It’s easy to feel like life is overwhelming. There’s more to do than you can possibly complete, and you feel like you’re crazy busy – but just spinning your wheels. You can’t get any life traction. You try to work on one thing but keep drifting into what’s coming up in the future – or things that didn’t go well in the past.
Sound familiar?
Suppose you had an app on your phone that kept track of three things:
- How much time you spend thinking about the future.
- How much time you spend thinking about the past.
- How much time you spend thinking in the present.
What would the numbers look like for you?
Research has shown that most people spend the majority of their time thinking about #1 or #2, and the least amount of time on #3.
Here’s the thing: The way to make a real impact on our lives is to focus our energy in the present. If our energy gets spread around in the past or the future, we have less energy for the present.
The present is the only place we can make a difference.
The Value of Focus
When I was a kid, my dad took me into our backyard one day with a magnifying glass. He had me pick up one of the crunchy, brown leaves that had fallen from our grapevine. Then he told me to use the magnifying glass to focus the light of the sun on that leaf.
“Closer . . . closer . . .” he would say. As I would bring it closer, the circle of light would get smaller and smaller on the leaf. “Make it as small as you can.” Soon, that light was just a tiny dot – and immediately, a hole appeared with smoke coming from the edges.
I was amazed. “I’m standing here in the sun,” I thought, “and nothing’s happening. But if I focus that light, I can burn stuff.” I went around trying to burn everything I could find – twigs, paper cups, tree bark, my sister . . . if it was close by, I tried to set it on fire.
At the time, it was just fun. But the lesson I learned has stuck with me throughout my life:
Amazing things can happen when you focus.
Two Things that Steal our Focus
What keeps us from staying focused?
In today’s world, there are a ton of distractions at our fingertips. But there are two culprits that are more dangerous than the rest:
- The past
- The future
They’re dangerous because they pull us away from the present, which is the only place we can do anything.
We can’t take action in the past, because it’s over.
We can’t take action in the future, because it’s not here yet.
The only place we can make an impact is in the present. The less we focus there, the less effective we become.
The Danger of the Past
We often think that if we had our whole life to live over, we’d do things differently:
- We would have invested more.
- We would have eaten better.
- We would have exercised more consistently.
- We would have started important things much earlier.
- We would have been kinder in our most important relationships.
In reality, we wouldn’t do things differently – because we didn’t know what we know now. In hindsight, we can see where we made wrong turns. We see the outcomes of those early life choices. But back then, we just didn’t have the life experience to help guide our decisions.
It’s easy to look back and say, “If only . . .”
It’s hard to let it go.
Whenever we spend time thinking about our past choices, we’ve lost our ability to act. Sure, the past can influence the present, such as when we apologize to someone today for harsh words we said yesterday. But living in the past means living with regret.
When we live in the past, it’s no longer the past. It’s become the present because we’re still there.
We can learn from the past, but we don’t want to live there.
It always leads to regret.
(Keep in mind, we’re only talking here about our past choices – not the things that others did to us or circumstances we over which we had no control. Deep-seated trauma keeps people from moving forward, but requires the professional help that a therapist specializes in.)
The Danger of the Future
Living in the future robs us of impact in the present. It shows up in two different forms: Dreaming and Worry.
Dreaming
Years ago, a popular multi-level marketing program had its members go through magazines, cut out pictures of things they wanted after they had a ton of money, and put those pictures on the refrigerator. The idea was that if you spent enough time staring at the pictures, you’d work harder to achieve them.
In most cases, it didn’t work. It emphasized the goal, but under-emphasized the work needed to make it happen. Over time, members would become even more discouraged because they weren’t seeing progress.
Goals are great; they give us direction.
Once we’ve set a goal, it’s good to look at it regularly so we can make mid-course corrections to our progress. If we focus on it too often, though, we’ll never do the work that will take us there.
Worry
Anxiety paralyzes action. We come up with something we want to do, and immediately our mind challenges it:
“That’ll never work.”
“Who do you think you are?”
“Here are all the things that could go wrong . . .”
We’re afraid of failure, so we don’t take action until we’ve got everything lined up for success.
That’s a big one for me. I come up with thousands of ideas, and that critical voice is loud and immediate. I’ve often wondered what I could have accomplished throughout my life if I had ignored that voice. As Wayne Dyer said, “You’ll seldom experience regret for anything that you’ve done. It is what you haven’t done that will torment you.”
The good news is that we can choose not to listen to that voice.
Pastor Max Lucado says, “You can pick what you ponder.” Here’s his description, from his book Anxious for Nothing
You didn’t select your birthplace or birth date. You didn’t choose your parents or siblings. You don’t determine the weather or the amount of salt in the ocean. There are many things in life over which you have no choice. But the greatest activity of life is well within your dominion. You can choose what you think about.
You can be the air traffic controller of your mental airport. You occupy the control tower and can direct the mental traffic of your world. Thoughts circle above, coming and going. If one of them lands, it is because you gave it permission. If it leaves, it is because you directed it to do so. You can select your thought pattern.
Dreaming is when we focus on things that could go right in the future. Anxiety is when we focus on what could go wrong.
Choosing to Live in the Present
Do you spend more time being anxious about the future, or being regretful about the past?
Both of them can be a tool for the present. The future can steer our direction. The past can steer our current process.
But the only place anything happens is now. The actions we take today can impact the future, and redeem the past.
Here’s something simple to try today:
- Keep a pad of paper nearby, or open a note on your phone.
- Just for one day, keep track of what you’re thinking about. Set an alarm on your phone to go off every 15 minutes, then list what you’ve been thinking about during that time.
- At the end of the day, highlight everything that’s in the future in one color, and things that are in the past in another color.
- List the emotions you feel as you look over your list. Anxiety and stress usually come from too much future. Regret and shame come from too much past.
Now – what’s one thing from the past or the future that you could walk away from, in order to spend more time in the present? What airplane will you deny permission to land?
Don’t try to change everything – just one thing. Work on that for a few days and see how it feels. Then, pick one more. As you refocus on the present, you’ll see your impact grow and your performance improves.
Are you committed to making a difference in your world?
Start small.
Start here.
Start now.