This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Power of Unwavering Focus" by Dandapani. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What’s the importance of focus in life? How does awareness reshape your mind?
In The Power of Unwavering Focus, Dandapani discusses the power of awareness and how it reshapes the mind for better—or worse. Then he considers the many benefits of living a more focused life.
Keep reading to learn why Dandapani says focus is a crucial skill to master.
Reason #1: Awareness Reshapes Your Mind
The first reason that explains the importance of focus in life is that it reshapes your mind. Dandapani explains that your orb of awareness doesn’t simply experience your mind—it also slowly reshapes your mind for better or for worse. This means that if you direct your awareness intentionally, you can control this process and shape your mind as you want. However, if you let your environment direct your awareness for you, it may reshape your mind in ways you didn’t intend. In this section, we’ll explore how this process works in three steps.
Step 1) Energy Follows Awareness
First, Dandapani explains that your energy naturally follows your orb of awareness. He says that everyone has spiritual energy flowing within them. This energy flows toward whatever part of your mind you’re currently inhabiting with your orb of awareness. This happens whether you’re intentionally directing your awareness to a specific region of your mind or letting your environment direct your energy while you’re distracted.
Step 2) Energy Nourishes and Grows Regions of the Mind
According to Dandapani, your energy that follows your awareness also nourishes and grows the region so that it becomes more powerful. You can think of the different regions of your brain like muscles that get stronger with exercise. Every time your orb of awareness directs energy into a region of your brain, it’s getting exercise. The regions that you spend the most time experiencing with your orb of awareness are the ones that grow the most.
Step 3) The Regions You Nourish and Grow Exert a Pull on Your Awareness
Dandapani states that as you nourish regions of your mind via your awareness, these growing regions will begin exerting a pull on your awareness. Think of it like a magnetic force that grows stronger every time you visit it. This pull makes it easier for your awareness to return to these regions again and again. Over time, your awareness will start spending its time in regions that exert the strongest pull.
Conclusion: How Awareness Reshapes Your Mind
Once we put all of Dandapani’s steps together, it becomes clear how your awareness reshapes your mind in ways that can make you more focused or more distractible. Let’s compare two scenarios to see the difference focus makes in the long term.
Scenario 1: You’re sitting at a computer trying to get your work done. You guide your orb of awareness to the region of your mind that allows you to apply yourself to your work. The region may contain motivation, skills, or job-specific knowledge. When your orb of awareness travels there, your flow of spiritual energy experiences the region, allowing you to get your work done. Your spiritual energy also grows and nourishes this region. Next time you sit down to work, this region will exert a pull on your orb of awareness, making it easier for you to focus again.
Scenario 2: You sit down at your computer to work, but your environment distracts you. You open YouTube and begin watching entertaining videos instead. Your orb of awareness is now pulled to the region that enjoys being entertained by videos. Next time you sit down to work, you will feel your awareness pulled magnetically toward this region in your mind, making it harder to focus on your work and easier to keep watching videos.
Reason #2: A Focused Life Has Many Benefits
Fostering a more focused mind provides a wide range of benefits. Dandapani asserts that mastering focus will help you to: improve your work performance, overcome stress and anxiety, deepen your relationships, live with more purpose, and experience more joy.
Benefit 1) Improve Your Work Performance
Dandapani posits three ways that improved focus will improve your work performance. You’ll use time more efficiently, use energy more efficiently, and master your skills.
1) Use time more efficiently: Improved focus will save time that is normally used up by distractions. Dandapani states that distractions such as social media, checking news feeds, or simply letting your mind wander when you want to be on task eats up valuable time. By learning to focus, you’ll minimize time spent on distractions and use your time on productive work instead.
2) Use energy more efficiently: Improved focus will allow you to use energy much more efficiently. As we’ll discuss when learning Dandapani’s focusing techniques later in this guide, every time your awareness moves off task, it takes willpower (and mental energy) to bring it back. The more practiced you become in preventing your awareness from wandering in the first place, the less willpower you’ll need to use to stay on task. Therefore, you’ll be able to complete the same amount of work without becoming as mentally exhausted.
3) Master your skills: Finally, Dandapani explains that improved focus will facilitate greater mastery of any skill. Recall that your energy flows wherever you direct your awareness. Therefore, the more you guide your awareness to the regions involved in using a skill—anything from painting to analyzing a problem at work—the more energy you will invest in those regions. This invested energy grows the strength and capacity of the skill, like exercising a muscle.
Benefit 2) Overcome Stress and Anxiety
Improved focus also has the power to help you overcome anxiety and fear. Dandapani explains that you experience anxiety because your awareness travels to an imaginary future where things are going poorly. This then causes you stress and anxiety in the present moment. However, you wouldn’t be stressed out if your awareness wasn’t traveling to an imagined future in the first place. Therefore, Dandapani argues, you can overcome stress and anxiety by guiding your awareness back to the present and away from the distressing imagined future.
Benefit 3) Deepen Your Relationships
Dandapani asserts that focus can also deepen your relationships with others. This is because focus allows you to give a friend or loved one your undivided attention. This deepens relationships in two distinct ways.
First, giving someone your undivided attention can make them feel valued. Dandapani states that everyone has a finite amount of time and energy in their lives, making them the most valuable things you can give another person. By giving someone your undivided attention—which requires your time and energy—you show how important they are to you.
Second, by giving someone your undivided attention, you’ll notice more about the other person than you would if you were distracted during your interactions. This will enable you to get to know them better than you did before and lead to a deeper, richer relationship.
Benefit 4) Live With More Purpose
Dandapani states that learning to focus will help you live a more purposeful life. He provides two reasons why.
First, improved focus has the power to help you better understand your life’s purpose. To truly gain a sense of purpose in your life, you must understand your deepest desires and motivations—which you can only achieve by knowing and listening to your mind. If you’re always distracted, you’ll never listen to the regions of your mind that hold your deeper motivations in life.
Second, improved focus will allow you to prioritize the activities, relationships, and skills that contribute to your life’s purpose. Recall that one of the benefits of focus is control over your time and energy. This means you’ll be able to invest more time and energy in activities that feel meaningful and give your life a sense of purpose.
Benefit 5) Experience More Joy
Finally, Dandapani reveals that developing the skill of focus will lead to a more joyful life. He stresses that joy isn’t an experience to be chased on its own, but rather a by-product of living purposefully and investing in the people and goals that matter most to you.
Thus, as your focus allows you to understand your motivations and priorities and to direct your energy toward them, you’ll discover that a focused life is a joyful life.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Power of Unwavering Focus summary:
- How focus isn't just something that happens to you—it's a learned skill
- Why focus is so important and how to improve your focus
- The unexpected benefits of wiggling your toes
