Day Six — Journaling

Photo by Scott McLeod Some Rights Reserved

Day six was about the power of focus, as in what we focus on and how it shapes our perspective on the reality we experience. To steal one of the examples, I want you to take just a few seconds to look around you at everything that's brown. I'll give you a moment to do that, and to fill the time, here is an unrelated but cute image.

Photo by Matthew Donovan Some Rights Reserved

Now, I want you to close your eyes and try to name everything around you that's blue. That's not what you were expecting me to ask, now way it? Also, if you actually try that, you'll notice that it's probably very hard to think of anything but the brown things that you were focused on when you looked around. That's how we often go through life — focused on the brown crap around us instead of the blues and greens and other lovely colors and life that makes it worth living.

So, how do you change what you're focused on? Simple… Ask yourself the right questions. That's the short of the entire tape from yesterday. That's why the exercise for the day was to come up with five personalized questions that help bring focus to the things that make life worth living and provide a positive, driving force throughout the day.

• What am I grateful for?
• How can I make today exciting?
• Who do I truly love?
• How can I help someone today?
• What do I want to learn more about today?

Some of these are more helpful at setting up a mental state than others, but they seem like they should work for me, at least for now. The rest of the assignment was to ask myself these personal questions every morning and provide at least two answers to each for the rest of the time I'm working through the tape series. Given what I know about how long it takes to form a habit, it should become habitual to think about these things first thing every morning, if I actually remember to do it every day for the rest of the series. I guess we'll see how that works out.