Feed Your Focus #12

I wanted to talk about this because I think where we channel our energy is a big dictation of our mood, of our mental health. I know that's true for me, this has been one of the most helpful things in terms of dealing with my anxiety, and for that reason alone, I think it's important to share with others. Hopefully, it helps you or whoever else is listening to this as well.

Before we get into this any further, just wanted to clarify, I still might not be pumping out episodes weekly, I will try my best to do so. But I'll try to at least put up a little episode, a little video. If you saw, I did that with the video I titled "Emotions are okay," and I actually uploaded that to podcasts. I'm going to be doing that iff I do end up making

these little videos. I'm going to be uploading them to all podcast platforms, as well as YouTube, and I'm going to consider them Ion Motive episodes rather than instant ideas. So if you go on the podcast and you click on "Emotions Are Okay," I actually went back and changed the title from just "Emotions Are Okay" to Emotions are Okay #11." That's how I'm going to be titling the Ion Motive episodes from now on, I used to do the title and then divider, Ion Motive number 10,

whatever episode it was. Now I'm just doing the title number 12, whatever it is. So this one, it's going to be titled "Feed Your Focus #12." Like I mentioned a little while ago, some of these episodes are going to be a little shorter just because I've got some stuff going on with school, but the longer episodes will be returning soon, and I think this episode might actually go to a regular length. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Okay, let's do it.

So when we look at something, literally look at something, I'm looking at the camera, right, or when I look at my laptop, my energy, my focus, my time is being dedicated to that thing. When I look at my script, I'm dedicating my focus to the script. And this is, this is relatable to everything in life, when you're having a conversation with someone, you're looking at them, you're hopefully giving your time, your energy, your focus to them.

Sometimes we go get caught daydreaming, but we're not gonna talk into that, we're not gonna dive into those little technicalities. That's not what this is about. My point is what we look at determines where our energy and our focus and our time goes. A lot of times we direct our attention to things that don't benefit us and are often harmful. We direct our attention to the problem, to things we don't have, where we

aren't. A lot of the times we skip out on giving our attention to solving the problem, growing as a human being, or creating something great. I see this most often on social media where people will just go and complain about some problem. And it seems like when they are doing that, they might think they're addressing the problem, but they're not. They're just digging themselves a hole. When we do this kind of stuff, we're just focusing on the problem itself. And this is so easy to

do. But it's so miserable. For me, I try to limit what I post on social media except on Ion Motive, because I pretty much post every day, but I have this problem too. I do this, I give my energy, my focus my attention to the problem itself. I just complain. Everybody does this, too. Everybody's guilty of it, we need to become more conscientious of it. For me, this was college, I would say up until this year, I really didn't enjoy college, all

that much. I love the friends, loved football when I played that, loved all those things, but school itself did, I just did not really enjoy it. I felt like I didn't need to be here. I felt like I could be spending my time doing something more valuable. I thought it would be better to go just start working. I thought it would be good to to make some money and then try to start a business, which now that I'm actually working on this

page, It's very humbling. It's way way more work than I ever thought it would be, so good thing I'm in school. So when friends would ask me about school, you know, I would just say "Oh, you know, it's going good blah, blah blah." But when I actually talked to closer friends and family members, a lot of the times I would say things like, you know, "I just feel like I don't need to be here, I feel like getting a degree is not going to help me all that much, I could just go

figure it out myself." Even if I was able to do that, my plan was to finish four years of school and that's what I'm going to do. So, because, not that I have to finish school, I'm very blessed and fortunate to be at this school, so thankful for it. But let's just say, because I decided I am going to finish school, me focusing on that problem that I thought I needed, that I thought I could be doing something else did not benefit me at all. Every time I thought about it, it pissed me off, and

it made me unhappy. My point with all this is at some point, we need to stop doing that we need to focus on things that are in our control, direct our energy, our time, our attention to those things. Things we can actually change, things we can actually improve. We need to do that! We need to do this because the complaining is never enough. Is there some golden number where if I complain 153 times about the same old problem, it

goes away? No. Is there ever a point where I go to friends and family and complain and they tell me, "Sorry, it didn't work out," "Oh, I'm sorry, you feel that way," do I have to hear sorry a certain number of times to feel better? No. Rather than focusing on how much bad there is, focusing on the problem itself, we can shift our focus to how much better it could be, focus on the solution. I see this a lot of times with

people and their work. They don't like their boss, they don't like their co-workers, they don't like how much they're getting paid. Okay, that very well could be the case. But focusing on that is not fun. It's not enjoyable. If you have a problem with those things, those are literally all things you can change. You can go get a new job, you can talk to your boss about getting paid, you can just try to build better relationships with your

coworkers. We cannot always control what happens to us, we cannot control our circumstances, we cannot control the environment around us. But we can control our attitude and our energy about that thing. We can literally shift our mind from all the things that are bad to what could be good. We can shift our mind from what could go wrong to what could go right. We can shift our mindset from why is this happening to me to what is this trying to teach me, in what way is this gonna

benefit me. When something is bothering us, it's bothering us for a reason. It's bothering us because we're passionate about it, because we care about it. But rather than channel our energy into the problem itself, let's channel it to positive things how to get out of that rut, because if we just channel it to the problem itself, we're literally just digging ourselves into a hole. And at some point, you need to start climbing out of the hole, channel your energy

for good. You don't, you don't need to change the energy itself, the energy can be used in a positive way. It's there. Now just use it for your benefit. If we actually devote the energy and our focus, our attention to something good, that's when we can start solving problems. That's when we can achieve our goals. That's when we can become the best versions of ourselves. As I mentioned earlier, this has helped me so much with my mental

health, going back to school. I think my complaining did not help my mental health and made it so much worse by complaining about school. The reality is, I'm here nine months out of the year, so I might as well try to

make the best of it. So rather than focusing so much on the problem, on why I'm not making money, on why I could be starting a business, on why this is not benefiting me, I started focusing on my grades here, I started focusing more on school, I started focusing on extracurricular activities, I started just trying to be myself more in school, and that's literally made me enjoy it so much more. It's helped my mental health. Now I'm happy here. I

love doing this. I love being at school, literally just from shifting my mindset from this thing is bad, it's not going to ever do anything for me to I can make the best out of the situation, I can find happiness in doing so. To wrap it all up. We have energy in us for a reason. But a lot of times, that emotion can run wild, those passions can run wild. And when that happens a lot of the times it leads us down this path that does not

benefit us. So it's extremely important to be aware of what you're putting your focus into, what, what you're looking at on a regular basis, what you're engaging in. You can put it to bad things or you can put it to great things. And it's up to you. It's, it's what you look at that determines where your energy goes, where your attention goes, where your time goes. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll have more coming out soon. Make sure to like and

subscribe if you haven't. If you're on podcasts, scroll down to the bottom, leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts on today's episode and the show in general. Until next time,