It just takes five minutes to discover the world of difference between being focused and being all confused – I’ve been enabling people to focus for over fifteen years and I know how it works. Every week, my personal development online readers are sent simple ideas and exercises on how to focus their mind – and it’s free! And every day, people all round the world sign up to my online seminars to learn the same thing. So, what is focus about?

First of all, you’ve got to realize that focus doesn’t happen naturally. The adult mind is either thinking about the past or worrying about the future. The worry you already know about – surveys show that most people are worried about their finances, worried about their kids, worried about their business, worried about retirement. For each stage of life we’ll always find a set of worries. And all worry is focused on events that didn’t happen yet – and, more importantly, stuff that we really don’t want to happen! What kind of idiot would squander their energy on the things that they don’t want to happen? An ordinary idiot!

While we are all conscious of worry, we’re not aware that our subconscious mind is obsessed with the past and it’s because of the past that we end up worrying about the future! We all learned the stuff that we don’t like about ourselves as young children – and our subconscious mind continues to play the same old cracked record. And you aren’t aware that this is going on, so you’ve never realized that you could do something about the problem.

What you do need to realize is that you don’t have to do anything about it if you learn to focus your mind on the present moment. Yeah, that’s what focus is – a here and now thing. This is where you spend each day, this is where you could be your very best if you could just focus, now is the only place that you can be, you’ve got no choice. The choice you do have is whether you’ll bother to turn up for your life or not. If you do decide to turn up, everything will change.

So, what do you have to do to focus? Well, this is your first training session, right here, right now. Sit down in a place where you won’t be disturbed for five minutes. When you’ve got comfortable, shut your eyes and just listen. You’re useless thoughts will try to distract you but, when this happens, just latch onto the next sound that you hear. When you do something this simple, you train your mind to pay attention to what is going on in just this moment – and that is what focus is.

Even if you just started with five minutes of sitting and hearing, you’ll understand something really important – the real world has nothing to do with the noise in your head that you’ve been paying all of your attention to.