Having now worked on self-development and with clients for several years now, I have drawn a conclusion that I would never have guessed at when I started as to the root cause of both unhappiness in life and lack of endurance in business – it is due to putting your attention in the wrong place.
We all know we should pay attention when on the job, but what exactly we have our attention on in every single moment, particularly when we are by ourselves, will determine our future. Even in our most bland moments, like standing in queues, eating breakfast, walking, waiting or doing chores, where our attention is cannot be overstated in importance.
A common reaction to bland moments is to feed our attention with entertainment, from the TV, the mobile phone, the PC, laptop, i-pod or i-pad. Many people, with absolutely nothing to do, watch or listen to, and left only with their own thoughts, would find the experience excrutiatingly unpleasant.
As soothing as all these entertainment and communication devices may be, the consequence of relying on them to fill spaces is that your life will never make any progress. Do not be surprised to find your life looking pretty much as it does now in twenty years time! To develop as a person in every aspect of your life, the secret is literally right in front of you – pay attention to what is going on in front of you right now.
Unfortunately, unless confronted with something threatening, sexy, colourful, exciting, novel or unusual, most people don’t understand what it is that they should be paying attention to or the relevance it has to their lives. They don’t realise that what is in front of them right now, be it bland, familiar or indifferent, is a powerful opportunity, a signpost guiding them to their next move.
The problem is that people have a crippling over-reliance on either sensuality or logic and reason. Logic requires sufficient data to process and come up with a course of action. Reason tells us the limits of reality – what is feasible and actual and what is not. The trouble with logic and reason is that they only have accessible information and experience to work with. That’s completely useless to you in a queue, or where you don’t have enough data to plot your next move or where you cannot make sense of what’s going on because you’ve never experienced it before. Worse still, logic and reason can often conclude there’s no way out!
The common reaction to this impasse is to go over and over the same issues in your mind trying to come up with a different answer that never comes, or just divert the attention onto amusing distractions that temporarily take your mind off your problems.
But we human beings have another intellectual capacity that is at least equal if not greater than the ability to reason – intuition. Unlike logic, intuition has no capacity to project or extrapolate from past to future and make predictions – intuition is completely centred on the moment. However, it is much faster at drawing conclusions because it bypasses the need to use language. Reason has to convert data into words, process the words and convert them back into actions. Intuition works in the subconscious part of the mind, converting data directly into action.
The majority of people go their whole lives never reaching their full potential simply because they refuse to trust their intuition, preferring to rely solely on the tangibility of sensuality and reason, ignoring the fact that reason and logic alone are utterly incapable of delivering happiness or success. Taking the leap of faith into one’s own deeper intangible abilities is essential to become everything you have the capacity of being.
The key to a fulfilled and worthwhile life is to train the attention to lock on to the intuition. This doesn’t come naturally in modern civilisation and has to be learned. Disciplines previously associated with religion, spirituality and alternative lifestyle, such as meditation, need to be learned in order to develop the skills necessary to take control of the attention rather than just letting it wander in quieter moments. Because of the information revolution, wholesale conversion to a different life, belief or religion is no longer necessary. The techniques and disciplines are available to all and can be easily integrated into the business environment. And why should you do so? Because they will give you an edge!
In my experience, unlike all the other mental processes, thinking, reasoning, the emotions experience and memories, intuition is the only attribute that never turns bad – it always acts in your best interest all the time, and I have learned to trust in it even when it is diametrically opposed to logic.
My often traumatised clients usually come to me only too aware how their own minds are blighting their lives and are therefore only too willing to be trained in intuitive skills. Using hypnosis, I can liberate them from all these other unhelpful voices by calming their minds and they experience for the first time the “friend in the head”, the guidance of intuition, which in any and every moment can show you exactly what you should be doing right now.
Just imagine the power this could give you in your business! Imagine always doing the best thing for your business right now all the time! You’d never panic or get overwhelmed – you would get back up after every blow! Of course reason and logic are important – they are great at solving problems when they have all the data and when you are planning a project, but for general everyday guidance, only intuition can be counted on. All the great leaders can point to their intuition as an essential element in their success.
They key to unlocking all this inbuilt power is be trained to focus your attention. Whatever has your attention has your mind and body as well. If you allow it to settle on the negative or unhelpful, then all your life is in that moment negative and unhelpful as well. All this I know only too well from a lifetime of experience! When you have been properly trained and you can put your attention on your intuition at will, you always know exactly what to do in any given moment at any time! This will set you on the path not only to fulfilment and success, but an even greater prize, the greatest prize that life can offer – peace of mind, body and soul.
