Mental Focus - External Pressure is inferior to Strategic Internal Pressure 

          Motivation is pressure, whether externally driven by other people, situations, and events, or internally created by our own thoughts and emotions about what it will mean to achieve a certain thing. When a person feels motivated, what they are feeling is physiological pressure in their central nervous system. As a manager of a Team (and manager of YOURSELF), you can take advantage of this phenomenon to bring greater success to your organization, its Team Members, and your own life.

          When working to inspire better Mental Focus from the people on your Team, one of the best tools of influence you as the Team Leader can master is the ability to spark beneficial internal pressure that moves a Team Player to excel past their current level of performance so that they become a better, more secure person in the process. Consider the following approach for integration into your own method for getting the most out of your Team.

          The right motivational strategy uplifts everyone involved with the Team, stimulating creativity, productivity, and rapport, while preventing stagnation, weak output, and friction. Here are five constants of Team Psychology that you should keep in mind when trying to influence the people on your team to stay focused, mentally.

1. Force begets an equal, opposite reaction. Force is inferior to Pressure and makes both Leader and Team Player miserable.
2. External pressure has no lasting effect on personal Mental Focus, and over time leads to an opposite result of distraction in the form of negativity and resentment.
3. Internal pressure - brought on by inspired, creative, flexible guidance from a source who has the Team Player's best interest at heart - not only lasts a long time, but can cause such a momentum of positive results that it becomes self-perpetuating until the Team Player becomes independently self-motivating.
4. When a Team Leader wants only good things for the Team Player, that selflessness naturally expresses itself by that Team Leader showing genuine interest in the Team Player - asking helpful questions about what is most important to them, becoming familiar with their beliefs and values, and finding a way to tie those things to the Team objectives so that both Team and Player enjoy a win-win scenario.
5. The wise Team Leader pays careful attention to the nature of the pressure (external vs. internal, positive vs. negative) moving his or her own self, making adjustments to maintain valuable, uplifting momentum within themselves. Few things make managing and motivating a Team as unbearable as being compelled by fear or desperation.

          When you understand the full depth of these five constants, managing internal pressure can easily be carried out by partnering with your Team Player to find out:

1. What they want most (goals and rewards),
2. What consequences they want most to avoid (failure, shame, etc.)

          You can then design a strategy that continually keeps what's most important within the scope of their daily attention. The more they focus on what they want - the more they habitually refer to the definitive plan of action related to productivity on the Team - the more natural, motivating internal pressure they'll have to compel them forward to reach the mark.

T. Lavon Lawrence
Author, NEURO-SCULPTING!© Certified Mental Fitness Trainer
The NEURO-SCULPTING!© Mental Fitness Training Studio
www.neuro-sculpting.com
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Strengthen Your Mental Focus Daily By Becoming Mentally Clear On Your Objectives & Goals!

          Strong Mental Focus is a cognitive skill that can be developed purposefully through the simple, daily exercise of those mental muscles necessary for better Mental Focus. One of the mental muscles that contribute to your ability to get what you want is your imaginative skill at constructing your target goal in your own mind with depth of clarity. The clearer, more detailed, and richly vivid your Mental Vision of what you want to be, do, and have for your life, the more intensely it will affect:

• Your dominant THOUGHTS as they begin to take on the subject, content, and character of your Vision.

• Your MOTIVATION, urges, impulses, and habitual drive so that you grow energetically compelled forward to achieve your aim.

• Your EMOTIONAL STATES, adjusting and guiding your feelings to ensure you continuously and increasingly desire, thus seek after, the object your desire.

• Your PERCEPTIONS, in that the Goal-seeking Mechanisms in your brain adapts your senses to notice and become more interested in information, people, events, situations, resources, and opportunities that are related and helpful to the successful accomplishment of your objective.

• Your habitual ACTIONS, which naturally become congruent, effective, efficient, and harmoniously aligned to your goals so that you complete the steps necessary to win the prize.

          Because key factors in the failure of long-term Mental Focus involve inconsistent Thoughts, Motivation, Emotions, Perceptions, and Actions related to your goals, the key solution is to stop wasting time hacking at those branches and address yourself directly to the ROOT of the problem by...

1.  Getting unquestionably clear in your mind as to what you want, and doing so each and every day. Developing this habit alone will greatly affect your Thoughts, Motivation, Emotional States, Perceptions, and resulting habitual Actions over time, in such a way as to make the accomplishment of your goal seem easier.

