Shift your focus
- Beth Repp
- Mar 4
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 4

I am writing this on a rainy dark day. It is March and we are expecting snow and cold weather this week. Coldplay is playing, which always makes me melancholic. I am behind on my to-do list. I gained two pounds this week. I want to nap.
I am doing my very favorite things: sitting in a coffee shop, reading and writing. I have a warm mug of coffee, and just had a club sandwich with the most delicious salty focaccia bread. I get to pick my daughter up from school and take her shopping for a frame to display her artwork. My muscles are sore from doing extra challenging weight lifting sessions over the last couple days.
Both of the above are true. Can you feel the difference in tone between the two paragraphs? Can you see how easy it is to start on a negative thread and just keep going down that dark rabbit hole? Once our brains and bodies start to have a pattern of thought and emotion, we start to look for all the evidence to further support it. We slide into a default pattern of thoughts. However, with just a slight bit of creativity and effort, you can shift this pattern of thought and feeling in such a way that the rest of the day progresses differently.
I read recently that we actually see and process clearly only about 1% of the environment around us at any given time. As an ophthalmologist, this blew my mind. Can this really be true? Watch the below video for a super fun explanation by Dr. Stephen Macknik:
In the book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons describe an experiment they did at Harvard, where students were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed in a video. In the video, a gorilla walks across the scene for nine full seconds. Many of the students never saw the gorilla.
It really is true that we only see what we focus on, both literally and figuratively.
The following excerpt from Shira Gill's book LifeStyled: Your Guide to a More Organized & Intentional Life highlights this beautifully:
"I'm going to share two different stories about my life. Both of them are 100 percent true.
STORY ONE
My life has been punctuated by grief, trauma, and loss. I had a lonely childhood. My parents were a mismatch from the start and split up when I was just three years old. I don't have a single memory of the two of them together other than when they sat me down to announce their divorce and talk about who would keep the cat. I longed for a sibling, and rarely saw or enjoyed gatherings, parties, or rituals with my relatives, who lived across the country in New York. Eventually, my father remarried and had a son, but our age gap was so large that I barely got to know him before I left for college. After another difficult divorce and multiple failed relationships, my father struggled on and off with crippling bouts of depression. We were very close, and while I did everything I could think of to help him, he ultimately chose to end his life by overdoing on pills. I was the one who found him and called the police. Despite being a new mother with a six-month-old baby and a toddler, I was responsible for cleaning out his home, planning his funeral, and resolving his estate because I was the only relative who lived near him. My life has never been the same since losing him.
STORY TWO
My life has been defined by creativity, community, and travel. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by parents who were brilliant, creative, and loving. I made friends easily and cultivated an incredible community through school, summer camps, and my participation in the theater arts. My parents encouraged and supported my love of travel, and in high school and college, they helped me coordinate a summer exchange program in Spain, an artist's residency in Italy, and a year abroad studying drama in the UK. After graduating from college, I lived and worked as an actor and event producer in incredible cities like London, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, before starting my own business as a home organizer, author, and speaker. I am married to a wonderful and supportive man, have two incredibly dynamic, beautiful, and hilarious children, and my brother (despite being much younger than me) has become one of my best friends in the world. I feel privileged and grateful every day to have built the family of my dreams and to get to do meaningful work that I love."
Now your turn. Can you look up and take in something meaningful you weren't seeing a moment before this? Can you describe or define today in a different way? Can you rewrite a story from your life, or for that matter your whole life, from a slightly different focus?
A small shift in focus can lead to a giant shift in how you experience your life.
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