How to Focus | Jim Kwik (Brain Coach)

So it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I learned to concentrate, and my life completely changed after that.

Internal distractibility, the mind actually getting distracted not by anything in the external environment, but its own propensity to pump out thoughts.

He stood in the same place, used the same tools, the same exact way every single day.

How do you concentrate? How do you maintain your focus over time? And this is something I feel like everyone is talking about. We are here in New York City where there are lots of sirens and horns that are blowing outside. And I have an expert here for you to help you with this challenge. If you're suffering from monkey mind, like you're all over the place, This is the conversation for you. Thanks for being on the show, Dandapani.

Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

So a lot of people know your story. You were a monk in a monastery for about 10 years, and your total focus was focus and concentration. And you're doing your mental training, your discipline, honing your willpower. And why, Why is concentration so important today?

I feel concentration is at the crux of all human success and endeavors. And if you can't concentrate, you can't manifest or create what you want to create in life. Right. And when I grew up, I spent my early childhood in Malaysia and then my teenage life in Australia. And no one ever taught me how to concentrate. Actually, as a child, people would make fun of me because I couldn't concentrate. They would tease me for not being able to concentrate. But it wasn't until I joined the monastery that my guru taught me that concentration is something that you can learn. You need to learn how to do, and then you need to practice to become better at it. Yeah, so it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I learned to concentrate, and my life completely changed after that.

And so I think it gives people permission to be kind to themselves if they're not great at concentrating or focusing, especially in the world of distraction we're in, because we've never been taught like many things in school. They'll teach us math and history and science, but not necessarily how to focus.

How does the mind work?

How does the mind work? Yeah, exactly. They don't.

Right. So, you know, and exactly. And that should be the reason why you should have empathy and compassion for yourself. Right. The question to ask yourself, have you ever been taught to concentrate and have you been taught how to practice concentration? Because learning concentration is not enough if you don't practice it.

Right.

You only become good at something when you practice it. So learning concentration is not enough. Practicing it throughout the day is what makes you become good at it.

And someone beating you up on it, or you beating yourself up that you can't focus, it's like somebody being mean to you because you can't play the violin if you've never taken a violin lesson.

It's so interesting you say that, because one of the examples I give in my workshops and my talks is I pick on someone in the audience and say, who here does not play the piano?

Right.

And someone will put their hand up and I go like, okay, play the piano.

Right.

And they go like— so now play the piano. It's the same way when adults go to kids and they go, can you just focus for a second?

Right.

You see parents yelling at their kids, right? Raising their voice. Can you just concentrate for a second? But you're telling your child to focus when you've never taught them how to focus. You're asking someone to play the violin when they've never played the violin before. So first step is teaching them how to do it. Second step is helping them to practice it. The more they practice it, the better they become at it. And people don't realize this. And it's so interesting. This is prevalent all across every level of society, even in big corporations and stuff.

We know that concentration is the source. It's a superpower to get anything done nowadays, especially now with technology. And technology is not— it's not a bad thing. Technology is wonderful. It allows us to be connected, allows us to learn and be inspired, be entertained.

I love that you have that perspective because people ask me all the time. People come up to me and they hold their cell phones at me and they go, these things are ruining our lives.

Right.

And my response always is, absolutely not.

Right.

What's ruining your life is your inability to exercise discipline around the use of your technology. That's what's ruining your life.

Because the technology ends up using you.

Exactly. The technology is beautiful. I can call my mother in Australia. And see her in literally 5 seconds.

It's amazing.

How amazing is that? Right? So it's your inability to exercise discipline around the use of technology is what's ruining your life. The technology itself is not bad.

Right? And it's having an effect on— we're letting it affect our focus and our concentration.

Exactly.

Because every like, share, comment, cat video, this dopamine flood. And we're just— we have this monkey mind. So what do we do about this? How do we train our concentration? Is it like a muscle?

It is like a muscle, kind of. The first step is defining what concentration is, right? I always like to start by defining, so we put everybody on the same page, at least people who are listening to me. So I define concentration as the ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. So if I can keep my awareness on you for an extended period of time, I'm in concentration. Concentrating. If my awareness drifts from you to something outside, to the sound I hear, then I'm being distracted. So every time my awareness drifts away, I bring my awareness back. I use my willpower, my mental muscle to bring my awareness back, hold my awareness on you. And my ability to do that is my ability to concentrate. So now that we've defined what concentration is, then the next step is how do you practice concentration?

