The 7 different types of focus

Internal focus

Internal focus means the feelings you control from the inside. People with a good internal focus have a clear set of guiding values and principles, and often a strong sense of intuition. People with a high internal focus take control of their thoughts, actions, and outcomes. The best way to get a strong internal focus is to keep practicing your mind. You must train your mind to obey commands and directions, don’t let random thoughts lead you to endless distractions, and you will end up in a rabbit hole. Instead, take full control of your mind and shift your gear into positive thinking.

External focus

Most people live inside their heads and are not focused on what happens on the outside. External focus is even more important than internal focus. Build awareness of what’s around you, start breaking bad habits and break out of your rut. Get out of your comfort zone, as you get out of it you are able to notice that your mind is expanding.

Peripheral focus

Peripheral focus is able to recognize and receive many things from your surroundings. Let’s take a meeting as an example, you have to do many things at once and you have to focus on people speaking, writing, etc. Sportspeople like basketball football are really good at peripheral focus. You have to learn how to observe and process many things simultaneously. To train your peripheral focus you have to see more and observe more. Go sit at a quiet spot and don’t focus on 1 thing try to focus on what’s around you and observe it. If you practice this every day you will see your peripheral focus increase by a lot.

Narrow focus

A narrow focus is focusing on one thing and nothing else. You put your energy and thoughts only on the one thing you’re concentrating on. Narrow focus comes from rehearsal and challenging yourself on the practice or technique. It’s focusing on one specific outcome.

Voluntary focus

Voluntary focus is consciously making goals and working on that goal with a big outcome of it. you want to control what you focus on. Pick a goal from your to-do list and focus on it for 5-10 minutes. Let thoughts come and go freely, and don’t reject them, try to get back to the work that you are doing. This way you are training your voluntary focus.

Stimulus-based focus

Stimulus-based focus is letting your mind distract from stimulated distractions, Such as notifications on your phone or watch. A good technique for this is to learn how to respond to stimuli. If you get distracted by a notification pause and count to five, Resist the immediate reaction and break that chain in your mind. After you counted to five in your head you are easier to return to the task that you were working at. The better you become at this the better your stimulus-based focus becomes.

Emotional focus

Emotional focus is the focus you have to switch the attention from within your own self to a person in front of you. So you can better concentrate and connect with them. People with a high emotional focus they just seem to get you and love to be around you. They can connect very well with them. Think of the most empathetic person you know and think of his/her qualities, as you interact with her/him try to spot and to focus on 3 good qualities they have that you admire, as opposed to the bad, over time you’ll improve your emotional focus.