Train Your Brain to Focus

Next time you are sitting in a meeting, take a look around. The odds are high that you will see your colleagues checking screens, texting, and emailing while someone is talking or making a presentation. Many of us are proud of our prowess in multitasking, and wear it like a badge of honor.
Multitasking may help us check off more things on our to-do lists. But it also makes us more prone to making mistakes, more likely to miss important information and cues, and less likely to retain information in working memory, which impairs problem solving and creativity.
Over the past decade, advances in neuroimaging have been revealing more and more about how the brain works. Studies of adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using the latest neuroimaging and cognitive testing [PDF] are showing us how the brain focuses, what impairs focus — and how easily the brain is distracted. This research comes at a time when attention deficits have spread far beyond those with ADHD to the rest of us working in an always-on world. The good news is that the brain can learn to ignore distractions, making you more focused, creative, and productive.
Here are three ways you can start to improve your focus.
Tame your frenzy.
Frenzy is an emotional state, a feeling of being a little (or a lot) out of control. It is often underpinned by anxiety, sadness, anger, and related emotions. Emotions are processed by the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped brain structure. It responds powerfully to negative emotions, which are regarded as signals of threat. Functional brain imaging has shown that activation of the amygdala by negative emotions interferes with the brain's ability to solve problems or do other cognitive work. Positive emotions and thoughts do the opposite — they improve the brain's executive function, and so help open the door to creative and strategic thinking.
What can you do? Try to improve your balance of positive and negative emotions over the course of a day. Barbara Fredrickson, a noted psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recommends a 3:1 balance of positive and negative emotions, based upon mathematical modeling of ideal team dynamics by her collaborator Marcial Losada, and confirmed by research on individual flourishing and successful marriages. (Calculate your "positivity ratio" at www.positivityratio.com). You can tame negative emotional frenzy by exercising, meditating, and sleeping well. It also helps to notice your negative emotional patterns. Perhaps a coworker often annoys you with some minor habit or quirk, which triggers a downward spiral. Appreciate that such automatic responses may be overdone, take a few breaths, and let go of the irritation.
What can your team do? Start meetings on positive topics and some humor. The positive emotions this generates can improve everyone's brain function, leading to better teamwork and problem solving.
Apply the brakes.
Your brain continuously scans your internal and external environment, even when you are focused on a particular task. Distractions are always lurking: wayward thoughts, emotions, sounds, or interruptions. Fortunately, the brain is designed to instantly stop a random thought, an unnecessary action, and even an instinctive emotion from derailing you and getting you off track.
What can you do? To prevent distractions from hijacking your focus, use the ABC method as your brain's brake pedal. Become Aware of your options: you can stop what you are doing and address the distraction, or you can let it go. Breathe deeply and consider your options. Then Choose thoughtfully: Stop? or Go?
What can your team do? Try setting up one-hour distraction-free meetings. Everyone is expected to contribute and offer thoughtful and creative input, and no distractions (like laptops, tablets, cell phones, and other gadgets) are allowed.
Shift Sets.
While it's great to be focused, sometimes you need to turn your attention to a new problem. Set-shifting refers to shifting all of your focus to a new task, and not leaving any behind on the last one. Sometimes it's helpful to do this in order to give the brain a break and allow it to take on a new task.
What can you do? Before you turn your attention to a new task, shift your focus from your mind to your body. Go for a walk, climb stairs, do some deep breathing or stretches. Even if you aren't aware of it, when you are doing this your brain continues working on your past tasks. Sometimes new ideas emerge during such physical breaks.
What can your team do? Schedule a five-minute break for every hour of meeting time, and encourage everyone to do something physical rather than run out to check email. By restoring the brain's executive function, such breaks can lead to more and better ideas when you reconvene.
Organizing your mind, and your team members' minds, will yield a solid payoff in the year ahead. Adding "high-quality focus" is a great place to start. Try holding a no-multitasking meeting and see what happens when everyone in the room gives their undivided attention. Have you ever tried this in your organization? If not, do you think it would fly?

Source:Internet

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6 Steps to Master your Emotions

Whenever you feel you are in a painful emotion, take the following steps to break the pattern, which is limiting your progress or success.

It is like cultivating your own garden in a way. What you plant will grow and thrive in whatever conditions. Similarly we need to develop habits or regular pattern of planting good emotions to feel positive and powerful to handle things around us.
1. Recognise your feelings – are they negative , do you feel overwhelmed or attacked or overloaded -- just ask yourself - ‘What am I feeling right now?’ Am I angry or frustrated? Then take a moment to question your emotions. Start to reason and begin to reduce the intensity of your negative emotions to deal with the situation more quickly and easily. Keep in mind the 10 positive powerful emotions listed to help get to the right frame of thinking.
2. Accept and Appreciate your emotions – Don’t destroy your feelings by wrongful communications with yourself. Begin to accept that you have right to feel the way you feel at times because of circumstances. However appreciate that now you are totally aware and can control your emotions – you can change your thinking patterns and the way you approach the situations. As every child needs attention, you will find this steps helps to calm you down eventually to look at the positive angle.

