Train Your Focus With This Technique 💡

I wanna share with you probably my favorite tool for focus. And you start by doing this, writing this down. Questions are the answer. We have about 60,000 thoughts a day. A lot of those thoughts come in the form of a question, a question that we ask ourselves. And there is one, what I call your dominant question, a question that you ask more than any other, consciously and mostly unconsciously. And so I wanna go through an exercise with you to determine what is your dominant question. Let me give you an example. Because I went through these struggles as a child, I had my brain injury when I was 5. I had migraines every day as a kid. I just thought that was just normal. I had balance issues, coordination issues. I would have poor focus, poor memory. It took me 3 years longer to learn how to read. Many of you know the story. When I was 9 years old, I was slowing down in class because I just wasn't understanding the lessons. I was being teased and bullied pretty harshly because of it, called all kinds of names and Picked on, and teacher came to my defense, pointed to me in front of the whole class and said, leave that kid alone. That's the boy with the broken brain. And that became my identity. Because I felt like I was broken, I would always say things like, my dominant question, why me? My dominant question became, how do I become invisible? Because I didn't wanna be picked on, so I didn't wanna be this, have the spotlight. I never knew the answers when I was called on in school. How did it reflect in my life as a child? I would shrink down, I would collapse myself. I didn't wanna take up a lot of space 'cause I didn't wanna be seen. I would sit behind all the way in the back or behind the tall kid in class, 'cause I just always wanted to be invisible. And so my dominant question is, how do I be invisible? Because I never wanted the spotlight. And I think that carried over into my career in a big way because every opportunity to scale after 30 years, infomercials, I met with Kaplan and talked about franchising our learning center. I said no to every media opportunity. I would say no. Every book deal, I would say no. Because I just didn't want to be seen. I want to help people though. So it was this reconciling between wanting to help people, but not wanting to be seen. And I realized it was because of the questions I was asking myself. An illustration of this, years and years ago, I have a younger brother, younger sister, and my sister would send me postcards and emails, pictures of a very specific kind of breed of dog. It was a pug dog. These kind of squishy faces. They're very docile. You could dress them up as ballerinas or whatever, and they don't complain. They just kind of do their thing. And my Question became, why does she keep on sending me these photos of pug dogs? And I realized her birthday was coming up and she's a very smart marketer, right? And she was seeding a birthday, future birthday gift, which I ended up getting her. An interesting phenomenon happened to me. I started seeing pug dogs while she was sending me these images everywhere. At my health food store, ready to check out with my groceries, and the person in front of me checking out is holding a pug dog. You know, I'm a runner. I'd be running in my neighborhood and I swear there's this guy one day walking 6 pug dogs. Did these pug dogs just magically appear in my neighborhood? Did they teleport and manifest in my neighborhood? No, those pug dogs were always there. But remember I said that your brain is primarily a deletion device? You want to keep information out because if you let everything in, you would be overloaded. You go insane, right? There's a billion things you could be thinking about. So I started to pay attention to these pug dogs because I was asking the question about pug dogs. And so what are you asking questions What's your significant other, your children, your team, what are they asking? Because it would explain a lot of their behavior. Because whatever you focus on determines how you feel, and how you feel determines what you're going to do at any given moment. And what you do at any given moment determines the results you get in your life. So I'm going to give you the final tool and how to access this tool, because maybe your dominant question, like mine, why is this happening to me, wasn't the best question I could ask. Because what are the answers I got? Oh, because I'm broken. Oh, because I'm not enough. That didn't move me forward in my life. Later on, I thought, well, I have a broken brain. My dominant question became, how do I fix this? And I started getting answers that were more useful. And my dominant question evolved over the years is, how do I make this better? Now think about it. If you all the time ask, how do I make my relationship better? How do I make my health better? How do I make my reading speed better? My memory better? My income better? You start getting answers, answers, answers. Pug dogs, pug dogs, pug dogs. But even if you're reading something, get to the end, forget what you just read. But if you have questions about what you're reading, then all of a sudden when you're reading, oh, there's a pug dog, there's a pug dog, there's a pug dog, there's a pug dog. Answer, there's the answer, there's the answer, there's comprehension, comprehension, comprehension. So focus is a tool that you could use to enhance your productivity, your performance, your profitability, and also become more of a limitless learner. So what is your dominant question? I'll give you another example. I took a friend through this exercise on how to find your dominant question, and we found out her dominant question, the question she asks herself 100, 300 times a day without even knowing it, or sometimes knowing it but unconsciously asking, is, how do I get people to like me? And that's reasonable. Now, you don't know anything about this woman. You don't know what she looks like. You don't know where she lives. You don't know her career. You don't know her ethnicity, cultural background, any of that.

Right.

