Focus: Strategies for Enhanced Concentration and Performance

In this course, we’ll explore the internal and external factors that keep you from being present, thinking deeply, and feeling mentally calm. I’ve organized the material into five key areas where focus gets disrupted:

• environmental

• physical

• cognitive

• emotional

• alignment

Some domains may resonate for you more than others, but likely you can find ways to build resilience to distractions in all of them.

I’ll lead you through three steps: 1) Develop an awareness of your specific challenges by taking an assessment on what pulls you off focus. 2) We’ll implement systems to automate or remove distractions before they even get to you. And finally, 3) You’ll practice exercises to increase your capacity for focus.

Taking the assessment and automating some systems are going to be one-and-done. These steps are easy and you’ll see some instant results. Putting practices in place to harness your attention is much more challenging. These are habits you’ll need to work on for your whole life.

We’ll start the course talking about physical things like the noises or disruptions around us and gradually move inward toward harnessing our own thoughts and making sure we are focused on things that are aligned with our values and motivations.