Focus

Well, wouldn’t it be great fun to buy a pair of rosy-coloured eyeglasses, and always see the world around us as pleasant and delightful?
I believe that your reply is “Yes!”
So let us look at one among the most vital structure blocks of the “How to” of Happiness: Focus.

Yes, despite all of the fun and lesser exciting stuff going on in your Conscious and Unconscious Mind, you can choose to focus on specific bits of details, and not on others. Where you set your focus helps to decide to a great level your moment-to-moment degree of Happiness.

This, very basically, is how it’s feasible to exist below a tarpaulin next to a rubbish tip in the Third World and smile. Now, it would be impractical to say that all the poor people in, say, India are happy, but on the whole they completely fail to show the hardships we (with our map of the world) expect them to.

Curiously, in their map of the world it’s amazing that they’re in a position to be together with their entire family every day (which perhaps for few of us in the West could work around as good as staying under a tarpaulin!), and they have a look at us wandering unaccompanied through their country, thousands of miles from our parents and siblings, and apparently a fair few of them feel a profound sadness that we're losing on life’s greatest happiness. Meanwhile we are focused on their poverty, dirty surroundings and the information that they’ll mostly on no account be in a position to come up with the money for a cappuccino machine, and feel pitiful for them.

I give this illustration to those people who say "Well I have many difficulties in my life" and this makes them accept that even though people have really hard lives they are in a position to live blissfully with the help of Focus. Which implies that, for them, their life is really not so hard at all.

Fortunately, you do not need to grow up in the Third World to observe the positive in your circumstances (although occasionally it appears to me that it assists!)
But we do have to be aware of some quite pernicious cultural conditioning, which generally says to us “You do not have enough. Get more. You do not have enough. Rush up before it is gone!”

The reality is, there are always going to be things we don’t have - have a look at all the bits of the universe that even a multi-billionaire like Bill Gates doesn’t have the wealth to buy, or the time to get round to enjoying. If there is too much for him to purchase/ get pleasure from/ create, what hope is there for us?
So we can safely focus on what’s in our grasp - the good things we already have in our lives, and the amazing things we are going to produce for ourselves!

These days the majority of us have heard the idea “glass half full/glass half empty”. This is an ideal example of the might of Focus. If you prefer to look at the air above the beer, you will see a huge and hollow emptiness, stretching as far as you want it to.
But if you prefer to see the beer, you will see beer. Or freshly squeezed tropical fruit juice. Or gold. Or love. Or Happiness.

Live the difference Life Coaching is based in Melbourne which offers transformational one-on-one coaching both face-to-face and on the phone. People come from all walks of life and live in and around Melbourne, interstate and overseas. Visit http://livethedifference.com.au for more information on Life Coach