Contrary to popular belief, Intuition is not your “gut instinct”. It doesn't work like a Magic 8 Ball and it isn't a mystical force. Intuition is actually a higher brain function. We did a whole video series on Intuition in my Performance Tune-Up, which you can check out HERE. Intuition is always working. The trouble is, sometimes it's working to create what you DON'T want. Intuition needs three key things in order to work: (1) Obsessive Focus (2) Emotional Importance (3) Time Investment. In this post I'm going to explore the role of Focus in getting your Intuition working for you.
If you've ever learned to ride a bike or to snow ski, you probably remember someone telling you to focus on where you want to go rather than the obstacles in your path. And when you first started riding that bike or skiing those slopes, you probably made the mistake of focusing on the pothole or the tree, right? Consciously you're thinking: Don't hit the tree, don't hit the tree, don't hit the tree. All your focus goes to the tree and, inevitably, you end up getting very familiar with that tree. See, we create what we focus on. The brain is a remarkably powerful thing, and it’s obsessive by nature. The trouble is, until we learn how to do it, we're usually not directing what the brain is obsessing about. And left to its own devices, the brain tends to have a negative bias. For that, we can thank our old friend, evolution.
The brain's job is to assess threats, avoid threats, and keep us alive. So it's always checking under the bed for the boogeyman. Like when you climb under the sheets, exhausted, ready to slip into dreamland, and you suddenly think, Did I lock the back door? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, but the last thing you want to do is go all the way down there to find out. The front part of your brain, the part that allows us to reason and use logic, knows that the odds of a homicidal maniac showing up at your back door on the night you happened to leave the door unlocked is statistically close to zero. But the deeper, older part of the brain doesn’t know statistics from static electricity. All it knows is there’s a breach in the defenses and if you don’t manage it, the bad guys are going to get in. So, even though you know it’s perfectly safe to leave the door unlocked for one night, your nervous system isn’t going to let it go until you put on your damn slippers, go down the damn stairs, and lock the damn door.
Obsessively focusing on an unlocked door can be a nuisance. Obsessively focusing on things that aren’t serving us can be disastrous. You want to get into the best shape of your life but your focus is on how hard it’s going to be. You want to find that person who’s a perfect fit for you but your focus is on how lonely you feel. You want to take the next step in your career but your focus is on how someone else deserves it more than you. We create what we focus on. If we decide getting into shape is going to be hard, then getting into shape is going to be hard. If we focus on how lonely we are, we’re going to stay lonely. Someone else deserves the promotion more than you? Someone else is probably going to get the promotion. So, what we've got to do is hack into the nervous system and consciously direct the obsessive focus of the mind on that which we want to create.
People who know Gary would call him pessimistic. A real glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. Gary played baseball when he was a kid. He wanted to be a good player, but he would find himself thinking, Boy, I hope they don’t hit it to me. I’ll probably screw it up. And at bat, Probably gonna strike out again. Then the ball would get hit to him and he’d screw it up. And he’d step up to the plate and guess what? Yeah, you got it.
In high school, Gary studied hard, he knew his stuff, but still he would walk into every exam thinking, Probably gonna bomb this one. When he went to get his driver’s license, all he could think about was how badly he was going to mess up the parallel parking part of the test. He didn’t have a lot of friends and spent a lot of time alone, but because he spent so much time thinking about how alone he was, he wasn’t very good at making friends. A whole vicious circle kind of thing.
It’s probably no surprise that, today, Gary’s business is suffering. After college he hung out his shingle as a financial advisor. He was good with numbers, he had creative ideas, he wanted to build something great, but he still couldn’t stop from focusing on the negative, the downside, the potential for failure. And he brought it to his relations with clients. Most people want their financial advisors to be along the lines of, “Here are the great things we’re going to do with your money!” but Gary was more like, “Here are all the terrible things that will happen if you mess this up.” Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Which is important when you’re asking people to trust you with their life savings.
So you probably see a pattern here. And we could dig into all the things fueling that pattern. There’s probably some unworthiness in there, maybe some shame, a whole lot of fear. And we could dig even deeper to explore the events, the experiences, the trauma maybe, that programmed Gary’s inner matrix to react the way he does. Gary could spend years in therapy digging into his own backstory to understand every nuance of how his current way of being came to be. But as my mentor used to say, the awareness of a problem does not translate into a solution to that problem. Gary doesn’t have to wait years to start getting results. He can do that right now.
The first step in rewiring the inner matrix is to start recognizing the way we’re feeling, thinking, and behaving. In Gary’s case it’s pretty clear: He’s running into every tree on the mountain. Why? Because he’s focused on the trees rather than all the open space around them. In a nutshell, Gary is focusing on Don’t hit the tree, when he’d be much better served by focusing on Ski the clear path. We create what we focus on.
You can learn to redirect your focus too. You might not be a Negative Nancy like our friend Gary, but that’s not really the point. If you’re struggling in some area of your life, your career, your relationships, your health, it might be that you’re just focusing on what you want to avoid, rather than what you want to create. Getting your focus tuned up is one of the components you need to access Intuition. We’ll look at the other components over the next few weeks, but for now, you can click HERE to learn more about our Power Series. It’s the perfect place to start learning how to hone your focus to a razor’s edge. Why not sign up today?