. You have that right and that power.

Now you have the freedom to focus on love. Is it possible that something will go right in the future? Maybe you’d like to consider a positive outcome and focus on that for a while. Or maybe you’re okay just remaining peaceful in the moment. If you like a challenge, take a seat, find a detached perspective, and watch this thought pattern play itself out. Whatever you decide, it’s all up to you.

When you use your power to focus on thoughts that feel good, you are retraining your left brain.

As you engage in this training over time, you will form new thought patterns that feel better and stop wasting so much time and energy worrying about things that will most likely never happen.