Techniques to Achieve Powerful Focus

Stress can hamper our ability to think clearly and cause damage to our health as well. But with powerful focus, you can level the stress with clear thinking. The techniques outlined below will help you maintain focus, allowing you to remain calm in whatever situation you find yourself, including martial arts training.

Breathing

Breathing is a core part of powerful focus. In fact, it’s one of the best techniques that you can utilize. When you tap into the right breathing exercises, you’ll feel better all over.

Stress won’t be able to take over how you feel or process your thoughts. Focused breathing can be done at any time during your day or night - whenever you need it.

The moment that you realize that you’re feeling stressed or know that you’re about to enter a stressful situation, immediately put your focused breathing into practice.

When you become stressed, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure rises and your breathing changes. Some people draw in more shallow breaths while others start breathing a lot faster.

This way of breathing can turn calmness into a heightened agitation very quickly. To practice the breathing, you need to sit or stand straight. Breathe in with your mouth closed in a deep inhale of air.

As you draw in oxygen, count off to five. Feel the oxygen pouring through your body. When you release your breath, breathe out through your mouth. But as you breathe out, visualize that you’re exhaling away all of the stress.

Let your body relax and release the stiffness that you may feel in any area of your body. Keep your focus on inhaling and exhaling. Release any negative emotions associated to the stress, but don’t try to rein in your thoughts. Simply let them be. Don’t try to stop or change them. 

Concentration

Concentration is part of a necessary mental practice that will allow you to achieve your mental and physical fitness goals. You can’t develop a strong mental concentration and you can’t have the powerful self-focus that you need if you just can't keep your mind on where it needs to be.

When you can’t keep your focus, your thoughts will flit from one thing to the next. You’ll be a jack of all thoughts but master of none. This can cause frustration as well as an inability to get where you need to be in life.

You have to train your mind just as you have to train your body. The more training that you give it, the more you’ll be able to keep your concentration. When you have focused concentration, it allows you to go a lot further and do much more than you realized you could do.

Concentration is the ability to keep your mind on whatever you give it to focus on. You get to choose - there’s nothing random about concentration. It’s all within your power to control it.

That means you have to forego multi-tasking and be willing to rid yourself of distractions. Too many people want to attempt to concentrate while setting themselves up for a lack of focus.

They let clutter - like a droning television or annoying radio chatter or a ringing cell phone draw away their concentration. You concentrate by firmly keeping your thoughts reined in and focused on what you need to focus on as if it were a target.

You can practice mental exercises such as when thoughts randomly pop into your mind, you imagine yourself gathering up that thought or those thoughts and pitching them back out of your mind’s view.

It’s only by concentrating that you can make any changes you’d like to make in any area of your life. You’ll initially catch yourself straying in your mind, so don’t worry if you find concentration hard at first. We live in a very distracted world, so it’s something that has to be undone.

Visualization

Visualization is a way that you can gain focus. It’s a tool that can be used to empower an individual. The practice allows you to imagine what you wish to see. It’s a practice that can be used to allow the brain to unconsciously guide the actions of what you do.

Using visualization can clear your mind, erase stress and help your immune system get healthier. It can also bring you calmness and relaxation. To start a visualization exercise, you need to get rid of any mind clutter that you have going on.

You can do this by focusing on something - and the something doesn’t really matter. Some people choose to focus on the way that they inhale and exhale as they visualize. Others choose to focus on an object to prepare themselves.

Create an image before you start the exercise. This could be your visualization of what peace or happiness is. See whatever it is that you want to visualize, and image it down to the very last detail in your mind.

As you breathe in, allow your mind and body to fill with the positive. Let go of your breath and as you let go of your breath, release anything that you desire to free yourself of.

The purpose of visualization is because it helps open the connection between your brain and how your body moves. You can see yourself as an elite champion of fitness and you can create what you see.

Visualization can be used to allow yourself to be freed from the unconscious things that are keeping you from reaching the potential that you’d like to reach. It’s a way of giving your mind a workout.

It allows you to hold onto or focus on the picture of what you want. It’s a way to mentally plan for success. The practice can teach you how to overcome the mental roadblocks that may be keeping you from reaching physical goals. Visualization should be a part of every elite workout.

Guided Imagery

Guided Imagery is also part of a powerful focus that can help you achieve beyond and above what you’re aiming for. This is basically a form of meditation and the people who use it put their subconscious minds through a challenging workout.

They imagine pictures that they can connect with. The practice allows them to self-focus on what works and remove what doesn’t work in their lives. It enables people to go to a place mentally that can give them an advantage in reality.

Guided Imagery doesn’t have to take hours upon hours to put into practice. You can do it in just a matter of mere seconds. For example, if you’re an executive about to give a presentation to a big client, you can use it then.

You can imagine the client loving the presentation. You can see him getting onboard with your ideas and looking to sign on the dotted line.  Using Guided Imagery is a way of communicating between the mind and body that’s extremely effective.

The reason that it creates such a powerful focus is because it goes beyond the surface of the mind to delve below where it can gently sway your body’s responses and make you act with self-confidence.

Guided Imagery can also mean that you follow images that someone else is leading you toward or suggesting you toward. Or it can mean that you’re using images that someone created and you’ve added them as part of your imagery.

Meditation

Like visualization and Guided Imagery, meditation can also teach people how to have a powerful focus. It can increase your ability to tune into the mind and body connection.

The reason that this is important is because tapping into that connection can change your life. You might not realize how much of your life is being controlled by what you think rather than what you do.

For example, if you see someone running a grueling marathon or participating in a strength competition, your mind might automatically send the message, “Oh, I could never do that.”

Because that thought is there, that’s what your subconscious is negatively feeding your body in communication. That you can’t do it - so you don’t even try. That’s why both the mind and the body can benefit from meditation.

Meditation has many different styles. There is mantra, mindfulness, focused, movement and spiritual. In mantra meditation, words or phrases are used while meditating.

The particular word or phrase is not what’s important. What is important is that what’s chosen allows you to remain focused and concentrate. Some people choose to use sounds over words or phrases.

In mindful meditation, you tune in to what’s going on in the space around where you are. If you’re at the park, you don’t tune out children playing, dogs barking or birds chirping.

Even though these noises can be distracting, you simply allow them to be part of the meditation. What you do is to allow them in - but you don’t focus or dwell on any of the sounds.

With focused meditation, you choose to focus on something. It can be a thing, an idea or a phrase. You block out all other thoughts. If you use music for this type of meditation, its usually nature sounds or music without words.

Movement meditation is meditating and using some form of movement. This is usually found in a meditation such as yoga. But you don’t have to use a recognized form of movement.

You can create your own such as moving slowly from side to side. The focus is on whatever movement is used.

Spiritual meditation is focusing on whatever higher power you have in your life. Some people use this form of meditation to seek a peaceful state. They use the time to free themselves of whatever issues may be going on by letting go of the issue during their time of meditation.