Posts Tagged ‘attention’

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Achieve Focus On God

November 2, 2010

How do you achieve focus on God? Paul wrote that we should pray without ceasing. What does that mean? The little book by an anonymous author called “The Way of the Pilgrim” charts the journey of a 19th Century Russian peasant who lost his family and his house and sets out on a spiritual journey.

As he travels, he ponders the advice of Paul. Then he happens upon a wise person who told him to pray the Jesus prayer 1,000 times a day. He gave the pilgrim a rosary upon whose beads he could count. The pilgrim began reciting the prayer aloud, but then discovered that he could just think them. Eventually the words were written on his heart and they were with him always. He then met many people on his journey who helped him including one rich man who sponsored his journey to the Holy Land. It’s a wonderful little book. Changed my life.

The prayer? “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Many people shorten it to “Jesus Christ have mercy on me.” Eventually you can just say one word and it will remind you of the whole thing (e.g., God, Jesus, mercy). This should help your focus–and your outlook on life. How can you mistreat others if you are always focused on God?

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Posted in Spirituality | 7 Comments »

Listen, Observe, Care about others

October 28, 2010

Jerry Lucas brought his traveling memory show to Sidney, Ohio this week. He has a calling from God to develop his techniques for memorization to change and improve education of people. One session dealt with remembering people. Lucas’ unique contribution is to turn everything you need to remember into pictures based on the theory that you remember tangible objects better than concepts.

However, his system has a few basic components apart from the memory aid. These are things you should be doing anyway. First, listen. The famous baseball figure/philosopher Yogi Berra once said (so the story goes), “You can hear a lot just by listening.” Where is your mind when you meet someone and you are given their name? Is your mind on them, your attention focused on them? Or is your attention more on what you are going to say to them? So, first pay attention to the person you are meeting. Listen as they say their name.

Next, observe. What do they look like? Notice unique things about appearance or facial characteristics. In other words, pay attention to them.

The thing is, Lucas works very hard at remembering. He puts a lot of energy into it. He has a list of people that he needs to remember. He reviews the list, which by the way has notes on appearance, the picture he formed to remember them and other notes. That’s not a bad idea. You might think it’s a lot of work, but only the setting up of the list is hard. The reviewing only takes a few minutes a day/week. I have over 2,700 names in my contact database. I don’t do the picture thing that Lucas developed. But I review the entire database periodically. Some I’ve never met, but if I have, I try to picture them. That way I remember.

While I was thinking about this process, I started to reflect on the example of Jesus. He had the ability to focus on the person, even when they interrupted him while he was on the way to do something else. He could take in everything about a person. How do you think he did that? By giving complete attention to the person he was with. That’s a good example to follow.

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