Focus Is the Key to Being Present

What tools do you use on a daily basis to continue to work toward mastery? Because my sense would be mastery is never really achieved. Like there's always more layers. Yes.

That's the goal. That's the target. But you know, it's also a destination you're never going to get to. For me, focus is a big thing.

I don't want to go through my life and miss out on all the special moments with the things and people that are most important to me, my, my family, the projects I work on. I love gardening. We have, you know, 33 acre property in Costa Rica that, you know, we've

planted 9,000 trees and plants. But if I can't be focused, I can't be present. And if I can't be present, how can I experience you or hear the words you're saying? So I feel that a lot of people go through life creating these experiences for themselves, but somehow when they're in that experience, they don't know how to be present in it. Someone could be

on a holiday or, you know, they land in Paris and they take a taxi and they're going to Paris and driving through, you know, Paris getting to their hotel and the whole time they're sitting in the car on their phone, not seeing Paris outside. So my goal is identify what's important, who's important, build experiences with those things and then learn

how to be present in them. And the only way I can be present in them is to learn how to focus. So focus is one of the big tools that I work on and perpetually being better at. How would you define focus? Because what I've found in life is there's a lot of words we all throw out. And we all have our own perceived definition of that word, right? Like for me,

focus is the teacher yelling at me saying, sit down and focus, right? But for you, how do you define focus? Well, that was my early experience. I couldn't focus when I was growing up. So in my book, I talk, I define all the words so we have a shadow vocabulary and a common understanding.

Focus is my ability to keep my awareness, my attention on you without it drifting away. As soon as it drifts away, I'm being distracted. My ability to bring my awareness back to you and hold it on you is my ability to focus. So that's how I define being able to focus.

And my guru had a beautiful saying, where awareness goes, energy flows. So if I keep my attention on you, my awareness on you, I use the word awareness, that's That's where my energy is flowing and you feel my energy coming to you and you feel my presence.

Let me ask you this question. Have you ever had the experience where you're talking to someone, maybe your spouse or someone and they look at you at some point in conversation and go, where are you? All the time.

The correct answer is I'm right here. But if they were to ask you specifically, where is your awareness? And then you say, honey, it left the moment you started talking because physically I could be in front of you going, it's interesting that, but my awareness attention is going

someone else. I wonder what time should I have lunch today? Maybe sometime I take a little break and get some coffee. So for me, it's not about physical presence, it's about mental presence. And if I can keep my attention awareness on you, I can hear, I'm being focused and then I can hear all the words that are coming out of you.

I can also hear the things you're not saying to me. And you know, you're with three kids. How many times have you sat with your daughter or your son and they're not saying something to you, but you feel them? All the time. They're not, something is not right or they're feeling something and then, you know, you

lovingly try to bring it out of them. But you can't do that if you can't be focused. Yeah. I mean, I had a beautiful experience a couple of months ago, actually, our six

year old was just, I could just feel energetically she was off and it was bedtime and my wife said, what are you doing? And I was taking a garbage can into her room. I said, I just have this weird feeling that she's going to get sick tonight.

And I was like, why would you think she's going to get sick? I'm like, I don't know. I can't put a finger on it, but I'm telling you right now, like I can feel it. And like, that's a great example of when you're focused, intentionally focused and aware of

your kids and how they are and how they're showing up, you can feel things that they can't say. Exactly. And look at it this way.

If your nervous system were like antennas and you trained your nervous system to be so sensitive, like almost a strings on a violin of the best violiners in the world, it would be able to pick up these energies that your child is emitting and you'd go something is not right. But if you don't work with your nervous system and your body, there's so many people

I've seen in front of the kids, the kids are having an off day and they don't ever notice it because they can't pick it up. So the only way you can pick it up is by training your mind, your body, your nervous system to be receptors of subtle frequencies of energy so that you can walk into a room and go, what's wrong? Something shifted in this

room. What was it? You know? And for me, that's what I want. I want to be able to... I define for myself as a parent, you know, what parent do I want to be? Because I feel like if you... And there's no right or wrong answer. For me, I think if you define it, then you know what to do. If you don't define it, you don't know what to do. So for me, I want to create

a relationship with my daughter where I selflessly serve her, putting my interest out of the way. I grew up in a community where, you know, you have to be either be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, if you don't, you fail. I want to be a monk. Total outcast. And I never want to put that on my daughter. So in order to serve her selflessly, I need

to work with myself more than with her so that I can be in the right place, the right framework and be receptive to feeling her, hearing her, unspoken things, spoken things to support her in the best possible way.