Hypnosis for optimal focus
Pay attention. Concentrate. Focus. The voice that demands that we focus is usually tense. Especially when that voice is our own, it pulls us back from distraction by sheer force of will. Concentration takes power.
What if focus could be easy and natural? That kind of focus might actually loosen the tension in your jaw, and relax the muscles in your shoulders. That kind of focus might make more energy available for the task at hand. That kind of focus is available to you.
Watch a small child at play with a cardboard box. Context drifts away and the child disappears into a world of her own making. She is entirely focused, entirely in flow. Her concentration is a form of play, natural and productive.
Your best state for solving problems and creating opportunities is the same state of relaxing into focus. When you do it naturally, you lose track of the need to concentrate: you simply engage all of your attention into just one activity.
The question becomes, how can you practice moving into a state of relaxed focus quickly, easily and effectively?
One answer is to practice going into trance. Trance is a state of relaxed focus which can be used to apply your best thinking to a specific issue or opportunity. When you enter trance, you allow your mind to follow just one out of the many threads available to it. You concentrate all of your attention on just one thing.
All hypnosis is self-hypnosis: the person in trance is always the person in control of the trance. Most people find that trance is also a state that is easily learned – like many places, it is more complicated to find the first time you go there. After you’ve been there a few times, it becomes steadily easier to go back into trance.
Trance is inherently healthy and enjoyable. It is the natural state in which the human mind plays with ideas to identify new choices or make decisions. Slowing down in trance allows you to speed up the actions and changes that result when you have the information you need. You come out of trance relaxed and ready to act.
Any experience of hypnosis will begin to teach you how to deliberately enter trance when you need to concentrate your thoughts and abilities. Any training in leading other people into trance will also allow you to become familiar with how you go into trance.
Training in hypnosis is not useful because it allows you to take control of other people’s minds. It is useful because it allows you to relax and focus the thoughts of just one mind: your own. When you train as a hypnotist, you condition yourself to relax and focus.
How much more would you accomplish this week if you were entirely relaxed as you concentrated all of your thoughts and efforts? You can learn to enter the state that produces your best thinking. Your most intense thinking can be a chance to relax, recharge and prepare for action.
All it takes is the ability to enter trance – a natural state of focus, relaxation and great new ideas.
About the author: Linda Ferguson, Ph.D. is a senior partner with NLP Canada Training Inc.,Toronto, Canada. NLP Canada provides intensive training in the practices and principles of NLP. Drawing on fields from the arts to business to neuroscience. Learn more at www.nlpcanada.com