2.  Choosing one dominant aim that can pave the way to bringing about smaller aims. Having too many desires tends impede Mental Focus through inner conflict, mental distraction, and inability to hold to a single task for long periods of time. By Visioneering a purpose that can allow (or even require) you to accomplish minor goals, you can invest the lion's share of your energy and intellect into hitting the one major target, freeing yourself from being pulled in too many directions. As an example, if you actualize a goal of making six figures yearly, there are many other objectives (material, social, travel, philanthropic) that you will be able to have as a result of both the pursuit and achievement of that one dominant aim. Depending on what moves you, your beneficial, dominant aim may not involve money, but you can be sure that it will positively affect most other areas of your life in some way.

3.  Allowing (even commanding) yourself to dwell on that Vision as much as possible in your spare time. A beneficial, dominant aim is supposed to dominate, so less important matters should be given appropriately lesser priority and attention without wrestling with feelings of guilt or frustration.

4.  Keeping detailed track by way of a written or electronic journal of your daily progress, thoughts, feelings, activities, and experiences so that you can determine truthfully whether they are in keeping with your aim. If you find any of these factors out of alignment - Thoughts, Motivation, Emotional States, Perceptions, Actions - then redouble your efforts to spend as much time as you can solidifying your Vision so that you can live in accordance to it.

T. Lavon Lawrence
Author, NEURO-SCULPTING!© Certified Mental Fitness Trainer
The NEURO-SCULPTING!© Mental Fitness Training Studio
www.neuro-sculpting.com
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 Mental Focus And The Power Of Habit:

Using Mental Focus To Build A Power Partnership With Your Subconscious Mind That Makes Your Success AUTOMATIC!

          Your moment to moment Mental Focus - what you're doing with your attention, what you're clinging to in your thoughts, what you're feeling as a result of both those, and what you habitually express to others - are writing and solidifying your destiny even as you read this article, and I'm about to tell you why you need to take advantage and control of the process.

          Let's talk a moment about the importance of going into a conscious - CONSCIOUS - partnership with the most powerful part of yourself, your SUBCONSCIOUS MIND. You must pay particular attention to this principle in order to have an EASIER time of bringing about your ultimate success, because to do so, you'll be required to stop trying to run the entire show of your life every single moment, and allow your Subconscious Mind to step in and take over matters through the power of habitual thought and habitual action so that what you want "seems to just COME to you!"

"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. . . For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work."--William James

          Among the FIRST things you would do well to seek in your acquiring of new knowledge and skills along the road to self-fulfillment is a wealth of POWERFUL HABITS that move you with precision and efficiency on as straight a path as possible to your objectives.

          In the personal mental fitness training I conduct with my clients, I inform them early that their most powerful tool will be that of HABIT - of replacing old with new - habit of thought, habit of emotion, and habit of action. They are well instructed as to why psychological rules dictate that they occur in just that order: THOUGHT, EMOTION, then ACTION. For the process to be successful, you must seek the assistance of the one force that guarantees a right outcome: THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND!

          There are images that can be found of icebergs floating peacefully on the sea, and what can be seen beneath the waterline is the subsurface mass of the object, vastly larger than the exposed peak. As an illustration, your Conscious Self - the integrated agent of your thinking, feeling, planning, deciding, and acting from moment to moment - is represented by the tip of that iceberg image, while the massive subsurface material represents your Subconscious Mind.

Your destiny is carried out by your Subconscious Mind.

Your Conscious Mind feeds it the coordinates.

          Your Conscious Mind is the wheelhouse of a great ocean-going vessel, while your Subconscious Mind is the main body of the vessel itself, plowing through the tides on the course given it from the wheelhouse Captain.

          Your Conscious Self - the you that you are all day - feeds the commands to your Subconscious Mind with energy and emotion, and the Subconscious Mind "makes it so," first through subjective self-perpetuating experience, then eventually, by way of your ending up exactly where you were most consistently determined to be (by evidence of the thoughts you continually entertained and the actions or inaction that reflected that thinking) in the OBJECTIVE world.

          The great vessel moves one's life ahead according to the input it is given be that input of a quality and character CONSCIOUSLY CONTROLLED, or whether it be AUTOMATONICALLY PERMITTED THROUGH FAILURE TO KEEP YOUR HANDS ON THE WHEEL. Your Subconscious Mind grants your demand and it does not matter whether the nature of the demand is high or low, beneficial or harmful, wise or foolish, enlightening or blinding, wealth-building or poverty-perpetuating. Subjectively and (inevitably) objectively, you will get what you consistently FOCUS on, because what you FOCUS on, insofar as your Subconscious Mind is concerned, you ASK for.

