Grounded In Calm Focus

What does it mean to be Grounded In Calm Focus? By calm I mean keeping your cool and not panicking. The more you keep your emotions under control, the more likely you are to experience a positive outcome. Similarly, there are situations in which a gesture or utterance could mean the difference between life or death. Think I’m kidding?

Suppose you are walking in the woods, come into a clearing, and 100 feet away you see a mother bear and three cubs. They don’t notice you. You would be rightfully concerned about the prospect of tangling with a mother bear protecting her cubs. But your natural inclination might be to say something like “Oh no!” or “ARHHHHHHH!” Big mistake. The bear now is alerted to your presence, and you can’t outrun or out- climb her. But even if you make no sound, you can’t just freeze, because very quickly the bear will smell you or notice you are there, and then you have the same problem. Staying calm allows you to focus.

What I mean by focus is to quickly assess the situation. Do you need to do something immediately, or do you have time to think, to plan? In my bear example, you have to instantly recognize the situation, make no sound, back out of the clearing and choose another route, leaving the bears undisturbed. In my example, the ability to focus at that moment is critical to your living through a bear encounter. However, if you were setting up camp for the night, thinking about how to secure your food items that might attract bears, you would have time to think through all your options and form a plan.

Einstein said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes on the solution. Einstein was clearly not thinking about a crisis situation like a bear encounter. Think about events where you made a snap judgment and reacted immediately. In hindsight, are you more frequently right or wrong in how you assessed the need for quick response versus taking time to think? If you are wrong more than right, then work on improving your ability to exercise calm focus with more consistency.