One of my favorite writers/speakers/teachers is David Allen. He’s a productivity guru. He has this exercise he does during his seminar that causes you to realize the power of focus. I did my best to adapt it for print/screen:

Look around the room and find the color BRIGHT RED. Now find another source of bright red. Ok, now find some more bright red. Ok, got some? Take a color snapshot of the entire room, and measure how much of that is bright red. As instantaneously as your mind wants to focus on bright red, it can.

Now do these next two things as quickly in succession as you can (without looking around the room again): close your eyes and try and find bright blue in the room.

Perhaps that worked for you. If your eyes wandered prior to to closing them, you probably saw some blue. (In the verbal example, you don’t know to look for blue until you have closed your eyes.) Either way, hopefully you get the implication of the exercise.

The point is you will never see what you are not looking for. I recently had this happen – my perspective on something changed, and all of the sudden it was like I was focusing on bright red. And it opened a great door. In a later post I will go into greater detail on what this bright red opportunity was.

What a good reason to always try and look for the good in people too.

I would love to hear about a time you all of the sudden started to see your bright red. Let me know in the comments!

Photo Credit: woodleywonderworks (flickr)