Focus
Use your focus or die. Those were the options. And I had already signed the liability waiver that said death was certainly possible. The cold can kill you. And the cold will kill under the right circumstances.
Let me explain.
******Disclaimer ….. do not try anything in this blog post without consulting a doctor or a trained professional…..***********
The ice cold water was like a thousand needles sticking you at once. It was the kind of cold that could take your breath away from the shock if you let it.
“Remember no talking on the way to the ice cascade. We must use all the power of our focus. Make sure to keep your eyes out for your buddy at the ice waterfall. We don’t want to loose any one. Use your focus. Then we will go into the water together, get ready…”
We began the 10 minute trek to ice cascade. The temperature outside was well below freezing. I looked ahead at the frozen-over creek. We continued the quiet trudge through the snow, following the person in front of us. The only sound was the crunch of snow, the sound of your heart beating, and the sound of your own breathing.
You could see your breath.
And you could feel the intense focus of the group.
As we approached the ice waterfall, Everything was frozen except for the pool of water immediately beneath the cascade of water or waterfall. The pool of unfrozen water immediately around the waterfall was about 5 to 6 feet deep, at it’s deepest. The only reason it wasn’t frozen over like the rest of the creek was because the water was moving.
I’d gone into the water the day before in board shorts for exactly one minute. And I remembered how cold it was yesterday as I prepared to get into the water for the second time. The memory was crisp from yesterday, right before I got in the water yesterday what the instructor said had stuck with me
The instructor was an Austrian, he sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger:
“If you get in dah vater der, vift no training. 30 seconds ambulance. 1 minute hearse.”
I remembered the water had been so cold it seemed to suck some of your life force out.
We stopped at the park benches next to the ice waterfall. I imagined people during the summer months enjoying a lunch time snack next to the creek as they began their hike.
People in the group started removing their warm winter jackets, and snow boots and stripped down revealing only their board shorts.
I put on my flip flops. My feet were blistered from the cold exposure the day before.
I stepped forward and followed the person in front of me into the freezing cold ice water. The intense focus of the group continued into the water. We were all breathing with the same intense focus.
I wadded in forward in the ice cold water until it was up to my waist. As I moved forward I did everything I could not to slip. I kept wading until the water was up to my neck. The entire group formed a circle in the ice cold water and we continued to breath in and out calmly. There we would stay for another 6 minutes.
There was no inner monolog. There was no self talk. Just the sound of breathing and the cold.
And that’s when I realized that Focus is a way to achieve superhuman feats.
This is a continuation of Three Keys To Emotional & Sales Mastery – Part 2
Where we discussed the 3 keys to managing your emotional state and turning yourself on, as a quick reminder they are:
Physiology – Your physical body, and how it feels at this moment.
Mental Focus – What you are paying attention at any time effects how you feel.
The Language You Use With Yourself And Your Clients – How do you frame things with your language?
What you focus on is what you will feel.
Let me explain.
If you ask a question, what is the best thing in your life right now?
This is redirecting your focus with a simple question.
And If I ask a follow up question:
How does this make you feel?
If we have rapport, you will search for those good feelings and feel them. All this was done with a few quick questions.
or
If I ask you the question, what is the worst thing in your life right now, what do you hate?
This is redirecting your focus with a simple question.
And If I ask a follow up question:
How does this make you feel?
If we have rapport, you will search for those bad feelings and feel them.
The truth is we are doing this to ourselves almost every single day. And we are the ones who control what we focus on.
The fact that you are reading this means that you’ve chosen to redirect your focus for a moment and I don’t take that lightly because:
The ability to focus single-mindedly on your most important task or goal is what sets apart the successful people from the failures.
Success is easy disciplines repeated daily.
Failure is neglecting to do easy disciplines every day, over the course of many years.
Focusing on the daily disciplines is the key.
Focus is the key.
What is focus?
And How do you attain a higher level of focus?
The fact that you have read this far into this blog post means that you have a higher level of focus then the majority of people. Check out this slate.com article about how most people won’t even scroll through an article.
The vast majority of people focus on things that are not important or will not get them a higher level of sales in any way. Don’t major in minor things. Don’t spend time focusing on what won’t serve you.
You can focus on why things are not working right now or focus on what you are going to do right now to turn it around.
You ability to focus is like a muscle, and like any muscle: if you want to strengthen a focus muscle it requires training.
The true challenge is the many different distractions and diversions in your office environment, on your phone, in your email inbox, in your mail. We are constantly being bombarded with different marketing messages trying to get your focus and attention.
Your Focus is truly your inner power.
Our true inner power is the ability to direct our mind our focus and attention on what we want in life.
Many people focus on what they don’t want. It’s going to be hard to get what you want if you focus on what you don’t want.
One of the quickest way to strengthen your mental focus and to be able to control your attention for prolonged periods of time is to practice some form of meditation.
The type of meditation is not as important as the act of focusing the mind single-pointedly like a laser beam. Natural light on it’s own may not be that strong but with a focused laser beam you can cut through steel.
Think of your mind like a magnifying glass. When you place your attention on something it comes into sharper focus.
Your mind also naturally deletes what you are not focusing on as you can only hold 7+or- 2 chunks of information in your attention at once. Your mind will delete other parts of your experience you are not focusing on.
