When I was a young composer, I had many good musicians play my music. Then I got a commission from Collage, a contemporary music group made up of Boston Symphony musicians. When I went to the first rehearsal of my piece, the one thing I noticed immediately, the one thing that separated these great Boston Symphony musicians from the other good musicians I had worked with, was their extraordinary focus. They were focused every moment of the 12-minute piece with an intensity I hadn’t seen before at any first rehearsal. And their focus was always there, throughout every performance.

Music training, as in sports, as in many other disciplines, demands a high level of focus. Most of us are not required to develop a high level of focus, so our minds can float from one thing to another, free association, not able to focus enough when it is needed.

Just what is focus? It is paying attention. It is the ABILITY to pay attention. It is like a camera lens when it reaches that place of optimal focus.

Years ago I worked with US Biathlon Team thanks to my friend an colleague John Donovan, a structural consultant and accomplished athlete. This is the sport where first, they cross-country ski, and then, they come into a target area where they have to shoot a rife aimed at a target. It’s a tough sport because skiing and target shooting requires different physical conditions. And the one thing I noticed about these great Olympic athletes was their tremendous focus.
This level of focus develops over time. It is not something one either has or doesn’t. When people say, “I can’t focus for very long. That’s just how I am,” they are only describing their current level of ability, not something they can’t develop.

So why develop focus? Two reasons: it’s easy and it helps your creative process. Your level of concentration can grow. Your ability to focus on structural tension, the desired state in relationship to the current reality, can grow. Your ability to maintain momentum while you are engaged in the action steps you take to create the outcomes you want can grow. Your ability to hold and work with structural tension over extended periods of time, weeks, months, years, can grow.

Focus, as I have said, takes practice. The more you are able to focus, the better. It is accumulative. My focus now is so much better than when I was in my 20s and 30s.

When I began to write year ago, I needed silence in the house. Now I can write in taxicabs and in noisy airports. My ability to focus developed over time and practice. So can yours.As Steve Jobs said, “That’s been one of my mantras, focus and simplicity.”

With all of the stimulus in our world, it is easy to get distracted and lose focus. There are problem types of distractions: there are competing desires distractions: there are running out of steam types of distractions. So here is a principle: focus your creative process based on aspirations and values, while tracking overall shapes and patterns, and that is the best focus to have. This will lead to generating strength, insight, processes, strategies, and, most importantly, the energy needed to take the critical actions that can lead to the successful accomplishment of your creations.

And of course, how do you focus when you’ve got a lot of things you are doing? To show how this is done, sometimes when I’m doing talks, I’ll get 4 or 5 people up on stage, and put them in a row, shoulder to shoulder. Each person represents a project that I might be creating. I push one person forward for a moment. And then I push another one forward. And then another. What I tell the audience is this: When I am focused on one project, I am there 100%. I move the project forward. Then I focus on another project I’m creating. I give that one 100% focus. When I move from project to project, it’s like switching the channel. While I am working on that project, I’m not thinking about the others.

This is how busy and effective people do it. They can handle many things by being able to be 100% focused on each one at a time. And then, they know how to change the channel when the time comes to switch focus.

The most direct access into your life is through the choices you make. We could divide these choices into two major types. There are the big, life changing choices – to get married, move to a new city, change careers, have a baby, go to school – and then there are the small choices – to eat the cookie, to exercise, to call your mom, to watch the football game. The big choices are fairly obvious as an important dimension in your life.

The smaller choices are not so visible, and yet, in many ways, they are as critical to your life as the big ones.

Notice how you make choices. For many people, it is their short-term appetites and impulses that guide their decisions. Because they are in that frame, they cannot see nor understand the longer-term consequences of these choices. To have a Big Mac once in a great while does not harm you, as my friend and colleague Dr. Wayne Andersen tells us. However, it is rare that people who indulge in Big Macs can only stop at 1. Instead, not unlike an addict, they have them 3 or 4 times a week. If you’ve ever seen the award-winning documentary Super Size Me, you know the ravages of such a diet. A healthy young man decides to film himself eating every meal at McDonald’s. He has a physical before the test. Within a few short months, he has high blood pressure, has gain a significant amount of weight, has bouts with depression, and is less able to think or function. The doctors were amazed at his decline.