          Your first habit is to accept and carry out the mission to DAILY OCCUPY THE WHEELHOUSE AS CAPTAIN. You must daily check the charted course and determine any adjustments that must be made to arrive at the destination on time, for there are winds that blow and tides that turn, but you shall NEVER seek a port of escape because your vessel is built to withstand and SAIL RIGHT THROUGH such storms to get to calmer waters. As Captain, you must DAILY ISSUE RIGHT COMMANDS to the engine room of your Subconscious Mind. You must keep your focus on your path, and concern yourself ONLY with where you want to go! ALL STOW-AWAYS MUST BE DISEMBARKED!

          This is accomplished by making an ally of your Subconscious Mind because it is indefatigable, working relentlessly on your behalf 24 hours a day, rain or shine, whether or not you are seeing the process unfold. Along the course to your own version of paradise, you will need to capitalize on your ability to engage in just the right habitual thoughts and actions to make the process of getting where you want to go a matter of MATHEMATICAL, AUTOMATIC CERTAINTY.

          To get to paradise, you'll need the highest level of thoughts and habits. To get those, befriend your Subconscious Mind to provide them, to take the load off of YOU, so that you can FOCUS on the small role you play of steering the ship, letting only the best onboard, and rejecting everything that does not belong aboard.

          Focus your attention and rally your Subconscious resources by becoming seriously interested in these questions:

• "What are the best habits of thought and behavior that I should integrate into my life in order to achieve my objectives along the straightest line and in the shortest time possible?"
• "What are the core beliefs, ideas, and strategies I need to integrate into my life so that I may achieve my objectives along the straightest line and in the shortest time possible?"
• "Who already possesses these things that I may seek them out, learn them, and make them my own, so that I may achieve my objectives along the straightest line and in the shortest time possible?"

          Gather a list of empowering right ideas to focus your attention on. Build a list of MUST-HAVE success habits to integrate into your way of doing and acting, as soon as possible, and even that is not soon enough!

Here are some ways available to you for bringing your focus about so that you feed only the best commands - the most valuable Thought Objects - to the great engine room:

STRATEGIC MENTAL TRAINING - A person whose business it is to get the most out of your Mind can teach you the cognitive skills you need for self-mastery in order that your efforts get maximum return on the investments of time and energy. The right personal mental fitness trainer can help you eliminate mistakes in thinking (fear, anxiety, negativity, false reasoning, mental laziness, etc.) and establish the most empowering mental habits, such as keeping hold of the wheel, plotting the most efficient course, tirelessly maintaining constant vigil, and issuing the best commands so that your Subconscious Mind becomes your ally and the resulting habit of thought and massive action your friend.

PERSONAL ASSOCIATIONS - You MUST get around the right people who achieve as you aspire to achieve, who think and act and do as you want to think and act and do, so that you can tune into that frequency, cognitively. Anyone who operates on a conflicting frequency oriented in the opposite direction is not operating sympathetically to you and can interfere with your progress, and even (though unintentionally) serve as a fatal enemy to your dream. Do whatever you must to get around the right people. Do not be surprised in your doing so if you end up in the temporary company of someone who has great habits but a painful mentality. You want to keep moving past even that person. Seek those who have a well-rounded grasp on the Power of Mind as it contributes to success, and who are eager to greet a fellow seeker. The Great will know you, and see you coming from a mile away. To maintain and increase their own greatness, they will warmly share what they know.

STRATEGIC READING - People who do not read for growth are really no better off than people CANNOT read. Reading is a gateway to self-expansion, deeper intelligence, self-transformational wisdom, and elevating personal power. Do not read to impress others and chatter on endlessly about how sophisticated you are. Read to learn, to apply, and to fulfill your possibilities. When you read the right books, written by people who are sympathetic, familiar, and who have succeeded at your aims as a person and productive member of society, your Subconscious Mind receives good fuel in the form of ideas, strategies, and habits which it can integrate into your own being.

AUDIO RECORDINGS - Digital, disc, tape, however you can get them. Ensure they are actually VALUABLE for your progress. Take the best of what you learn and integrate it into your own way of thinking and acting so that they are self-perpetuating. As an example, I have clients who have read great books and taken a few of the premises and synthesized them into concise Affirmative Declaration statements which they repeat to themselves with vigor several times a day. Over time, those statements become WHO THEY ARE. The outcome is natural, easy, and habitual.