Your mind will cut through goals like a laser beam when you focus all of your attention on the goal.
One of the biggest challenges I see for sales people is they have a lack of mental focus or a lack of clear goals. They get distracted by the day to day. They loose their focus when they need it the most.
Focus is energy and energy is focus. Where focus goes energy flows.
For years I had attempted on and off to meditate. As I had always heard that meditation was good for you. After failing (or what in my mind I considered failing at the time) to meditate consistently, I gave up on traditional sitting meditation.
I looked at long distance running as a form of meditation. In a way, it is, because meditation is directing the mind to focus on something specifically. The act of focusing the attention creates more clarity and clarity is power. What you focus on, it be the breath, or a single sound or mantra repeated does not really matter as much as working to control your level of attention and focus.
I found myself trying a number of different meditative practices but nothing really stuck besides running until 2017.
Let me explain.
I listened to a Tim Ferris pod cast with Wim Hof, the Iceman. Wim has 28 world records and the conversation was very interesting intellectually. As many things are, like reading this blog post it’s stimulating your brain and you are taking in information about me listening to a pod cast but you don’t get the same experience as listening to a pod cast yourself.
There is a certain point where understanding something intellectually is not enough. You can understand what it is intellectually to be excited but actually feeling the emotion of excitement is a completely different experience, than reading or hearing about it.
Yes, you can describe it and yes, you can talk about it but the map is not the territory. The language used to describe something is not the same thing as the thing being described.
And I thought to myself, that’s really interesting that this man has been scientifically proven to be able to influence the autonomic nervous system. And this is something that science thought was not possible. Wim Hof proved science wrong and is literally at the edge of what we know and what we don’t know, Check out this vice.com documentary on Wim Hof.
That was it though. I thought that it was an interesting idea but in my head I’m thinking,
“Yes I know how to breath and yes I understand meditation is a valuable tool. I don’t really like the cold so while this is interesting intellectually I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. ”
Do you ever have an idea that keeps following you around so much that eventually you can’t ignore it anymore?
This is what happened to me. I continued to hear about Wim Hof in various places completely ignoring it.
I’ve attended Unleash The Power within Tony Robbins Seminar once a year for the past 3 years. And at the San Jose UPW that I attended in 2016 Wim Hof was actually there for the 4th day. The 4th day of the seminar is the day completely focused on health.
With the breathing exercise he lead I was able to increase my longest breath hold from about 30 seconds to over 2 minutes. This is without any air in the lungs. So not taking a big breath in and holding it but actually taking deep breaths to oxygenate the body and then exhaling all the air in the body.
This gave me a new experience. And that new experience blew my mind. And that’s what mental and physical challenges can do. It can give you a new experience and new frame of reference.
You start thinking:
If I can do this then what else can I do?
Any time you have a big achievement or if you do something that you didn’t think was possible, immediately generalize it.
If I can do this, what else can I do?
If I can do this, what else am I capable of?
Loaded with this new experience, I immediately became immensely curious to find out more about the Wim Hof Method and I wanted to learn more about Wim.
I watched his Vice.com documentary.
I signed up for his online course.
I signed up to go to Poland for a 5 day immersion event in the Wim Hof Method. The exact same experience that they do in the Vice.com documentary.
What I learned from this experience is that your mental focus is really your true inner power and that the ability to focus on a goal or a task or what you want to accomplish is the key determining factor in your level of success at anything you want.
With your focus you can get into freezing water that would kill someone with no training.
Your focus is your ability to literally become a super human. With focus we can achieve what many believe would be impossible.
That’s another reason why I love the UPW seminar.
When you can walk over fire, what else can you do?
When you learn to walk on fire what stopped you in the past will no longer stop you in the future.
Focus is the key.
Focus is what controls your results.
Focus is where the mind is at any given time.
You don’t see with your eyes you see through your eyes.
What do you look at?
What do you hear?
What do you feel?
The senses are giving us input and the true lesson is that you control your focus.
You control what you are looking at.
You control what you listen to.
You control how you feel, it’s your nervous system after all.
You control what questions you ask yourself.
You control what you say to yourself.
You control what you focus on.
You might say, that’s all well and good you went to Poland to go train with some iceman. I don’t have time to do that.
That’s okay you don’t have to go to Poland or climb an ice mountain in your shorts to get immediate control of your focus right now, you can do this by simply asking yourself a question.
What is the most important thing for me to focus on right now?
That’s a great question to start with.
How can you redirect your clients focus?
By asking a question.
It’s really that simple.
I practice a simple 15 to 20 min meditation each morning after attending the Wim Hof Poland Experience. This simple practice pays massive dividends in your focus throughout the day and your productivity, not only that I’ve not been sick once since coming back from Poland.
Also remember this the breath is the string on the kite of your mind.
Where your breath goes your emotions will follow.
If there is only one thing you take away from this blog post, try out some form of directing your mental focus, like meditation, and practice it daily. This will strengthen your ability to focus in all areas of life, not just sales.
What would life be like if you had the ability to consistently focus?
Focus is an adaptation.
Focus is a practice.
What will you choose to focus on NOW?
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