CHICAGO PERSONAL TRAINING ARTICLES:

Direct Your Focus on What You Want and Overcome Old Habits by San Diego Personal Trainer Dave DePew

Dave Depew is San Diego's top Personal Fitness Trainer. He has served as a consultant to the US Navy Seals and the Marine Corps. He is the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the San Diego SoCal Scorpions (Women's professional Football), and hosts the Dave Depew Fitness and Nutrition hour on World Talk Radio.

By: Dave DePew

Research suggests that we are always focusing on something whether we are aware of it or not. That may be part of the problem— focus is usually not conscious but automatic. We tend to unconsciously focus on something we don’t want and then when we get it we feel like a victim. We don’t stop to consider that we may have created it in the first place. The irony is that we don’t realize we could choose to create something completely different if we could only start “consciously” focusing on what we want. If we can consciously focus on what we want, we can make it happen.

According to Bill Harris, Director of the Centerpoint Research Institute, the mind is a goal-seeking mechanism and an extremely effective one at that. It is constantly creating exactly what we focus on. When you focus on something, your mind says, “Okay, I can do that,” and starts figuring out how to do it. Yes, that’s right! You start seeing how to do it on your own. The more frequent and the more intense the focus, the faster and more effectively we will create what we have focused on.

The goal is to learn how to consciously direct your focus on goals that you want to achieve. Once you can do this, everything will change. It does take some work because, at least in the beginning, you will be fighting your old habits of unconscious thoughts. However, with practice, perseverance, and conditioning you can steer your focus to more successful goals.

One of the most common reasons I am hired as a trainer and coach is because of my ability to motivate others. The funny thing is that I don’t consider myself a motivator. I see what I do as teaching awareness. When people become aware of the state they are in whether it is awareness of the mind, body, or soul, only then will they have an ability to see a need for growth and balance. The current state of a person is governed by his or her virtues as they relate to core values. Your core values are who and what you believe is important. In a way the core values are an internal compass. When we act against our core values it brings us great pain. For example, if health and vitality rates high for you as a core value, chances are you are someone who is in the constant pursuit of better health and when your health is compromised it affects your virtues.

Our virtues are positive intention, negative intention, and neutral intention. In an environment where we could freely grow we would certainly accomplish a great deal more if all our intentions were positive intentions, but the reality is that we have negative and neutral intentions to protect us from pain. The pain of our past has planted the seeds for future fears and makes us cautious, so much so that it often keeps us from truly being happy. Over time we have created certain programs that we depend on for our survival. Many times these programs, while good at one time, might have become outdated and require some updating.

Every bad habit has at one time provided something positive to us. I believe that if you dig deep enough, in every bad habit you would eventually find an intention to achieve something positive. Regardless of how unhealthy and harmful it is the behavior will not change unless a more desirable behavior is found that still provides the positive gained from the bad behavior.

It takes a very conscious effort to bring change to the subconscious. We can never eliminate old programming but we can continue to learn, and through conditioning our response we can better ourselves.

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