AFFIRMATIVE DECLARATIONS - Use concisely written declarative statements and repeat them with intense emotional commitment. Do so no matter how often a critical, doubting miscreant of a voice in your head whispers its dissent. Do it a thousand times a week if you must, and that voice will begin to change; and the next thing you know you will think and believe and feel exactly as you have declared. When your thought and emotion aligns with your declaration, your actions will certainly follow suit. When your thought, feelings, and actions are in alignment, you will realize your reward.

SELF-HYPNOSIS - Remove the critical voice in your mind through intensive relaxation, and then you can listen to your Affirmative Declaration which goes directly to your Subconscious Mind without interference. Educate yourself well on this technique, record your script according to best practices used by professionals, and commit to consistent use. Hypnosis is a fantastic approach for putting the right ideas into your Subconscious Mind so that they begin to reflect in your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

There are other avenues, but I believe you understand the point. Acquiring new knowledge and then funneling it to your Subconcious Mind is key to changing the way you view possibility, and vital to your conceiving of methods to break through the current, self-limiting perceptions serving as a veil between you and where you want to go.  Remember that you want to:

• Achieve what you most rightly desire
• Achieve it on a STRAIGHT, UNWAIVERING LINE of progression
• Achieve it in the FASTEST POSSIBLE TIME
• Achieve it as EASILY as possible (meaning, with the least amount of unnecessary STRUGGLE)

Habit is your tool.  Your Subconscious Mind is your greatest ally.

T. Lavon Lawrence
Author, NEURO-SCULPTING!© Certified Mental Fitness Trainer
The NEURO-SCULPTING!© Mental Fitness Training Studio
www.neuro-sculpting.com
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Your Skill At Mental Concentration Greatly Affects Your Mental Focus Ability

           If your Mental Concentration skills are not sufficiently strong enough to meet the constant, time-critical demands of the life level you're looking to achieve in the immediate and long-term future, your level of Mental Focus will not be strong enough to ensure a consistent upward and forward momentum (nor quality of productivity and achievement) necessary to solidify your chances of success.

          The entire point of Concentration Training is to prepare you to boost your MENTAL FOCUS.   Mental Focus is NOT the same as Mental Concentration. Visualize a piece of paper on which, at one end, you draw a target symbol. On the opposite end, write in small letters "You Are Here. In between, make 8 dots in a line from "You Are Here" to the "Target." Mental Focus is the total, absolutely clear mental knowledge of Target, Dots, & Starting Point.

          Mental Focus is your skillful ability to KNOW WHAT YOU WANT with absolute clarity, knowledge so clear and uncorrupted by competing desires and distractions that it thoroughly brings into congruent alignment your THOUGHTS, EMOTIONS, IMPULSES & URGES, PERCEPTIONS, & ACTIONS. That's right: If you forge it clearly enough in mind, it will TRANSFORM YOU into the person you need to be in order to make it come about. MENTAL CONCENTRATION on the other hand is totally 'HERE AND NOW'.

          MENTAL CONCENTRATION is your skillful, CONSCIOUS, PURPOSEFUL ability to direct and control your ATTENTION (it's DIRECTION (target), SPAN, DEPTH, and DURATION) AT WILL!!!  I repeat:  AT WILL!   Mental Concentration happens RIGHT NOW, RIGHT HERE. If you moved in a line from "You Are Here" to "Target," Mental Concentration is total immersion and energy applied to each DOT.

          With Mental Concentration, you MOVE FORWARD STEP BY STEP, but your only concern is simply the CURRENT, NECESSARY STEP in direct defiance of all internal and external sources of distraction in the present moment. With Mental Focus, you SET YOUR COURSE and STAY ON IT for lengthy periods of days, weeks, months, or years. Mental Concentration is MOTION NOW, while Mental Focus is TARGETING, constant and in total defiance of all internal and external distraction over the long term.

          So, in closing, a person (YOU, for instance) best implements his or her training agenda by learning how to CONCENTRATE EFFECTIVELY and for crazy LONG DURATION onto ANY TARGET against ANY FORM OF DISTRACTION (Thought-based, Impulses, Urges, or External Sights & Sounds - especially OTHER PEOPLE and their 'demands'). Whatever your training technique, you WANT that kind of skill, because you can then apply it to FORGING & HOLDING an IDEA, PURPOSE, or VISION in such a way that you EASILY bring it about.

