We Get More of Whatever We Focus On

What is worth your focus? What's important to you? Maybe the saying "Be careful what you wish for" might also apply to "Be careful what you focus on" because whatever we focus on, we get more of it.

Focus is essential for several reasons. For one, focus is vital for us to be present and fully experience and appreciate the fulfillment of savoring the present moment. Additionally, when we focus on the moment, the experience becomes learned and more embedded in our conscious and subconscious minds, and our ability to remember is reinforced. Focusing also strengthens and enhances future experiences to be absorbed, and our potential to learn is also supported. Experiences can then become richer and may be more available to use when learning new things in the future too. This inner growth can also build self-esteem, belief in ourselves for challenges ahead, and self-respect.

How Acting Skills Can Improve Focus

The actor does not become the character, nor do they pretend to be the character; the actor visits an experience or experiential space, occupying it in an intimate, repeated, and planned way over time. The distance between the actor and the space, as they are not the same, does not diminish the experience or life growth but lends it a unique force. The reason is that the ability to plan and rehearse living the fictional possibility of a character enables the actor to inhabit it in a more focused, precise, and complete way than nonfictional life would allow.

Learning to focus this way, combined with new beneficial mental and emotional experiences through acting techniques, can extend into everyday life to make one's life better.

Open to Learning

Another consideration that learning can take place naturally when we are more objective and open is the audience's perspective. Even as audience members, we can take part in the form of an imaginative experience which can lead to personal growth through the actor's portrayal in a story, potentially gaining something from the experience. Sometimes when we watch a performance, play, film, or even read a story, we can feel better because of the experience. It is in the richness of our experiences that matter most for inner change to happen. We change our circumstances by changing how we create the experience of our own reality.