The Awareness-Focus Loop

The reason this meditation exercise will work for many of you is because it trains a really specific mental skill, the Awareness-Focus Loop.

There are tons of feelings that sit right below your conscious mind. Unaddressed, these feelings actually guide the majority of your decision making.

Maybe you’ve heard this as the rider (rational brain) and the elephant (emotional brain).

With effort, the rider can guide the elephant. But with any distraction, the elephant takes over.

The good news is that with effort you can examine those subconscious feelings with your rational, conscious brain.

The “I am aware” exercise uses a nifty trick. For practical purposes, your language center is active only with your conscious mind.

So by framing your examination of your wandering thought as a fully formed sentence you’re guaranteed to be moving the feeling from your subconscious to your conscious.

Quite often the thought just disappears at that point because it’s too trivial to keep focused attention on.

In any case, having awoken your rational brain, you have the opportunity to bring your focus back to what you rationally want to be focusing on.

In meditation, that’s your breath. In work, that’s your current task.

A lot of people think of meditation as spiritual and/or calming. It can be. However, there’s a growing interest in meditation from high performance fields.

Hedge fund managers meditate to manage cognitive biases. Athletes meditate to reduce anxiety and get into a flow state. Even the military is taking up meditation.

For these high performance cases, the Awareness-Focus Loop is the key skill that you train during a meditation.

High performers take the “I am aware” exercise and apply it as they live their day.