T. Lavon Lawrence
Author, NEURO-SCULPTING!© Certified Mental Fitness Trainer
The NEURO-SCULPTING!© Mental Fitness Training Studio
www.neuro-sculpting.com
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 Controlling Your Mental Focus:
When A Mere Emotional Feeling Can Decide Your Fate!

          The quality of your Mental Focus determines how you feel about nearly everything you have to do in life.  The way you feel determines what you decide do, what actions you decide to take, and whether you'll consistently carry out the right actions to squeeze all the juice from life.  So, if you are in Sales, Marketing, or any other career or business area where you need to build a customer base to generate revenue, you should understand clearly that your feelings (associated thoughts and emotions) about even the smallest, mundane, laborious details of the objectives you have for your life determine not only the quality of the experience of working daily towards your goal, but whether you will hit your target, period!

          Your feelings - the real-time act of picturing something in your mind and having an emotional response to that imagery - must be positively congruent and agreeably supportive with what you've set out to do, or you'll find yourself engaged in self-sabotaging behavioral patterns such as procrastination, mind-changing, and seeking out distracting, stress-relieving activities that are not goal-achieving.

          If you are in Business, Sales, Marketing, or another Client-oriented enterprise, you must have consistently enjoyable feelings in regards to such tasks as:

• Prospecting for new business
• Picking up the phone and calling people you don't know
• Following up with potential and existing clients
• Mastering your skills on a daily basis
• Setting action goals for the day and keeping track of progress
• Continually improving yourself as a human being

          As a habit, you'll want to begin conducting a daily inventory of your mental reactions to thinking about the little things you must do to succeed at your goals.  Is there fear?  Worry?  Doubt?  Disinterest?  Frustration?  When you are planning out the details of your day, notice (and, better, TAKE NOTE of) the internal dialogue that pops up with each task planned.  You may discover that for one or more tasks, you are not particularly thrilled to do them.  This can have a cascading effect that impacts your whole day.

          Every such disempowering feeling toward something you know you should do needs to be displaced, replaced, or eradicated by cultivating an OPPOSITE mental association, good feeling, and welcoming thought regarding the thing to be done.

          Worrisome, anxious feelings can be displaced by eagerness or excitement merely by consciously changing the content of the thought itself and then holding your attention onto the new content until it is crowds out the previous mindset.  This is the Psychological Law of Displacement in action.

          Often, merely adjusting the physical position of your body and deepening your breathing can be of value, in combination with forming uplifting imagery to move the negative experience off the stage of your mind.  Whenever you do this kind of approach, you should immediately find a way to take some form of action so that its value is maximized, and the worrisome habit rendered impotent.

          A fearful notion can be replaced (better yet, eradicated) by concentrating fully on what needs to be done.  The act of mental concentration disengages your mental resources from the fearful state and redirects them to the task of concentration.  The effort to do so requires a courageous resolve which replaces the shaky mindset.  In the moment you switch states of mind, you'll feel as though the fear simply doesn't exist, and that is because as long as you maintain the mindset of mental concentration - of determined resolve - it won't.

          From a mental state of determined resolve, take the necessary action while maintaining the mindset throughout.  You'll find yourself far more productive and your results will be superior.  Nothing solves fear like proving that it is merely an illusion.

          A doubtful mindset can be eradicated by focusing all your attention on a feeling of resolute faith.  The skill to concentrate on a positive state (at will) is priceless!  At any time, you have the ability to intensely think of a positive state and immerse yourself in it, mentally.  Doing so may require solid resolve if the negative state is being particularly stubborn, but resolve wins out every time.  Again, once you have accessed the mindset, hold it without until the previous state is no longer bothering you.

          Whatever creative approach you use, the important principle to keep in mind is that you do not have to settle for a negative feeling toward a valuable task merely out of mental habit.  You have a choice to change any disempowering, goal-killing emotion, and once changed, to take action under the pleasure of the new, empowering mental state.  As a forward-moving person, you should take advantage of your ability to shift Mental Focus at will in order to make your workday and your work life more pleasantly productive.

T. Lavon Lawrence
Author, NEURO-SCULPTING!© Certified Mental Fitness Trainer
The NEURO-SCULPTING!© Mental Fitness Training Studio
www.neuro-sculpting.com
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