For the advertising agencies that support McDonald’s, they understand the ways people make choices. In one ad, there is a picture of a Big Mac, fries, and a sugary soft drink. The caption is, “You can’t resist.” In another ad, the announcer says that a McDonald’s meal triggers your “pleasure center.” No doubt that it does, same as cocaine and heroin.

Your pleasure centers, caused by the secretion of endorphins which leads to feelings of euphoria, are additive. Psychiatrist William Glasser, who developed Reality Therapy, studied the impact of endorphins on human behavior, and concluded that people could actually get addicted to themselves. In his ground breaking book Positive Addiction he saw that when one moved from a negative addiction – alcohol and drugs – to what he called a positive addiction – running, meditating – the same endorphins were released. The addiction part came from similar symptoms when the person stopped running or meditating. A kind of cold turkey withdrawal with all the pain and cravings one might have when they are trying to give up drugs.

So, short-term appetites and impulses often are more than just wanting a Big Mac on occasion.

There is a force in play that is driving the action, motivating the desire, and giving a false impression of what you might really want. You can’t build your life on such choices. Perhaps a better questions is this: are these types of reactive cravings actually choices? Most addicts are not addicts by choice, but by lack of choice.

If we were to look at how a person becomes the creative master of his or her own life, we would see them having more and more of true choices available. When we were children, there were few choices that were within our realm of decision-making. As we became adults, more choices became available. Often people have choices that they don’t know they have. They are so infused with concepts and obligations, with issues of identity and fear, of feeling that they are not free to live lives of their own, that they feel a profound lack of choice. Words that commonly describe this experience are stuck, lost, depressed, in a rut. All of this usually leads to a mid-life crisis. The crisis comes from the feeling that you don’t have a lot of choice in your life, that all you can do is follow your patterns and routines, and try to stay out of too much trouble.

After years of this, the human spirit wants to rebel. Of course it does. Too often, the rebellion is unduly destructive, as most revolutions are. There are better ways to accomplish an escape from limitation, and that is the nature of strategic choices that have the ability to lead to the life you want to live, not the one you have created by default. Here, the choices are not based on impulses or vague ideals, but aspirations and values. What you want to create becomes the focal point of your creative process. The major goals are primary choices, and what it takes to accomplish those goals are a series of secondary choices that supports the primary goals. This relationship is the essence of true discipline. Not a trade off, but taking strategic actions, things that you may not want to do and wouldn’t do if it were not for the primary choice, but purely motivated to support the primary choice.

But not all things are as they seem. As I have described in my book Your Life As Art, there are structural patterns in play that are not easy to see and hard to understand. In fact, I describe two distinct types of behaviors in patterns, oscillating and advancing.

In the oscillating pattern, it looks like you are going in the direction you want to go, and even have success for a while. But in this pattern, success is not sustainable, and soon, there will be a reversal of fortunes, and you will lose what you had.

Everyone has a version of this pattern. Most people do not know it is in play in their lives. So, from within the pattern, they can make the wrong conclusions about themselves. They might think they are losers, or cursed, or screw-ups, or failures. The thing is, the structural pattern is not personal to them. If we took them out and put someone else in, the new person would act exactly like the old person.

When we talk about a change of underlying structure, this is what we mean. If you had an oscillating pattern as your M.O., and you changed the underlying structure from that structure to one that has the ability to advance, your life patterns would change from oscillating, in which success was not sustainable, to one in which success is not only sustainable, but is the platform for future success.

Of course, all of my books are about this in one way or another. Structural dynamics is one of the most useful and insightful disciplines there is, especially in regards to creating your own life. In an oscillating structure, your choices are less about what you truly want, and more about reacting and responding to the circumstance in your life. Another way of saying this is, what seems like choices are not really true choices. This reinforces the experience of powerlessness, and exacerbates the conflict between structural limitation and the desire of the human spirit to soar.

