You may have heard before that some people use meditation to increase their focus and to help them clear their minds. This is true, it does work well for a lot of people.
However, if you’re trying to do something specific with your focus or creativity, you probably won’t benefit as much from a random generic meditation class. You may need something a little more purposeful or specific to assist the creative process!
You shouldn’t be thinking about anything whatsoever during it, allowing your mind to go entirely blank. This helps people destress and relax, because they’re not thinking about all the things they have to worry about.
However, while this is helpful for that, it might not be as conducive to helping you focus or figure out a project. You should instead try more purposeful meditation, where instead of having your mind go blank, you focus on one thing and one thing only.
By clearing your mind of all other distractions, except for the project at hand, you’re going to be able to completely focus on that and come up with much better solutions.
Ideally, this would be accomplished in a space where you’re free of any noises, obnoxious sights, or people trying to get your attention.
There aren’t many places that would fit this bill perfectly, so just work with what you’ve got. The most important thing should be to not have people interrupting you, so if you can get to a space like that, even if it does have errant sounds and sights, you should still be able to focus well.
You might end up finding that different things help you more or less while you’re meditating. Try experimenting a little bit. You might not be able to focus in dead silence, so you might have some ambient nature sounds playing through some headphones.
You might want the lights up or down, and you might want to keep your eyes open or closed. It’s different for everyone, so try a little bit of everything at first to see what helps.
For most people, this is worth a try, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t work for you. A handful of people don’t focus well under meditation conditions, so you might find it’s simply not right for you. At least with a purposeful meditation, you have something to focus on (your task) rather than just trying to clear your mind which can be very difficult for some people. Give it a try; what have you got to lose?
Unless you’re particularly lucky or skilled, creative ideas probably don’t just happen on demand for you. In fact, in most cases, creativity will appear whenever it happens to, and you tend to have very little control over when it will occur.
The purposeful meditation techniques described above may help you to get yourself into creative flow so may be worth a shot.
Otherwise, creativity can come up and interrupt you at any moment, even if you’re in the middle of something important. You could be trying to focus on your normal work, trying to sleep, or in the middle of a call or meeting with someone very important.
In these cases, you have to treat it the same way you would a toddler. The first thing you should try to do is train yourself to reserve your creative thoughts for later.
If your mind wanders even a little while you’re trying to focus, you can get flooded with all these different ideas that you can get lost in.
Sometimes a creative idea will pop up that could be life changing for you, and in that case, you need to stop what you’re doing and at least write it down quickly. Don’t ignore your creativity outright if it’s something that’s a really good idea or something that you really want to work on.
If that’s the case, try to come back to it later and continue expanding on it. You just can’t let random intrusive thoughts take over your work. Focus can be extremely important while also being rather fragile.
The slightest wandering thought or break in your concentration can pull you way off track in some instances. While some people’s focus isn’t easily broken, yours might be one little distraction away from crumbling, allowing you to get fully enveloped in that distraction.
As you can appreciate, all of this purposeful meditation, creativity process and maintaining focus can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to maintain any focus and creativity, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched, but it does really work.
If you want to develop more self-discipline, click on the featured resource below to get a free report, The Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
