Tensing and Relaxing

But notice, the next day, even an hour less than the right amount can drain you and your brain energy. Food for fuel. Skipping breakfast and/or regular meals hurts energy and focus performance, as per the American Dietetic Association. An incredibly simple way to improve concentration (and boost your metabolism, too) is to jump-start each day with a healthy breakfast (think protein and whole grains, unprocessed white flour, and high fructose corn syrup) and then refuel regularly every 3-4 hours. True Success enlivens and supports the spirit; The small self aligns with weak attractor patterns (that is, crab mentality); Instead of envying or hating success, the truly successful imitate it, copy it, identify with it, and develop the patterns. To take responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences is, in itself, extremely powerful and almost instantly raises one's calibrated level of consciousness to over 200. An extremely valuable insight learned by all spiritually evolved individuals in the course of their development is seeing their own personal consciousness as the decisive influence that determines all that occurs in their lives. The truly successful identify with the ABC. They realize that they are a channel acted through to create success in the outer world. Inasmuch as they identify with the actual sources of success and not merely the effects, they have no anxiety about losing it. They can lose their fortune or position and re-create it in no time because it all comes from their ABC, which is their inner power. We say of such people, Whatever they touch turns to gold. Mark wanted to be loyal and he felt intensely guilty when he inexplicably backed out of what he knew were promising relationships. Soon Mark was making the connection between his conflicted adult reactions and his childhood experience as hostage therapist to his mother. Mark thought loyalty meant he was supposed to just sit there and be a container for his mother's difficult emotions21. His mother had no intention of leaving her unhappy marriage. But she relieved her frustration by pouring her distress into Mark, the child with the most understanding and empathy. It was a convenient release.

After expressing her pain and resentment, his mother felt better and was able to go back to exactly the way things were. Instead of putting her foot down with her husband, she complained to Mark. He was expected to contain his mother's pain and not let anything leak out to his father or anyone else. After years of this, was it surprising that he felt like exploding? A study from USC also demonstrates that certain vitamins, including iron, magnesium, and zinc, may be linked to improved cognitive and ability to concentrate skills. Thus, consider adding a multivitamin to your daily routine if your eating habits are not sufficiently varied and/or optimally healthy. More recent research also points to the vast advantages of Omega 3, so definitely add this to your diet as well (fish, flax seeds, or a supplement can come from Omega 3). The workout. Research has confirmed that physical activity can dramatically improve focus, mental alertness, and memory so that a fitness routine can be maintained or started. Even thirty minutes of regular exercise helps, so don't quit exercising just because you don't have hours to spend at the gym. Also, consider breaking your activity into various smaller exercise rounds throughout the day if you don't have large chunks of time (eg, walk or cycle to work, go for a walk in your lunch break or after dinner, etc) as it's the important cumulative effect of exercise. Reduce the outside distractions. Reduce, minimize, or prevent distractions as much as possible within your daily life. Try turning your cell phone off or getting shut your office door, for example, so you can work for a chuck of time undisturbed. But other people, who view their success in the realm of the external, ABC, will always be insecure, because its source is thought to be out there. True success comes as the automatic consequence of aligning your life with high-power energy patterns and following certain steps. True success is not just about a job, business enterprise, or money in the bank. It is about who you are as a total person, an energy field that inspires, uplifts, and beautifies, no matter what you are doing. True success stems from being aligned with the energy of life. STEP 1: INTENTION

