Your focus can solve or cause problems

This blog is about my brother.. a continuation if you will, of yesterday’s blog.  I am tackling this one though as I frequently do, via an indirect path.   I want to start with this video of Madonna’s woman of the year acceptance speech.

What everyone should do, is choose wisely, that which they focus their attention, passion, and energy upon. ~Xtac Quote

I have always liked Madonna.. Her music, her daring.  When she talks about the troubles of her life, that is what she is giving focus to..  and so we respond to it, we acknowledge that say, Prince had it better, easier, was more accepted.  That wasn’t my reality, I didn’t think, he was cool, but she is a slut..but she thought many of us thought that.. or at least enough to lash out at it.

I always thought of Madonna as a woman who was strong.  I thought of her as a person who didn’t care what other people think..   what other people think…

You see what I did there?  I began to shape your thoughts about this video, and who I am, by what I chose to focus on.

Often, what we focus on shapes the conversation.  What we give focus to becomes the backdrop against which all other things are discussed.  Highly successful people often flat out refuse to acknowledge failures.  Not because they didn’t happen, but because when you acknowledge failure, that is the beginning, the very first crack in the door to focusing on that failure.  It invites discussion and discussion invites examination, and more examination begins to take the form of focus, and focus shapes reality.

So.. the highly successful focus on accomplishment, on achievement, on motivating people to focus on the goals they share.

You can quietly acknowledge to yourself, your failures.  Its important to be realistic, to know your limitations, to learn from past mistakes.  But we who would be successful, keep these to ourselves because what we focus on shapes our reality.

So it is, that when I focused on the negatives of my brothers text, he responded to my focus.  His first message was overwhelmingly positive, but I took two words and chose to describe them as “negative”.  His second message was a reaction and it was predictable if you gave this even a moment of thought.   No.. negative did not compound a negative.  Our second conversation was quite positive in fact.. but my focus had shaped the nature of our next discussion, the starting point where we would resume speaking.

So it is that what we focus on, can solve problems, or it can create problems.  When I walked past a pretty girl, projecting strength and authority and received in return a warm come hither smile.. I was experiencing the power of projection.  We project both non-verbally and verbally.. but we need to be aware that we are always projecting and what we project, people react to.

Let’s look at this another way… The man who admires his woman creates an inner beauty in her.  As you admire her, she responds and returns to you,  a more sexy and seductive woman.  The man who does not see his woman as desirable will ultimately reap what he sows and she will become as ugly inside, as he has made her feel on the outside.  Its another abject lesson in the power of focus.

Do we ignore reality to create a false focus?  Have you not been listening?  We create focus so that it may become our reality.

I like what Madonna said about not owning anything, that she owes all that she is to a high power.. I liked when she said, “I am a different kind of feminist.  I am a bad feminist”.   There!  I did it again.. I was shaping your opinions by making you react to my focus. Those were positives so your reaction should be positive. If I pick only negatives, you would naturally gravitate to my negatives.

I like when my brother said he liked my new quote.. that was a positive.  I’ll focus on those.   I won’t focus anything my brother or Madonna said that was negative.  Not because I wish to invalidate their experience or observation but because I don’t want to bring my focus on their negatives.  I don’t believe in giving energy to negatives.  I believe in action about negatives.. and if the time comes to act on a negative I will.. but I won’t give focus, and therefore a life and energy to negatives.

I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. ~ Quote, Mahatma Gandhi

And how does this apply to Masters and slaves?  It means that if you, as a Master, observe a negative in your slave, you either act on it to correct it, or you give focus to a positive in your slave.  Better yet do both.  You will be an infinitely better Master if you follow this advice.

And if you are a slave, and you feel negative feelings regarding your assigned tasks or yourself, you should act to change those feelings. You do this with by choising what you will give your focus to.  Make your focus be a positive perspective.

Gandhi was made to clean toilets because he was a lawyer and such work was beneath and him and it was reasoned that such a thing might break him.  He did of course live in a world divided by the caste system.  But he thanked his jailers and they could not understand how he had arrived at thanking them.  And he essentially said that they had shown him a trap he had created for himself, and when he saw it, he knew that he did not have to accept it.  So instead of focusing on the trap they laid for him, he focused on doing a very good job of cleaning toilets and taking pride in it.  By doing so, he could both avoid the trap they had laid to break him and still could honestly  say “thank you” to his jailers for what they had done for him. Not “to him”, but “for him”.

You see my friends, with focus and right thought, we can always find our happy place.  We can always give focus in a way that shapes a better reality.  Or we can help create our own problems..  The choice is entirely in our own hands.. Carpe Diem my friends.. Go be someone’s great day.