As this is my first post of 2016 I’d like to thank all of you who have being reading me, it’s a good feeling to be read even if it’s only one person. As you’ve seen by now procrastination is my demon. I’ve lost many things to this demon and thus I’m committed to fighting it and help my fellow procrastinators transform into actors of their own lives, creators of their destinies, masters of their present and future. As we’ve seen so far on other posts, if you haven’t read them do it now, I’ll wait, they’re not that long, it should take you at most 5 minutes, so go, now, yes now. Ok, as I was saying, as we’ve talked before procrastinators are not all the same, and so not one technique will work on all procrastinators, we need many. The same way that we’ve heard the saying that when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer every problem looks like a nail here we need to go beyond a single method to combat procrastination. We can use focus and visualization as we’ve seen before. This tools allow us to have a better grasp on what it its we want to accomplish, our goals. Visualization helps us first by establishing what “done” looks like. We’re not talking here o a single or multiple metrics goal, as would a business KPI, or a timed performance for an athlete, we are talking about a visualization of much more than that. Again, I’m not trying to be esoteric here, I’m very much grounded, but what I’m saying is that a description would require a narrative worthy of a novel, and unless you are or want to be a writer this is not necessary. I’m talking about establishing how we will feel when we’re done, how we will look like when we are done, how our environment will be when we are done. This is a visualization that will help our brains set targets and our actions will then be compared to those targets, we will feel stress building if we are pulling on the wrong direction. So that for visualization, now, for focus. We need to focus our actions to go in the sense of that visualization. We need to set boundaries to our attention so we can achieve our goals. When we don’t set these boundaries what we do can in the worst case destroy work we had already done to achieve our goals. Focus allows us to work, advance, build on the path of our goals. Now, having focus is not easy, we are easily distracted, all the time something is there competing for our attention, be it external like social media or plain old media or be it internal, our own thoughts. We can blame every gadget we own for our lack of attention, but we are, by far, our worst distractor. We are constantly being bombarded by wandering that emerges from the most subtle reference from our senses and mostly from the last wandering thought and build a chain of disperse ideas linked by the most obscure references. And now, here we are, at last, ready to talk about mindfulness. 
What does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.
So, have you thought about mindfulness before and are you interested in it? I’d love to read your comments.