Examine your ABC before you do anything at all about the ABC. Does the original founding principle from which you are operating have universal appeal? Could everyone wholeheartedly subscribe if it were known to them? If not, the success is automatically limited from the start. Was it shocking that he could not get away from women's needs fast enough? The energy it takes to be someone else's emotional container is formidable. It ties up the motivation and energy you would have to spend on projects of your own, a life of your own. To hold pain for other people means you lose room for your own pleasure. I Didn't Love Her Mark's turnaround came when he began to be honest with himself about his feelings toward his mother. He was clouded up with so much loyalty and guilt that he had never asked himself how he really felt about her. All he knew was that he was supposed to love her and that she desperately needed his love. So Mark tried to turn himself into the kind of attentive son the part required. He showed his mother what she needed to see, regardless of how he really felt. During pre-determined periods, try keeping your internet browser closed and only checking your email at pre-determined intervals. If you work hard for 46-50 minutes with 15-minute breaks, you are more likely to get more stuff done than if you are available all the time via phone, text, and email. This can be a tough habit to break in these days of usually browsing email, Facearticle, and Reddit, so start by pacing yourself and allowing yourself to only look at those sites during your specified 10-15 minute break. Remember also that sometimes external distractions are quite subtle but may still have a strong impact on your cognitive endurance. These may take the form of sounds, bad smells, or even visual signals. To avoid these distractors, rearrange your desk and use white sound devices or earplugs if appropriate.

Maximize the peaks. When they are at their peak, most individuals have a specific time of day. Discover and use yours to your advantage. While most people have daily rhythms (ie, peaks during the day), some are more active at night. We can look at the example on an international level of Nazi Germany, which for a while certainly seemed to have all the earmarks of a winner. It had assembled the most impressive military force ever gathered on the planet. Yet it went down the tubes. What was its rallying cry? Deutschland uber Alles. Germany above All does not exactly have a universal appeal, does it? It could hardly capture the hearts of Belgians, the French, the English, or anyone else, for that matter. It is a win-lose proposition: we win; If the start-off motive is to win a prize, sell more cars than the other auto dealer in town, or get rich and famous, the endeavor will not even get off the starting line to real success. The fact that you should be the best in something or become rich and famous may appeal to you, but is it of interest to other people? As an adult, Mark berated himself over his problems with relationships, wondering if he secretly hated women or was not entirely heterosexual. Mark was relieved when he was finally able to get to the bottom of his fear and guilt. He did this by uncovering his worst guilty secret about his first important relationship with a woman, his mother: I didn't love her. He had loved her once, but her terrible self-centeredness made it impossible later. Mark had had to keep this truth even from himself in order not to slip up and devastate his mother. He felt guilty about not feeling more for her, and so he subconsciously kept trying to feel the right feelings.

He carried this over to his relationships with girlfriends, guiltily trying to give them what he thought they wanted while growing more and more distant and angry toward them. Once Mark got the idea that he was not a bad person and was not obliged to manufacture feelings for the emotionally needy, his relationships began to open up into the kind of real joy that he had never considered himself capable of experiencing. The Fifth Commandment Mark's feelings toward his mother and Elaine's empathy for her sister were initially described by both of them as love. By planning projects that require full attention and intellectual capacity during personal peak periods and using your less-than-optimal hours for more routine tasks, this improves concentration. Time-management strategies integrate. Procrastination is one important thing to overcome. You significantly cut down on time spent thinking, dreading, and/or avoiding it by actually getting to work on a specific task. All this amounts to wasted energy, which is spent better on the project itself. Think of it as the more you procrastinate and the slower it goes, the more difficult it is in the long run, peeling the Band-Aid off. Keep with you a small to-do list (try the notearticle function on your mobile device) to keep a list of all the things you need to do so that you can stop thinking and obsessing with them; Intend to concentrate. In a parking lot, do you ever lose your car or forget where you kept your keys, wallet, or mobile phone? It is possible that this is NOT a symptom of early Alzheimer's, but a red flag of loss of focus, concentration, and attention instead. If you have a service and attitude that helps others achieve their goals, then you have an enterprise with universal appeal. Ambition alone does not yield success. But if the purpose is to make this a better world to live in for everyone or to increase the safety, joy, and beauty of life, everyone can subscribe to that. Coming from a universal principle is coming from power. Coming from self-interest is coming from force and leads to counterforce. The Map of Consciousness may be seen, in one aspect, as a scale of ego, with the level of 200 being the fulcrum at which selfishness begins to turn toward selflessness, and the level of 500 being the fulcrum at which selflessness has become one's inner dedication.