Hello! Seiiti Arata. If you’re a person that constantly overthinks, this video is here to help you to reflect on your actions and learn to make your behaviour more beneficial to you. If you’re constantly working at full speed, this technique can help you take control of your situation.
The problem with working full speed ahead is that you end up paying less attention to what you’re doing. You pay less attention to yourself.
1. Attention increases potential.
Regardless of what the project is, the final result will always be dependent on how much of your attention you give it.
If you spend a lot of time playing video games, you’ll end up being a really good player.
If you decide to dedicate your time to learning to cook better, and put effort into learning different cooking techniques and new recipes, the food that you cook will become more and more tasty.
If you pay attention to your savings, you’ll find that you spend less money.
If you devote your attention to finding new ways to have an extra income or to get more money for your work, you’ll find that you earn more. To read more about this, visit arata.se/moneytaboo.
The problem that most people come across is that they’re not giving something enough attention. In fact, sometimes they give it no attention at all. There are even times when people pay too much attention to one thing, and they seem to start ignoring everything else.
For example, if someone were to be overly self-centred and never paid any attention to the people around them, their relationship with those people would be likely to suffer. Other people probably wouldn’t like them or want to spend time with them.
If you don’t pay attention to your own body and health, you might become malnourished, or maybe your posture will suffer, or maybe you’ll just forget to do some exercise. All these factors might contribute to some serious health problems in later life.
Think about your current situation. What are you paying attention to in your life? What are you focusing on?
2. When you don’t pay attention, you live in default.
When you’re not paying attention to what you’re going, it’s easy to get anxious, and to do things automatically, because it’s what you’re used to doing.
The next time your mum, dad, child, or someone close to you speaks to you, pay attention to the way that they speak and what they say. Don’t just have another default conversation.
Pay attention to fully focusing on what the other person is saying, make sure that you’re not thinking about other things or letting your mind wander.
Are you genuinely interested in listening to the other person? Decide whether your tone of voice and the way you talk is respectful, as this is a good way of showing the love and respect you have for this person.
When you go to work tomorrow, think about how you’re doing your job. Are you doing it because you enjoy it, because you want to be there? Or are you just repeating a series of routines in this default setting that you’ve gotten yourself into?
At any time, regardless of what you’re doing, try to take a step back and evaluate yourself.
3. Have a look at your findings.
When you begin to pay attention and observe yourself, you’ll come to some interesting conclusions. Be kind to yourself. Don’t be too critical or too hard on yourself. Avoid the destructive self criticism, as it’ll only make you feel guilty.
We want to have a healthy level of self-esteem. We want to understand that we’re capable of transforming our own lives. Using our rationality, we can identify which aspects of our behaviour aren’t good and change them for the better. However, having an overly critical view of ourselves can make us feel guilty and upset, and ultimately put us in a low-power mental state. In other words, we don’t believe we can improve ourselves. In this case, we need to put effort into feeding our proactive stance. We have to accept that we’ve got the capacity to improve.
On the other hand, don’t protect your ego too much as it might prevent you from growing as a person.
It could be the case that after you’ve taken a step back and evaluated yourself, you’ve found some behaviour that you don’t think is ideal, but your ego will try to justify it.
For example, you found that you were a little bit intolerant, you didn’t have much patience and didn’t pay much attention to your child. To protect your own ego, you might say to yourself “oh, but my son came to speak to me at a time that I was really stressed about work, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself for losing my temper”.
Calm down, take a deep breath.
You don’t have to explain yourself to me. My opinion doesn’t matter.
You don’t have to justify it to yourself either. Just identify the actions you don’t agree with, and make changes to be better.
I promised you at the beginning of this video that this would be a very simple technique. Just stop and pay a little bit of attention. Take a step back and look at yourself, and build on what you find to make better choices.
The act of paying attention in itself is something that you can practice and get better at. You can raise the level of awareness you have about your own consciousness. You can observe yourself. You can choose where to put your focus. This is very different from just living your life on default mode. This is the kind of thing that we look at on the focus course at arata.se/focuscourse
Look at yourself without passing any judgements. This moment of mindfulness and awareness is an important moment in your personal development.
You can find the answers you need within yourself and you have the capacity to change your behaviour for the better. Just pay attention without letting judgements get in the way. If you start judging yourself, you’ll have to defend yourself. Defending yourself is something that’ll stop you from changing and improving yourself. Just look, reflect on what can be done to improve and take action. To learn how to make better choices, you can visit arata.se/focuscourse.