When I was young, I was keenly focused on getting my black belt in Kenpo karate. In fact, I wasn’t so much focused on that as going along to whack a few fellow students on a Wednesday night, let off some steam and have a good time. But it was a really productive thing for me to do. Because it taught me a lot about resilience, endurance, discipline, focus, doing the stuff you don’t enjoy as well as the stuff you do, to achieve something. But it also taught me a few specific principles, one of which I still apply today as an analogy for my clients.
Black Dot Focus
As students, we learned two techniques for maintaining focus when trying to execute our forms and sets to the best of our ability. These sets and forms were designed as “practice” for us to demonstrate our best execution of movements or combinations of movements. Often, they would involve a pre-designed engagement with an imaginary opponent or set of opponents to demonstrate different counters and attacks.
The very first set I learned was the star block set. I stood there, legs apart, knees bent in my horse stance, firmly grounded, imagining the attack of an overhead arm, a punch, a kick and so on. I executed the blocks to defend against these attacks. It was then that I learnt about black dot focus. It was essentially how to maintain concentration and later down the line in future sets, balance and orientation, when moving through these sets and forms.
The principle was simple: Pick a point on the wall in front of you and only focus on that specific point. BUT, maintain an awareness of what’s going on around you.
We also learnt about white dot focus, although we never used it. White dot focus was almost the opposite: Focus on that same singular point, but this time, completely block out your surroundings and do not be disturbed by ANYTHING.
Are we too white dot focused?
As entrepreneurs, I see all too often, clients slipping into their own little version of white dot focus. They focus solely on one thing in front of them, completely avoiding any awareness of anything else around them. This could be family, health, their own freedom, finances. Usually, it’s their own health and happiness; it’s sleep, nutrition, down time, exercise, all the things we know we need to function optimally but are too easily shoved aside when we don’t recognise their importance on our productivity.
Of course, when we have goals, we need to focus on them. And as much as we can strive to be responsive instead of reactive (i.e. managing life so we’re not living in the fire-fighting zone but are instead controlling as much as we can), occasionally emergencies or difficult situations crop up and we have to be flexible in our plans and accept a setback. When this happens, our focus has to switch from the main goal to managing the acute situation. But all too commonly, what happens then is that we engage in white dot focus. We block everything else out. We forget that we need to be aware of what’s going on around us.
But it is possible, whatever we’re pursuing at any given moment, to be not only wholly focused on the task at hand, but also aware of and managing the other stuff around us.
To be clear, this is not multi-tasking!
Multi-tasking is not a thing, it’s just doing a lot of things very badly. What I’m talking about is prioritising one thing above all others at any one time. If you need to kickstart your nutrition, it might be that your golden non-negotiable, is three healthy home-cooked meals. That’s your black dot. It might then be that your business, your family and your gym time fit around that. They’re still priorities and you’re still planning for them, nurturing those goals, but you’re maintaining your major focus right now, on healthy eating to improve health and perhaps lose weight.
What you shouldn’t do, is focus so hard on this, that everything else suffers and isn’t planned for. Because if you do that and slip into white dot focus., everything else is just left to its own devices and it won’t improve, it will deteriorate. Then eventually, you’ll end up living in that reactive fire-fighting zone again. And that ain’t going to help with anything.
So focus on the thing you’re putting at the top of your priority list, but understand the attention you need to give to the other parameters too. Don’t multi-task. Focus. But be aware of your surroundings. Engage your black dot focus.
If you want to know where to put your focus first, try the Super Human scorecard to make sure you’re channeling your energies in the right place to maximise your performance on any walk of life.