Lessons In Concentration - Leave Your Comfort Zone And Achieve Focus

Your comfort zone can best be described as the point at which you are using minimum effort to achieve a particular result or set of results.

So if you have a repetitive 9-5 job, then you are in your comfort zone pretty much everyday while you're at work. This is because repetition breeds familiarity, and once you're familiar with something you become comfortable doing that thing.

In our series Lessons In Concentration, we have been looking at various techniques to improve our focus and concentration, which has been invariably destroyed by modern living.

Things like smartphones, social media, email and easy access TV shows have all contributed to killing our focus. Now I'm going to show you a way of using your comfort zone to get it back.

The Effort Of Focus

It is fairly obvious that it takes focus and concentration in order to learn a new and complex task. This is because as you learn new things you are creating brand new neural pathways in your brain that match to the task you're learning.

For instance if you are learning to play football (soccer), neurons in your motor cortex are firing along with ones in your visual cortex, cerebellum and other parts of the brain helping you learn the new skills you are being taught.

At this early stage of your learning, you have no choice but to concentrate on the instructions you are given. If you do not do this, then you will not be able to learn how to play very well.

This is true of anything you are learning, when you are first introduced to a task, your concentration levels are going to be at a premium.

However once you have gotten over that initial hump, things will start to become more 'natural' to you. Rather than thinking implicitly about each distinct movement you make in your football lessons, you will start to do things more instinctively.

This is a round about way of saying; practice makes perfect.

Flattening Out The Curve

We often refer to this early stage of learning as a learning curve. That is to say we are imagining a curve drawn on a graph, whereby the bottom axis represents time and the vertical axis represents difficulty.

The curve starts from bottom left to top right and the steeper it is drawn, represents how difficult it is (or has been) to learn the task at hand.

At some point (if we carry on learning till we are skilled) the learning curve flattens out and we gain no new knowledge for our task.

But wait! How is this possible? Does this mean that if we carry on at something we can learn everything there is to learn about a particular subject?

No, rather it means that after a particular amount of time without any new stimulus, we have learned all that is possible for us to learn about that subject.

Getting Out Of The Zone

Sticking with the football analogy let's look at the current FIFA World Player Of The Year, the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

In 2013 Ronaldo won the World Player Of The Year award after missing out on it four times in a row to the Barcelona forward Lionel Messi.

At the time it was reported that Ronaldo had hired an extra team of trainers to take him to the next level and become the best player in the world.

In other words he realised that he had gone beyond the point whereby he wasn't learning anything new, so decided to push himself out of his comfort zone in order to do so.

Ronaldo was already a star at Real Madrid, earning big wages, he didn't need to try and improve but he wanted to, and he realised the only way to do that was to get out of his comfort zone.

The Focus Of Effort

So how to use this maximum effort phenomena to practical use?

Quite simply put, you have to find something new and difficult to do, like learning a new skill like painting, or a new language like Mandarin.

By doing this you are getting your brain used to the fact that you love doing difficult things, and also to concentrating on a higher level.

Ultimately this will help you to focus and concentrate on tasks you need to complete and goals you need to reach.

WHAT ABOUT YOU; HAVE YOU TRIED SOMETHING DIFFICULT RECENTLY? OR ARE YOU THE SORT OF PERSON WHO RUNS AWAY FROM DIFFICULTY. AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Len dela Cruz on Unsplash

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