Hmm.

And one simple task I tell people is to practice doing one thing at a time. Keep your awareness on one thing at a time. So if I'm having a conversation with Jim, then I give Jim my undivided attention. I keep my awareness on him. If it drifts away— Jim's talking to me and I'm listening to what he's saying, and then my awareness starts to drift away and I'm thinking, I'm gonna have for lunch today, I should go try that restaurant that's on this side of town. Looks— oh, and then I feel like, what did you say, Jim?

Right.

So I bring my awareness back to you. It drifts away again, I bring it back. It drifts away again, I bring it back. And I repeat this practice 1,000 times, 100,000 times, a million times, till I train my awareness to stay on one thing for an extended period of time.

And it doesn't take as much effort when you're trained, after you've trained?

No, it doesn't. Now I can concentrate really well. There's not a lot of things I can do very well, but I can concentrate.

So as a cognitive neuroscientist, and when you're studying the brain, what's actually going on inside? We could talk even metaphorically when people lose their attention.

Right. So there's, you know, as I was saying a moment ago, attention is not one thing. It's probably 3 things or more, but at least the 3 kind of main systems of attention that we've studied in my lab are quite different from each other. And they all have the potential to go haywire in these moments of distractibility and frankly, even psychological health challenges like depression or anxiety or attention deficit disorder. So the way that I like to think about it is, and of course these all have formal names and their neural networks are known and their neural networks are identifiable and independent from one another. But just for the sake of this conversation, one way in which we pay attention is really— the metaphor I like to use is like a flashlight. So we can direct it willfully wherever we want it. And just like an actual flashlight, if you're in a darkened room and you've got a flashlight, very handy tool, because wherever it is that you direct it, you're going to get information. You're going to get crisp, clear information. Everything else is a hazy, darkened nothingness in some sense. And attention does that for our conscious experience. Wherever it is that we direct that attentional flashlight, we get crisper, clearer information. And we know this at the neural level. We actually see increases in perceptual activity in the earliest stages of visual processing when people are paying attention to a particular part of space or a particular object, which tells you how powerful attention really is. But the thing about the flashlight, going back to your question of vulnerabilities, sure, we can direct it, but it can also get pulled.

Mm-hmm.

And the kinds of things that can pull our attention are really baked into our evolutionary makeup. I mean, things that have to do with salient information in the environment. Right? Things that might produce fear in us or make us flee from a dangerous situation or provoke a fight or a conflict, or things that have to do with anything having to do with ourselves, frankly. Think about going down the street. If somebody calls out your name, chances are you're going to just look. And, you know, you've got a— Jim is a name that maybe many people might say, but I'll tell you, for maybe Kwik is not. But my name, like, I can't deny that somebody said something and I'm going to look, even if it's Is she and not Amishi, I'm going to think that they're saying something about me.

Mm-hmm.

Anyway, so the point is just that when it comes to that particular system of attention, it can be directed and it can be pulled. And you can see how hyper-focusing on the thing you're trying to direct toward to disadvantage can be problematic, or getting flitted around everywhere because there's stimuli that might grab you, just like the ding of our phone or a social media notification can be problematic. But just to quickly say something about the other 2 main systems of attention that are, that are part of this broader topic, whereas the flashlight is really about advantaging certain kinds of information. And wherever we direct that attentional resource, we get more access to information available there. The second system is almost the exact opposite. It's not really about what we're attending to, it's about when.

Hmm.

And it's not about narrowing and focusing to a certain subset of things, it's about being broad and receptive. So this is something we call formally the alerting system of the brain. And it's just like that, the alert we go on. So if you're driving down the street and you see, you know, yellow flashing light, maybe near a construction site, you're going to be alert. You're not going to be focusing on anything in particular. You're going to be broad, receptive, and ready.

More like a floodlight.