But you know a lot more than you think about this woman. If she obsessed, asked the question, how do I get people to like me? If she asks herself, knowing that questions are the answer, she's shining a spotlight, just like, how do I be invisible? You know what my life was like. How do I shrink? How do I not be seen? Her personality changes based on who she's spending time with. She literally adapts and likes everything of the things that People she wants to like her likes. So her personality is very malleable because she wants to be liked. So, you know, all of these things about her life, and you only know one question that she asks herself. So my question for you is, what's your dominant question? What question are you asking all the time that is directing the spotlight, your focus? The most important thing that you have is your focus, where you put your attention to. And the results follow from that. I was doing a brain training for the actor Will Smith, and we were in Toronto, and I spent the day with him doing our brain training. And at night they were filming. It was a night shoot. And everyone thinks that Hollywood is just very glamorous. And it just really, for those of you in the industry, it's just not. It's like hurry up and wait, right? It's 2 o'clock in the morning. It's February in Toronto. So it is freezing outside and they're taking breaks to reset. And I'm with his family from West Philly, and we're under this tent watching all these monitors where they're filming. And during the break, Will Smith comes and he makes us all hot chocolate, even though there's a crew that would do that, right? He starts cracking jokes. He starts telling stories, right? Because you know what his dominant question is? The question he asks all the time is, how do I make this moment more magical? And I was always thinking about, my question is how to make it better. So I was like, well, how do you improve that? And then he came up with immediately, really fast, very sharp thinker. He said, how do I make this moment even more magical? What does that presuppose? That it's already magical, right? So the words that we use in our mind direct everything in our life. It's the program that will run. Just like remembering names, your brain is this incredible supercomputer. And if you tell yourself, I'm not good at remembering names, you won't remember the name of the next person you meet. Because you program your supercomputer not to. If you truly understood how powerful your mind is, you wouldn't say or think something you didn't want to be true. So you want to stand guard to your mind, especially with the questions you're asking yourself. So how do I get people to like me? You get a certain answer. Why does this always happen to me? You get a certain answer. How do I make this better? You get a certain answer. So I realized when he's bringing us hot chocolate, telling stories, cracking jokes, that Will is living his dominant question. How do I make this moment even more magical? So let's come back to you. Let's come back to your family. Let's come back to your team, your customers. What's their dominant question? Because it will explain with incredible specificity why their life is the way it is. The focus is like an arrow. That arrowhead is where everything else comes from. Wherever our focus goes, that's where our energy flows. So a few tips on how to find your dominant question. 4 things that you could do.

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Number 1, look for patterns. When you are faced with a challenge or a conflict or a difficult situation, be highly aware of— sensitized. Awareness is the first step to learning anything. You can't change something unless you know it's there. So you go from unconscious to conscious. And so the first step is look at the patterns. When you're faced with conflict, some kind of situation, where does your mind go and what are you saying to yourself? Number 2, journaling is a great practice to discover your dominant question. When your stream of consciousness and you're just writing in your journal, there's something magical happens. You're taking the invisible and you're making it visible. That's why you write your goals, right? It's the first step in manifesting what's in your mind to something Physical outside of yourself. When you are journaling stream of consciousness about things, see the pattern of your thoughts. You start seeing that there's a certain cadence or certain ideas repeat itself. The third idea is feedback. Talk to your friends, talk to your family, talk to your coworkers, because they probably have some insight in terms of how you think. Sometimes they say it's hard to see the label when you're inside the jar. If you're inside the jar, it's hard to see the label. And sometimes your friends and family, the people that are around you, most, they could see what you can't see. Just like fish probably don't perceive water because it's just there all the time. And so the idea here is get feedback from your friends, your family, teach them this dominant question so you learn it better, and ask them to guess your dominant question. And that will give you some insight in there as well. The 4th thing you could do to help you discover your dominant question is meditation. And I don't meditate to get enlightened. I actually use meditation as a focusing exercise. You can't stop your thoughts, or that's not meditation. You can't stop your thoughts because that's what your mind does. Like your heart beats, you can't stop your heart from beating. You can't stop your mind from having thoughts. The idea here though, it's a focusing exercise. The idea here is when your thoughts go outside of your meditation, you start thinking about work, something going on with the kids, your dry cleaning, whatever. When you pull it back through meditation, you exercise your focus. When you pull it back to your mantra, maybe you have a word that you're meditating on, or bring it back to the candle that you're meditating on, or pull it back to your breath, which is my go-to, and kind of release it. Then you're flexing your focus muscles. What does that do? Later on in the day when you need to focus and you're getting distracted, you have a pathway you built through neuroplasticity to regain your focus from the thing that's distracting you, like when you're meditating, back To center. For me, I feel like I'm at a disadvantage if I don't meditate. People say, I don't have 10 minutes to meditate. If you're so busy you don't have 10 minutes to meditate, you should meditate for an hour. You probably need it more than you realize. All right? So meditation, when you're clearing your mind, notice what questions come to mind, because you're going to hear it a lot more in that silence with yourself, and that could reveal your dominant question. So those are 4 tips. The last thing I would say as a bonus tip, Look at your results. If you want to find your dominant question, yes, look at patterns when you're in difficulty where your mind goes. Yes, journaling. Yes, get feedback from friends and family in terms of what they would guess is your dominant question, maybe point you in that direction. Yes, meditate. But also a very easy way of finding your dominant question is what are the results you're creating on a regular basis? Because those results are not random. Those results come from focus, which means you probably ask a question that led to that focus, and that focus led to feelings and behaviors to get you that result. So is it consistently bad relationships, right, as an example, or consistently bad learning, or consistently bad whatever mistakes that you're making? Go back and deconstruct. And it takes an honest look at looking in the mirror, like, what am I asking myself that makes me Pursue these relationships or pursue XYZ, right? So the results would be kind of like the canary in the mining in the cave that will give you an idea of where your focus is and what questions are generating that level of focus. So that's the dominant question.