Fix your focus

/ 01 July 2010

Keeping your concentration

To succeed in business, sport, school or anything else for that matter, the most powerful tool anyone can have is focus. This book sets out to help you enhance your focus and reduce stress by re-establishing the art of concentration.

De-stressing is a major theme throughout; meditation, visualisation, relaxation and life balance are all important, in the author’s eyes, if you want to learn to relieve yourself of the continuous partial attention that is part of the 21st century. The basic theme of this book is that if you are trying to do too much and feel like you’re getting nowhere; that is probably because you are.

While there’s no magical technique for instant focus, the book does enable you to understand your concentration profile, what stops you from focusing and what helps you to concentrate, so that you can spot when you are straying and get back on track.

This is a very wordy book for one that aims to help those of us who are ‘focus-challenged’. While that makes it difficult to get into, it also serves as an object lesson in concentration. As I read each chapter and learned what distracted me the book became an excellent tool to practise my focus on.

Overall, the Art of Concentration lives up to its claims. By allowing a proper amount of time for each task, slowing down our minds, realising our limitations, making time for ourselves and facing up to the fact that a lot of tasks are really boring, you can concentrate far better and achieve far more with a lot less stress.

Reviewed by David Mann

Rodale