Exactly like a floodlight. So flashlight, floodlight are sort of the ways that I like to talk about the distinct mechanisms. And what's so cool about this system is that it's ready for action. It's tied to being advantaging, again, our survival. But just like there's, you know, the Capacity to get the flashlight yanked around, the floodlight can go on overdrive. And now we're not just vigilant, we're hypervigilant. Everything is keeping us on edge and readied. And things like threatening circumstances can drive this up, which leads to disorders like anxiety and PTSD and is associated with it. And then the third system, it's not so much about what— the flashlight— when— now— the floodlight. It's really about our goals, our internally held priorities of what's important and relevant for us to do. And the metaphor I like to use here, which, you know, frankly, I'll start with the formal name for this system: executive control. And it's like that term executive that we'd use for the executive of a company. The person's job as a leader is not to do every single thing in the organization, but to ensure that the goals of the organization and the actions are matched. So the metaphor there I like to use, and you can see in the executive context how much this is done, a juggler. You're keeping all the balls in the air, ensuring that everything's happening smoothly. And of course, in taking too many balls on or not paying attention to their coordination or oversight, the balls will be dropped, tasks will fail. There'll be a mismatch between goal and action, which often occurs in disorders like attention deficit disorder and other kinds of frontal lobe function disorders that we might say.

So there are many ways in which attention functions and also many ways in which it can become vulnerable because Now you and I, we were, you mentioned that it's trainable, which just gives people their agency back when they lose their attention and we can direct it, right? You ask somebody what time it is, their attention goes there. They ask somebody what they ate yesterday, it goes there. When we're talking about practicing and training and doing the mental work, what happens in this 12 minutes then? And I encourage everyone to get a copy of the book because obviously it'll go way deeper.

Right. Well, it's deeper, but it's also sort of like, just like the body, right? If I— I'm almost going to give sort of like a basic CrossFit fitness type thing, where multiple systems are going to get engaged and we're going to exercise those. But there are ways in which we can train all 3 of these systems I've described and their coordination, as well as addressing something we haven't really touched on yet, internal distractibility, the mind actually getting distracted, not by anything in the external environment, but its own— propensity to pump out thoughts. And we know this too, right? The example I gave of getting to the bottom of a page and having no idea usually isn't because the phone's bugging you. It's you're just thinking. Your eyes are maybe even moving along, but you're not there. You're not taking it in. So the training itself, I'll give you one sort of example of a foundational practice, and it touches on all 3 of the systems that we talked about, as well as this internal distractibility, or what I call mind wandering, having off-task thoughts while you're trying to engage in a task. And really it starts out, and this is why mindfulness is such a cool, low-tech, low-demand, highly portable And free tool that we can all use. The key is that we got to get ourselves to do it. So what you'd ask people to do is sit in a comfortable, quiet, supportive location. Take this seriously in the same way if you did a physical workout, you know, you'd have the right gear on and you'd have your mind ready to engage in the practice. Then what we're going to do next is pay attention to the fact that we're sitting here breathing, and the breath and breath-related sensations will become the anchor for our attention. Out of all the things we could pay attention to, it will be the thing we're going to focus in on. And not just the fact that we're breathing, but a very specific sensory experience tied to breathing. Like, you know, the coolness of air moving in and out of your nostrils, maybe your chest moving up and down, whatever it is for you that's vivid and able to be easily tracked. You don't want to pick something like, I can kind of feel my heart beating, or don't pick something subtle. Pick something that's very easy to pay attention to. And then in some sense, the next step is for the next period of time that we do it. And I wouldn't encourage anybody to just, if you've never done this before, to jump right into 12 minutes. Start with maybe 30 seconds or a minute.

Hmm.

And then build up to that number. Think of it as now you're going to focus on those breath-related sensations for this period of time that you're going to do the practice by shining that flashlight of attention right on those sensations. Like, that's where you're going to direct your, your mental energy. Usually we have people close or lower their eyes so there's not as much happening in the environment. And then the next step is essentially you've engaged the flashlight, you know where it's supposed to be, but keep that floodlight also available to you. So you're checking out moment by moment Right now, where is my mind? Where am I? What is going on right now? And then on occasion, probably more often than you'd think, you'd notice, oh my goodness, my flashlight is nowhere on my breath. I'm thinking about lunch, or I'm thinking about this or that, or I'm having, you know, some, some other thing come up— thoughts, memories, sensations. And when you notice that your mind has wandered away, essentially then we're going to kick in this executive control to say, is my behavior aligned with my goals? No, it's not.

Mm-hmm.

Just redirect attention back. So in that short kind of practice, we're focusing, which is the flashlight, noticing, which is the floodlight, and then aligning or redirecting back to the goal, which is the juggler. And all of these things are happening in coordination and sort of repeatedly by doing something for as short as a minute and then building up to 12 minutes, which does some very interesting things. It gives us a sense of practice of how to do this. It strengthens— we know from our objective measures that it strengthens attentional Performance and real-world performance as well as mood, you know. And the goal is not to just do this because you're an Olympic-level breath follower. Who cares? Like, but you're just using it as an anchor. Now, when you're in the middle of a conversation or you're trying to write a report or anything you're doing, you're kind of keeping those 3 aspects in mind. Focusing— there is a target. Noticing where I am relative to that. And then redirecting to get back on track.

