The Leadership Coach™

You Get What You Focus On

Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by Paul Andrew in Self-Leadership, The Leadership Coach™

Anyone who has bought a car knows about the impact focus has on what we notice. From the moment you really consider buying a particular model of car you see it everywhere you look. It seems as though there are ten times more of them on the road, overnight. That’s one of the powers of focus.

It’s true in life that in the end we tend to get what we focus on. For better or worse. Psychologists say the human mind is bombarded with 2 millions bits of information every second, of which we process only around 132 (a tiny fraction of what there is to notice!).

So how does your mind choose which to information to dump on mass and which to process? Your focus acts as a huge filter. If it’s not what you’re focused on, the mind generally deletes it… Even if what it ignores might be better for you than what you’ve chosen to focus on.

I’m often amazed at how people with a negative focus can find the negative in anything. I sat in a workshop recently where a woman defended her lack of confidence in achieving growth in her business by saying “well I just read the newspaper”… from which she had concluded the economy had her doomed to fail this year. Ironically, she had that day’s newspaper sitting directly in front of her at the time. The headline? “Victory! Rates Cut”. But she wasn’t looking for good news. Her focus was busy gathering evidence elsewhere.

So what’s your focus this week?
Is it time to step back, reassess the big picture, and realign your focus?
If you get what you focus on, what will your current focus be getting you five years from now?

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Tags: Executive Coaching, Keynote Speaker, Leadership Coaching, Leadership Development, Leadership Training, Mentoring, Paul Andrew, Performance Coaching, Personal Development