…meaning the most effective way to get from loser to winner in life

Nowadays all I am talking about is controlling your attention. I talk about self-discipline. Causing your plane land on the airstrip no matter how the wind blows.

You expect that from a pilot… but you don’t expect it of yourself.

You, if you managed to observe you from the sideways view, would see that your life, your actions, your attention has no rhyme and reason… you have no direction, you have no solidity…

The more floppy you are the more you crave my coaching, hoping that I will give you a backbone.

I won’t. I can’t. Only you can do it for yourself.

Some of you are in the creativity field, or at least you would like to.

But all you know, at present, is two ways of moving:

• floppy or
• forced/rigid.

Nothing worth doing works when forced.

When you force your attention, you are doing yourself a disservice.

Creativity comes in diffuse focus, fuzzy focus. Whenever you are forcing, the focus is not fuzzy.

Fear, worry, concern, agenda sharpen that focus further and remove any chance for creativity.

Unless you know that, you cannot be creative. You can’t sit down and say: ‘I’ll be creative for an hour here‘ and you can’t.

Creativity is allowing.

But no matter what endeavor you engage in: mastering your attention is key.

Many of you haven’t even gotten to the place where you can see what the heck attention is… the knowledge will come from practicing, failing, practicing failing. Always with a wide cone of vision…

When you narrow your cone of vision so as to filter out distractons, you are coming from ‘if I ignore it it isn’t there’. It is, and the more you ignore it the more power it gains.

Here, again, allowing will be the gentle method that works.

In the video of the metacognitive training I showed yesterday…

…the different sources of audio are really close to each other, if you listen through stereo: I listened that way. The birds are up, the dripping and the cow-bells are to the left, the waves are to the right lower corner of your visual field.

They, in the video, ask you to not move your eyes… i.e. keep your cone of vision wide enough so the edges of the visual field include all the audios, and yet zoom in on the one they are asking you to hear.

It is a very enjoyable exercise, and if you have been a rank beginner, you may want to start getting some distinctions: cone of vision, direction, angle, zooming in… you probably don’t have any of these.

I just recorded a podcast episode, ‘Discipline: Herding Cats’.

I realized while doing it that if I am not as successful as my other abilities would say I could be is because my ‘directing my attention’ aka discipline is only 30% (on a scale of 0-100).

Had I known that it is this important, I could have practiced directing my attention, being disciplined a lot more. But I didn’t know, and no one told me.

My father’s attention/self-discipline was 70%…

…and that is why he made it through the war, that’s why he became a top dog in Hungary, because of his self-discipline.

Me? not so much.

And when I look, I can even see that my statement that Responsibility is the keystone capacity, I can see that it is not so. Without disciplining your attention, without disciplining all your faculties to pull in the same direction, even responsibility cannot be on for longer than a few minutes… and that is not enough to do what it needs to do.

• The good news is that everything in life is an opportunity to strengthen your attention, strengthen your discipline.
• The bad news is that everything in life is a missed opportunity to strengthen your attention unless you use it that way.

You see: The more undisciplined you are the less you can accomplish in the world.

You can be capable, but you won’t reap the fruits of that.

It will sound like an oxymoron, but it definitely isn’t: creativity is keeping the attention unfocused, and yet disciplined.

Focused or unfocused requires the same amount of discipline… it IS like herding cats.

The secret is to not be forceful. I’ve had cats and they don’t appreciate, don’t obey force. And your different parts are like cats… they are fiercely independent, not giving a hoot for what YOU want… they only care about what they want.

Do I advocate putting yourself in marine boot camp to learn it? No. Marines are not really taught discipline: they are disciplined.

Your will, your intention to be disciplined isn’t trained there… you have to or else.

That is not the way I want you to be disciplined.

I want you to become disciplined because after a while, when you start getting the hang of it, it will give you so much energy and maybe even joy, that it starts becoming self-perpetuating.

Why I didn’t become more disciplined?

I thought that being the ‘wild child’ is attractive, that it makes me lovable, that I am helping myself.

Ugh…

Tomorrow in the Life Script workshop I am going to examine how that little ditty has run my life, and where it was born.

Now I am excited about tomorrow’s class for myself… lol.

The more a class is answering some of my own questions, the better they are… for the obvious reason: I am channeling divine wisdom, or something like that…

Let’s look at your life-script

Read the original article: Why attention and self-discipline is the cat’s meow…