So if you feel like you're losing ground because of your monkey mind or entrepreneurial ADD, You're probably asking yourself, how do I keep my mind from becoming easily distracted? So here's the good news. There is hope and there is help. I want to introduce you to a dear friend, Julia Roy. She is my go-to personal trainer for productivity. And what I love about this superhero is she takes a neurological brain-based approach to transforming the way we work, the way we focus, and the way we perform. Now, this session is taken from a live talk she did at one of our recent Brain Conferences to a group of high achievers. I want you to pay attention and listen to these powerful work hacks so you can enjoy the gift of a focused, quick brain. Now, here's Julia Roy.

Hi, thank you. I want to talk I want to talk to you and tell you a little story, something about Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway, he never ate at his desk. He also never talked on the phone or read the newspaper or opened up his mail when he was at his desk. When he was at his desk, he wrote. And that's it. In Mason Curry's book, Daily Rituals, he gives us a peek inside Hemingway's process. He says, Hemingway wrote standing up. He actually was the inventor of the standing desk, apparently. Facing a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on it. And on top of that, a wooden writing board. First drafts were composed in pencil on onion-skin typewriter paper laid flat. Slantwise across the board. When the work was going well, Hemingway would remove the board and shift to the typewriter. Hemingway created this very specific place where he did one thing, where he wrote. And when it was time to write, he stood in the same place, used the same tools, the same exact way every single day. Now, if we fast-forward to today, in a world of work that's mostly digital, The only thing that we need is the internet to do our work, right? And this is great, we can do work anywhere, anyplace, anytime, but there's a cost because we don't really notice our physical environment anymore. We're so heads down into our computer. But this is a huge mistake. Our unconscious habitual mind is constantly aware of our surroundings, whether we're aware of it or not, all of the time. It's using cues and triggers like sound and your senses and location in order to automate habitual thoughts and behaviors and workflows. And so I wanna talk to you about 3 ways that you can use your physical environment to boost your productivity, get you more focused and in the zone so that you can use the time that you spend working more effectively. Okay, number 1, designate work-only Hemingway, when he was at that standing desk, he didn't wonder, oh, should I do this? Should I do that? He knew exactly what he was there to do. He was there to write. He did nothing else there. So you wanna designate places, different places for different types of work. Because when you're there, it's a lot easier to get into what you are doing. So we have laptops and mobile phones and they let us work anywhere, but when we When you try to do more than one thing in a single place, it becomes harder to do that task. So when you are at your desk and you are sometimes brainstorming, sometimes checking email, sometimes managing projects, you're constantly distracted wondering what you should do because you use that place, you anchor that place in all kinds of different types of work. And so let's use an example. Your bed. This is a really good one. When you get in your bed and watch TV, when you get in your bed and she's smiling at me. Yeah, babe. When you get in your bed and you watch TV, sometimes you read a book and you're checking your phone, checking Facebook, you're checking your email, and then we wonder why it's hard to fall asleep at night, why our brain won't turn off because we're using our bed for all kinds of things, for work and for play, and then we're frustrated when we can't fall asleep. Because now the bed is actually not a great place to do what it's meant to do, which is to sleep and dream, because you're confusing it by doing different kinds of things in that place. Another good example and just way to use this in your work life is, let's say you need to brainstorm new ideas for a project, just think outside of the box, you know, come up with something new. Don't do it at the place where you check email and manage projects and answer the phone, pick up your computer or even better a pen and paper and go outside, sit on a park bench, pick an empty office that has a view, do it somewhere else. Try different places around your home and office and see what works. And when you find a place where brainstorming comes easily and naturally, do that there. every single time and don't do anything else in that place. If you want to improve your focus and your attention on a specific thing that you want to do, let's say it might be writing or you wanna get proposals out quicker and faster and more efficiently, just be intentional about where you do it and don't do anything else in that place.

Hi, Kwik Brain, it's your brain coach. I wanna thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this 'cause when you teach something You get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number two, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing. Because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing: if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: three one zero two nine. Did you remember that number? 310-299-9362. Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question. And I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video. Bye.