3. Understand and Analyse the message – you are getting or thinking through. This is to help you break the habit of negative emotional states you get into immediately under certain conditions. Check out your feelings and challenge them if valid for those situations. This is to prevent the same happening again and again form occurring in future. It is literally conditioning you to think better than just misinterpreting things.

Four great questions to ask:
a) What must I really feel to handle it better?
b) What belief do I need to develop to feel that way?
c) Am I willing to create the right solution and handle it properly to get results?
d) What will I gain from this? Or how will it benefit me?

4. Stay Confident – this step is important as it need to be carried throughout. Things do wrong at times but it is crucial not to lose hope and faith in yourself. Develop confidence and keep it till you achieve the desired results.
5. Give Assurance to yourself – that you have ability to solve things and develop positive powerful emotions to get expected outcomes. Furthermore, keep assuring that you cannot only do it this time but also every time such condition prevails. Repeating yourself will to develop assurance and overcome negativity.

6. Become Passionate to take action – don’t be a coward – just go for it. Excitement is important to move you forward – so get passionate about winning people, situations or even circumstances that challenge you. Passion is the leverage that gets you in the driving seat to steer you to your goals of happiness.

So begin to kill the weds in your garden before they become giants to control you and your life.

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Seven Chakra

The word chakra is Sanskrit for wheel or disk and signifies one of seven basic energy centers in the body. Each of these centers correlates to major nerve ganglia branching forth from the spinal column. In addition the chakras also correlate to levels of consciousness, archetypal elements, developmental stages of life, colors, sounds, body functions, and much, much more.

Below is a brief description of each chakra.

Chakra Seven:
Thought, Universal identity, oriented to self-knowledge
This is the crown chakra that relates to consciousness as pure awareness. It is our connection to the greater world beyond, to a timeless, spaceless place of all-knowing. When developed, this chakra brings us knowledge, wisdom, understanding, spiritual connection, and bliss.

Chakra Six:
Light, Archetypal identity, oriented to self-reflection
This chakra is known as the brow chakra or third eye center. It is related to the act of seeing, both physically and intuitively. As such it opens our psychic faculties and our understanding of archetypal levels. When healthy it allows us to see clearly, in effect, letting us "see the big picture."

Chakra Five:
Sound, Creative identity, oriented to self-expression
This is the chakra located in the throat and is thus related to communication and creativity. Here we experience the world symbolically through vibration, such as the vibration of sound representing language.

Chakra Four:
Air, Social identity, oriented to self-acceptance
This chakra is called the heart chakra and is the middle chakra in a system of seven. It is related to love and is the integrator of opposites in the psyche: mind and body, male and female, persona and shadow, ego and unity. A healthy fourth chakra allows us to love deeply, feel compassion, have a deep sense of peace and centeredness

Chakra Three:
Fire, Ego identity, oriented to self-definition
This chakra is known as the power chakra, located in the solar plexus. It rules our personal power, will, and autonomy, as well as our metabolism. When healthy, this chakra brings us energy, effectiveness, spontaneity, and non-dominating power.

Chakra Two:
Water, Emotional identity, oriented to self-gratification

The second chakra, located in the abdomen, lower back, and sexual organs, is related to t he element water, and to emotions and sexuality. It connects us to others through feeling, desire, sensation, and movement. Ideally this chakra brings us fluidity and grace, depth of feeling, sexual fulfillment, and the ability to
accept change.

Chakra One:
Earth, Physical identity, oriented to self-preservation

Located at the base of the spine, this chakra forms our foundation. It represents the element earth, and is therefore related to our survival instincts, and to our sense of grounding and connection to our bodies and the physical plane. Ideally this chakra brings us health, prosperity, security, and dynamic presence.

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Ways to Ease the Stress...

• Talk with someone about your feelings-anger, sorrow, and other emotions-even though it may be difficult.


• Don't hold yourself responsible for any disastrous event or be frustrated because you feel that you cannot help directly.


• Take steps to promote your own physical and emotional healing by staying active in your daily life patterns or by adjusting them. This healthy outlook will help yourself and your family. (i.e. healthy eating, rest, exercise, relaxation, meditation.)


• Maintain a normal household and daily routine, limiting demanding responsibilities of yourself and your family.


• Spend time with family and friends.


• Participate in memorials, rituals, and use of symbols as a way to express feelings.


• Use existing supports groups of family, friends, and church.


• Establish a family emergency plan. Feeling that there is something that you can do can be very comforting.

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