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The above article can open a useful area of investigation, but cannot, itself, lead to the type of transformation that is possible. For that, we have created a special workshop called CHOICES. This happens only once a year here in Vermont, and is lead by my wife and colleague, Rosalind Fritz. See below!

CHOICES
This is a transformational workshop in which you have the possibility of starting your life anew, with new energy, freshness, clarity, and firm grounding for the future. What could be more vital and important than the strategic choices you make from now on?
Rosalind Fritz is CEO of Robert Fritz, Inc, and she leads the two-year structural consulting certification program. She has taught structural consulting over 25 years, and is a master structural consultant. So join Rosalind for this exciting and life-changing workshop.

Pricing:
The price is $650 USD per person including lunch
Please contact seminars@robertfritz.com, or call 802-365-7286 for more information and/or to register for this program

Click here for more information

Do a quick check on yourself. What are the ideals that you have adopted for your life? Most people adopt ideals of how they should live in childhood, and update them throughout their lives. However, they are never able to live up to their ideals. There will always be a difference between the ideals you have and how you are. Here’s why: Ideals are abstract concepts about how we should live. Plato called them virtues. Concepts are neither true values nor genuine aspirations. Instead, they are notions, theories, and generalizations that are used as a model of how to live, what to think, what kind of person to be, perhaps, even, what kind of work or career to pursue.

The term “ideals” can seem lofty, virtuous, even noble. It may give you a false standard by which to aspire, one that is often impossible and inconsistent with your deepest values and true aspirations.

Ideals vs Values

It is easy to confuse ideals with true values. An ideal is a picture of what you should hold dear. The fact is there is no particular way you should be, so concepts like these are based on the false notion that you must live up to idealized standards. 
Here is a common definition for the word ideal.

Noun: Ideal
Plural noun: Ideals
A person or thing regarded as perfect. A standard of perfection: a principle to be aimed at.
A standard of perfection;
Synonyms: perfection, paragon, epitome, shining example, ne plus ultra, dream.

True values come from what you think is more important and what you think is less important. Ideals are models of “good” or “perfect” behavior. Values come from our critical choices in reality. You know your values especially when they are in conflict with other competing values. Let’s say that truth and kindness are two of your values. You go to a concert that featured your sister. Poor thing, she can’t carry a tune in a basket. After the concert, you have a conflict between truth and kindness. If kindness were the higher value, you might say, “Sis, you were great!” If truth were the higher value, you might say, “Sis, you were pretty terrible.” And if you could not decide which of these values were more important you might say something like, “Sis, for a person who can’t carry a tune in a basket, you were great.”

Choice vs Ideals

In our experience, when people have a choice as to how they want to live and what they truly want, they want some very good things. They want good relationships, meaningful work, good health, and a host of other very productive results. They may not know how to create such a life, but that doesn’t prevent them from wanting it. If you could have good relationships, meaningful work and good heath, would you take it? Of course you would. This is not adopting an ideal, but recognizing some of your true desires. Choice means you can do it, whatever the “it” is, or not do it. Ideals are not based on choices but on implied obligations of how you need to be. In other words, no choice.

Some people’s ideals were formed as children from the adults in their lives. For others, it may be rock stars, athletes, astronauts, actors and actresses, public figures, historical figures, and the list goes on. There are many models from which to choose. Yet, wherever the ideals came from, they function exactly the same way. “Here is how you must be.”

You may have adopted an ideal or two when you were young. You thought that it was important to live up to these ideals as if they were secret promises you made to yourself. Then, you measured yourself against them.

Many people have ideals of what they should have accomplished by the time they had reached a certain age. Others have the ideal of what adventures they should have experienced. Most people do not happen to accomplish or experience their ideals by the deadline, and they feel as if they had let themselves down. If you have this kind of pattern going on, step back a minute and review your fundamental assumptions. Why did you think you had to be, do, accomplish, or experience any benchmark by any age? You simply made that up. It is not steeped in reality. It is pure fiction.

So, here is a very simple yet life-changing principle: rid yourself of all ideals. The goal of life is not perfection. The blessing of life is the chance to be involved with life. The point of life is to live.