Beyond Distractions: Finding What Truly Matters
Don't Just Want... Want to Want!
Your focus… your attention… your awareness… the doorway to your wallet for advertisers.
You might run ad blockers, and you might even opt out of social channels or national news. If you do, what is it that you are protecting? What are you creating in place of those distractions?
Your focus is also the doorway to your personal development and well-being.
What are you valuing?
I like to use focus-enhancing music for pomodoro-style periods of reading and writing. But for what? Why does my focus matter to me? Because it’s the source of my creative process. If I don’t write, there will be something bouncing around in me like loose groceries in the car on a bumpy road.
I want to focus and feel satisfaction from focusing.
Can motivation come from curiosity?
How can I spend more time feeling focused and feeling rewarded for the focus? It takes motivation to get into this gear. What strengthens motivation? You can strengthen it, right?
My main goal is a calm focus. I want to be free from overthinking and strong emotions. It’s too valuable to not spend more time here. That's why I left my career in advertising tech. I wanted to focus on mediation, art, and coaching.
But even now, I ask myself: how committed am I to deepening my curiosity? To helping others explore their focus, attention, and awareness? Is my curiosity strong enough to make this work for my career in the well-being industry?
I like to say, “The question is the answer.”
Healthy Motivation
We all have problems to solve, and we all love solutions. Pain relievers outsell vitamins. They are necessities, right?
The problem is, there’s little common acceptance for how to build motivation in a healthy way. Typically, we bully ourselves into action. We have fear projected on our cave walls in every form of media. What drives us to pursue our deepest desires and take action?
It takes two things. One is to undo the habits where you 'numb out.' The other is to build new neural pathways for your curiosity. The path starts with physical sensation. For example, touch your fingers together. Then, be curious about the feeling for ten seconds.
There’s a cornucopia of physical and emotional sensations. It’s human nature to want to feel everything we can feel. Unhealthy motivations lead us to numb out. How can we, instead, enhance feeling it all?
Numbing out leads to forgetting what we want. It's like when you watch too much TV and then you don't feel like doing anything else, even things you usually enjoy. The deeper question I’m getting at is, “What do you want to want?” How can we align our actions with what we know in our hearts is important?
We don't have to figure it all out.
In the end, we aren’t going to figure it all out and become superhuman. But we can have some fun exploring what we ‘want to want.’
I know I “want to want” being so damn curious about color and shape that I can’t help but to keep making more art. And I “want to want” to be doing any practices that lead to more inner stillness. It feels too damn good to miss out on it.
Want to discover strengthening your inner stillness? Join me for a 21-day meditation challenge beginning on the first of the month (repeats every month).
It’s a chance to develop your curiosity—because it feels good!