SUCCESS

Focus to Achieve

It is an important premise of cognitive psychology that we get more of whatever we focus on. In fact, where we place our awareness has an affect on our lives in a big way. If we choose to focus on pessimistic thinking or negative aspects of our lives, then we will only increase these feelings and compound them. Vice versa, we can make a choice to focus on what is good about ourselves and our lives and that way, positive aspects of ourselves will become enhanced and then stronger and stronger as a result.

When I bought my first car many years ago, a little yellow Renault Five model, I had never seen this particular model or colour before but of course, within half an hour of driving around in it, what do you think I saw? Yes, dozens of yellow Renault fives. They had always been there of course but it wasn't until my awareness and focus changed that it was more obvious. In the same way, if you change your focus to things that you want to attract more of, you will notice those things more and more. There is even a small organ in your brain that is responsible for this. It is known as the reticular activating system, which in turn, is part of your hypothalamus and is responsible for changes in focus and new awarenesses.

As a practicing counsellor and therapist, I often use this approach with clients when I ask them, "where are things going well in your life?" even if just in a small way somewhere. Most people can find small areas that are fine. Then you can build on this by changing their awareness to how they know that this is a good area. Ask them what is different about this area and then expand on that one thing more and more. This may sound and seem simplistic but it forms the basis of a particular technique known as solution-focused counselling or coaching, and gets its effectiveness from concentrating on only what is going well and identifying why. People's awareness can move quite quickly to finding solutions instead of focusing on problems areas of their lives.

In fact, some research from the last 15 years has shown that solution-focused coaching was responsible for 75 percent of improvements within a large group of clients who suffered from mild to moderate depression. That is an amazing finding as traditional cognitive-behavior therapy usually used in this type of treatment has only been about 40 percent effective.

It does seem then that where we place our focus and awareness is vitally important to emotional health and well-being and can strongly affect life outcomes and goals.

If we can take one thing from all of this, it is this: Be aware of what you do want more of. Do not place your awareness on what you don't want as you may get more of it. Think the opposite and place more awareness on that as a goal. This will aid you in moving towards outcomes instead of dwelling on the problem areas in your life.

Lee James Heather 

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