Tag Archives: Discipline

The Power of Concentration

I kind of accidentally stumbled upon the video of Dandapani about the power of concentration, the power of doing one thing at the time and I am really amazed how often I do or want to do multiple things at the time. So he says something like “do one thing at the time and finish it”. So I have been watching myself for the last few days and I am watching myself more and more, am more aware about what I am doing, what I want to do at the same time. And sometimes I still do, but I am more and more aware of when I do it. And indeed, how not concentrated I am when I do multiple things at the time.

Like tonight I decided to connect my laptop to my music collection on another computer and started playing music. And yes, music can be played in the background. So while I was cooking I played music in the background. But while eating I decided to turn the music off and focus on the eating. And the laptop was still on and open on my table and I was amazed how often my mind went to the screen, mostly resulting in thinking other thoughts and indeed forgetting about concentrating on the eating, on my food.

And finishing things and doing one thing at the time is hard sometimes. As while cooking sometimes I had to wait for the cooking process to finish. And normally, also this time, I started doing things next to the cooking. But my awareness was still with the “doing one thing at the time” and I realized that indeed starting doing something else may result in forgetting about the cooking and messing up the food, like letting it burn or cook too long or something.

Mmm, and hard now, as I don’t feel like finishing this post. I don’t really know what else to write right now. So maybe just put some links and maybe a picture. But indeed, starting this post without the intention to finish it puts me in a weird position now, at least that is how it feels.

So yes, very interesting being aware about doing one thing at the time and finishing things.

Doing one thing at the time...And I was looking for a picture about doing one thing at the time and then realized my current computer desktop would be a good sample of not doing one thing at the time. As using my computer for the last fifteen minutes or so I realized I am trying to do many things at the same time, indeed being distracted by many things on my computer desktop, in my browser and in my Facebook. And I did quite some things based on that. Not really wrong I guess, finishing things like putting a phone number someone sent me, but it is amazing indeed what a computer desktop or browser window with many things or a Facebook page with many options offers in opportunities to do many things at the same time. Or indeed not doing them or not finishing them.

Stopped

So the last few days, weeks, or maybe even months I slowly stopped. And the last days I kind of really consciously stopped, stopped kind of everything. As it seems all those things like discipline and habit and Principles of Success and desire document don’t seem to work, didn’t seem to work.

I even kind of stopped the sending of my daily quote, something pretty serious to me. And the writing here, but that didn’t seem to have so much effect or influence.

And it all kind of started with the Coda meetings I am participating in. As that seems to be the first thing ever that kind of makes me feel that something is happening, that something is improving.

And I am not sure if I am right, but it may be the worst advice to someone who is codependent, to work on things like ‘discipline‘ and some or most of the Principles of Success, although the Principles of Success also recognize things like the power of love, romantic love, and something like Infinite Intelligence.

So realizing more and more that I could’t do it, can’t do it, can’t do anything on my own, with my own little human power, a few days ago I decided to give ‘everything’ to God and wait, stop, do nothing anymore.

And it was hard, as I still have work to do, still have no clue how to pay the bills two months from now and desperately looking for love, a new partner, or maybe my current, old partner.

But I just couldn’t, I couldn’t go on forcing and forcing things, something I always do, did. But more importantly, something that doesn’t work, didn’t work.

So here I am, a few days after my ‘giving over’, wanting to share some of my experience.

And not sure what to share, but slowly I started to feel some more freedom, slowly I started to do things, but only things I felt like doing, nothing forced, including not doing some of the items I planned, allowing myself to move them, not do them, as it just didn’t feel good.

And today, or actually yesterday or so, I felt like writing again, writing here, writing something. So that’s what I did.

I messed up

I messed up lately with practically everything, especially with Inspiration for Success. I didn’t even send the daily quotes which I mostly manage to do, even if I am away. And I never expected this to happen, as I thought I had learned what was discipline and habit. But apparently I haven’t.

Not sure what is next, but at least I am writing again here.

Enough for today

Still hard, let’s say virtually impossible, to skip writing a post here. It appears that habits are really powerful.

However, I don’t feel like writing now as I am tired and also just don’t know what to write. So this habit is somehow useless, as I don’t see much use in this post, or at least in a post as short as I am planning to make it.

But still, in the mean time I arrived at the third paragraph and I even wrote something useful (about habits).

Question remains how to develop some more useful habits, or better habits that would bring me e.g. riches instead of poverty. As those things also must somehow be related to habit. Or at least it must be possible to develop habits for riches or turn poverty habits into riches habits.

Self analysis, question 50

Today’s question often makes me guilty, especially lately, as I believe I don’t spend enough time on work, on earning money. But maybe I’m too hard on myself as I also consider a hard worker and someone who doesn’t give up.

So let’s answer the question

“How much time out of every 24 hours do you devote to:

  • your occupation
  • sleep
  • play and relaxation
  • acquiring useful knowledge
  • plain waste?

And the first one I am most scared about as I did not spend a lot of time on ‘real work’ lately, like internet marketing or finding customers for my business. But I have spent a lot of time on meeting people and moving around to get my DoctorsConnect project going. And what makes me believe I don’t spend time on my occupation is that I often have to travel and wait a lot in order to meet the people I want to meet and that time doesn’t feel like ‘work’. But of course it is part of ‘work’, even though it also involves time in e.g. bars and also enjoying time meeting people (for pleasure).

So if I look at it, I may indeed spend only something like 4 hours per day on ‘work’, on occupation. But if you count all the work related to also my project and sales and promotion I guess it is closer to ten or maybe even twelve hours a day. And that often feels like too much, meaning I don’t have a lot of time left for play and relaxation.

Related to sleep I guess in general I sleep eight to ten hours per day, even though lately it is often less than that, maybe something like seven hours. Main issue here is that I often can’t sleep and often end up wasting my time on ‘tablet use’ after going to bed.

Time spent on play and relaxation is maybe one or two hours a day, although most of that may even be counted as ‘plain waste’ as I often just watch TV or keep browsing Facebook and Google and such. Main issue here is that I kind of lost the feel about ‘play and relaxation’ as I have been so focused on earning most of my life, also because for most play and relaxation one needs money, that I can’t imagine anymore how to play and relax. Ah, and the main reason I guess is that relaxing for me means traveling or meeting friends. And I don’t have money for travel and I still don’t seem to have friends, people who want to be with me.

Yeah, what about acquiring useful knowledge? I don’t spend a lot of time on that as I believe I know most of what I want to know. Still, I guess somehow I do acquire useful knowledge on the way as I search a lot of things in Google and such. Time spent on acquiring useful knowledge per day? I guess one hour or less.

And then plain waste. I guess I spend something like four hours a day on plain waste, just doing nothing. And the main thing here is I don’t have focus, I don’t know where to put my energy to be successful or reach my goals. So often I just don’t know what to do. And this is I guess my major problem on my way to success, on doing what I want, on achieving what I want. That I just don’t know how and that my history has proven that things just don’t work, at least not the things I know. So does this mean that I need to spend more time on getting to know more about achieving success? But I already have the feeling I spent a lot of time on that, including building this whole site with related research and reading ‘success’ and ‘self help’ stuff. So that is not the way.

Anyhow, let’s see how the above adds up:

Occupation: 10 hours
Sleep: 8 hours
Play and relaxation: 1-2 hours
Acquiring useful knowledge: 1 hour
Plain waste: 4 hours

Total estimate based on my feeling: 24-25 hours. Wow, didn’t expect that to add up to something like 24 hours, so I may know more about myself than I thought and/or am better at estimating time than I thought.