Your two main steps towards developing strong concentration… recognising the essential… and leaving out the non-essential. 

Did you ever stop to think what an important part your thoughts, I mean real concentrated thoughts, play in your life? 

The ability to concentrate all your attention is so important, no matter what task or job you have to get done… as nothing great or significant can be accomplished without proper effort and concentration. 

And almost all of us have some sort of difficulty in the concentration of our attention. 

Workers in business and industry, students in high school and college, and even professors in universities, complain of the same difficulty. 

It is said that the power to concentrate all your attention is vital as it stands at the very centre of most (if not all) mental activity. No matter from what angle we view the mind, its excellence always seems to depend upon the power to concentrate all our attention. 

Concentration may be defined as being that state of mind in which the entire energies of the individual, physical as well as mental, are focused upon the thing they are doing or thinking. All actions and all thoughts NOT connected with what they are doing or thinking are kept out of the mind… 

If we examine a growing child, one of the first things we will see is the power they have in them to “pay attention or to notice things”. 

When we examine the ability of normal adults we do so by means of tests that require close concentration of attention, and we regard anyone who is able to maintain close focused and concentrated attention for long periods of time as a person of strong mind or will. 

So real concentration may be broken down into just 2 parts: 

1.  The voluntary focusing of all our power and attention in the selecting of certain objects to be attended to. 

2.   And the ignoring of other objects which act as distractions. 

But even in spite of our most careful provisions, there will still be distractions which cannot be eliminated. For example, you cannot stop the noise of planes flying over or cars driving past while you are trying to work, plan or study. 

And you cannot build a fence around the thoughts and focus of your mind so as to keep out unwanted and irrelevant ideas… the best thing you can do is to accept the inevitable that the presence of some distractions will always exist, and to realise that in order to concentrate and pay attention properly, it is necessary to form the habit of ignoring these distractions. 

You can simply start out by making a strong determined effort to ignore all distractions… practise ignoring them, and try your best not to let a slip occur. 

Also at the same time, try to develop interest in the object you are concentrating all your attention on, because we tend to pay more attention to those things in which we are most interested. 

It’s easy for any one to say, “concentrate”… but you need to know exactly how to concentrate.  Remember that to concentrate is merely the act of applying your entire body and mind, to the task or action in hand. 

Every effort of the mind, whether it’s to… 

•   Perceive something 

•   Recollect something 

•   Associate something 

•   Imagine something 

•   Even to judge something 

Must all involve some concentration of the faculties of the mind upon that particular action, task or act, whatever it may be! 

As you start to develop a firm interest in your field of work or study, and as you develop the habit of ignoring distractions – you will be able to concentrate your powers of attention with less and less effort. 

Another important fact to note is that as you develop the power to select objects for the concentration of all your attention, you also develop (at the same time) other mind power processes; you will improve the ability to memorize and recall much more, to fine tune and manage better your time and effort. 

And also the power to control your future thoughts and actions… 

In short “developing your power to concentrate and focus all your attention means developing power in all the mental processes”. With that being said, we want to finish by giving you. 

The 2 TOP Keys Of Concentration 

For every one of us, concentration will always mean: 

1.    Selecting and focusing on what is most important to us, and disregarding what is not… and also knowing which tasks and jobs have top priority. 

2.    You must identify for yourself what is most important and essential to you – and try to filter out everything else. 

These are the two main steps towards developing strong concentration… recognising the essential… and leaving out the non-essential.