Why ‘Focus’ is a valuable mental tool for an Entrepreneur?

Daniel Goleman in his book, “Focus, the hidden driver of excellence”, talks about three kinds of ‘Focus’, that all leaders need.

1.       Inner focus – Attunes leaders to their intuitions, guiding values and helps leaders make better decisions. A leader, he says who does not have inner focus becomes rudderless.

2.       Other focus – Connects leaders to the people in their lives. A leader who does not care for others and do not seek to understand their thinking, is clueless to what is taking place around him or her.

3.       Outer focus – Connects leaders to the larger systems that they find themselves in. A leader who does not increase his awareness of the larger systems at play will become blindsided.

In an information rich world such as today, entrepreneurs and leaders can easily get lost and side-tracked with overloaded stimuli that fights for their attention.

Herbert Simon the Nobel prize winning economist warned that, “what information consumes is the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

We need to continually fight the distraction that clouds our senses throughout the day. For a day to be productive the entrepreneur must divide his/her attention between the most important tasks that need to be handled each day. This must be done, not loosing sight of the daily operations as well as the goal he or she is trying to reach. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts must be carefully kept aside, used only for important updates, as a bulk amount of time can get easily sunk into it unknowingly.

Attention comes from the Greek word, ‘atendere’, which means to reach towards something.

William James, a founding father of Psychology stated that,

“Attention, is the taking possession of the Mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts….It implies withdrawal from somethings in order to deal effectively with others.”

Now let’s analyse this statement.

1.       Firstly, attention is a taking possession of the Mind. The mind suddenly takes possession of awareness to govern it in a direction of choice.

2.       Secondly, this possession takes place in a distinguishable way. It is clear and vivid.

3.       Thirdly, in a given moment in time our awareness is caught simultaneously between several strands of thoughts or objects, and a intentional choice must be made among these.

4.       Fourthly, there is a withdrawal of thinking that needs to take place.

5.       Finally, such a mental action helps us to deal effectively with what we choose to concentrate on.

It requires an intentional decision to actively choose to process a limited amount of information, from a sea of information that try to bury us daily.

For the entrepreneur he or she must be conscious about maximizing their limited amount of time, into the most productive options that will benefit them at large. Being emotionally intelligent is vital for a leader, especially those in business leadership. Emotions have the tendency to grab our attention, because it sits the closest to our hearts. Therefore, emotionally lack of control, can be a major distraction to our focus. As entrepreneurs we need to maximize every chunk of time at our disposal. Attention is vital in cutting out and letting go of what is irrelevant, to be effective in what is relevant.

Being motivated in what you do is a good way of keeping the ‘attention’ engine at top gear.

Maya Angelou stated that, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.”

As an entrepreneur, the more you like what you do, easier it is to make a decision to shift your attention towards it. The more motivated you feel about a certain task, the higher the concentration that goes into it in effectively being done.” Goleman goes onto say about an experiment done at the Pentagon, to study vigilance levels during sleep deprivation lasting 3-5 days. The most encouraging finding emerging from this study was that even after 3 or more sleepless nights people could pay keen attention, if their motivation level was high enough.

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