Of course you know what you are thinking about right now. Maybe you are thinking about your lunch or the kids or a project you are engaged in. Or maybe you are totally focused on my words right here as you read them.
Even when your mind wanders, you’re more aware of the wandered thought and less aware of the thoughts from which you’ve wandered.
The ability to focus on one train of thought and less on others is called awareness scotoma in which I lock on to one and lock out alternatives. One thought OR another, rather than many.
If you were to entertain every thought train equally, you’d never perceive anything – every thought would be like a drop of water in an endless ocean. Fortunately, your mind has a remedy for overwhelm of this nature:
Attention and Selection
Your mind tends to vacillate between alternative thought trains – thinking in one direction then others then back again – in microseconds. What gets you anywhere and why you achieve action on anything is that you spend just a microsecond longer attending to one thought more than you do others. You select, attend, and ignore – far too quickly to register consciously. Yet, the process produces experience and awareness.
That means it is unnecessary to focus 100% of your energy into a single thought train in order to achieve results. It may be impossible to focus 100% of your thought energy into only one thought train because you are always in possession of alternative thought trains simultaneously.
Rather, to achieve a goal only requires that you shift your gaze – your attention – slightly more in one direction than in others.
As long as you believe that you have to make BIG changes to achieve your goals, you will fight and struggle to achieve them. When you believe it is easily achievable, however, your gift of attention will tend to make it so.
A simple attention to one changes everything.
