Attention is the key to levelling up

[00:00:00] Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go!

[00:00:14] To level up in any aspect of your life, you must pay attention to it. Sounds simple, right? It is. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the solution to a complex problem must also be complex. The right solution is often simpler than you think. But back to paying attention.

[00:00:36] Last year, I paid outsized attention to my professional life, and the result was I grew my skillset, the breadth of my knowledge increased, my mailing list grew, and the sheer quantity of my output was larger than it had ever been before.

[00:00:53] Last year, I paid little to no attention to my health. I didn't even give it maintenance level attention. As a result, my health degraded in every possible aspect.

[00:01:06] You can devise all the strategies in the world, research all the tactics to use and download all the possible apps to use. But the first and perhaps only thing you really need to do to either maintain or improve in any arena is to pay attention to it.

[00:01:24] Attention is the key to leveling up.

[00:01:27] Now, here's the thing about attention. You only have a certain amount of it. You can't pay attention to everything, because that's the same as paying attention to nothing. You can, however, cycle your attention.

[00:01:45] Now, There are everyday things you need to pay attention to. The basic maintenance of your life, right? Things that are so well ingrained in you that you can just do them, or at least, you must do them. So some of your attention is going to go there. Which means, you only have so much attention to pay to new things.

[00:02:05] So a great recipe for failure is to say, You'll eat better, exercise more, journal daily, make more plans with your friends, finish all your side projects, and yup, you're going to start doing all of that, all at once, from the start of the year.

[00:02:22] You'll do great for a little bit, because all of these things will activate your stress response cycle, as we covered last episode. But trying to do all of this all at once means there won't be any let up. You are trying to affect change in too many parts of your life, adding too many stressors with no room to breathe.

[00:02:41] So eventually, probably soon you'll fail, which is a different kind of stressor.

[00:02:51] So here's a strategy that has worked for me in the past, and I'm going to try and apply it to my goals and systems this year. Choose one arena of your life to pay more attention to than usual this month. Just one. Yes, that's very unoriginal, but it's simple, achievable, and maintainable.

[00:03:15] I'm going to choose my health to pay attention to more than I normally do every day. How I use that attention is a topic for another episode, but the important thing is I will try to affect change to my health this month and that's all. Everything else stays at homeostasis, the status quo. This means I'm going to allow my stress response cycle to complete every day.

[00:03:39] I'll always have things that are normal for my mind and body to return to, that feel safe, which allow me to try to keep improving my health every day, without repercussions in the long term.

[00:03:52] We live in impatient times. You know, we want everything now and quickly. But you gotta let that go. Nothing truly good in your life happened now and quickly. It all took time. So don't worry if this feels slow. Pay attention to one thing this month. Get used to it. Make it feel good. Take it from a stressor to something normal. And, don't let other people or factors pressure you into changing course. Other people have different goals. Their goals may sometimes depend on you.

[00:04:24] But if that's not the arena you chose to put more attention into this month, then don't. Perhaps it can be a next month thing, and that's okay, because good things take time. And most things are not as urgent as anyone thinks.

[00:04:39] Pay attention, because your attention shows what is truly important to you. If you say your health is important, but you pay it no attention, then it's not actually important to you, right?

[00:04:51] So, pay attention.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening, same time tomorrow?