The art of concentration: Lose focus easily? Daydream? Don't despair! In part two of our series PAUL McKENNA reveals his simple techniques to boost your powers of attention

By Paul Mckenna

Last updated at 8:29 AM on 4th January 2012

Brain boosters: Paul McKenna is sharing his techniques to increase your intelligence, improve concentration and enhance memory

Yesterday I shared with you techniques that enable you  to increase your intelligence immediately by removing any barriers to learning.

Today, I will show you how to dramatically improve your powers of concentration.

In order to learn more effectively you need to control your concentration. We all know how to concentrate — it’s a natural human ability — but we veer between two different sorts of concentration. Active concentration is when you’re really focused on the task at hand, eyes wide open, sitting forward, intensely involved in whatever it is that you’re doing.

This type of concentration is particularly useful for performance, whether that’s on a playing field, in a boardroom or during an examination.

Passive concentration, on the other hand, is when you sit back, relax and allow things to come to you. You are fully absorbed by the experience, but there is no active effort to engage with it.

Any time you’ve been engrossed in a movie, sporting event or even just listening to music, you were using passive concentration. Even though you weren’t making any effort to remember, often you can recall many details of what happened and what was said.

When we use passive concentration, we’re taking everything in, without trying to take it in.

Some people would even say they weren’t concentrating at all — they were simply engrossed by what was happening and because of that quality of attention, they picked up more than someone who was trying to take notes and analyse the story.

So, some things will be easier to do in a state of active concentration; others will be easier in a state of passive concentration.

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• I'll bring out the genius in you: In a major new series PAUL McKENNA shares his formula for super-charging your memory and boosting your intelligence

Yet many people have become used to using one kind of concentration, and stay too hyper-focused to absorb new information or too passive to put it to use.

The following exercise will  put the power back into  your hands, allowing you to actively choose which kind of concentration you use at  what time.

TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR CONCENTRATION

Have you ever seen a mixing board in a recording studio? It’s a collection of knobs and sliders ranging from zero to ten, designed to let a music producer create an optimal mix between all the different sounds being recorded.

We are going to create a slider in your mind — one that will enable your neurology and physiology to effortlessly slide between active and passive concentration, so that you are always concentrating appropriately for the task at hand.

So, imagine that there is a slider in your mind that looks like this:

Many people have become used to using one kind of concentration, and stay too hyper-focused to absorb new information or too passive to put it to use

On the left-hand side, you have passive concentration; on the right, you have active concentration.

1 Remember a time when you were in a state of passive concentration — watching a TV show, listening to music or any time that you were effortlessly relaxed and absorbed by what was going on around you.

2 Now return to that time as though you were back there again. See what you saw, hear what you heard and feel how you felt. As you do, make sure your concentration slider is all the way to the left.

3 Go back through this memory at least three more times  with the slider still all the way to the left.

4 Now, remember a time when you were in a state of active concentration — fully engaged, using all of your attention to take in as much as you could. Your energy was up and you had a little bit of an adrenaline kick.

5 Now return to that time as though you were back there. See what you saw, hear what you heard and feel how you felt. This time, make sure your concentration slider is all the way to the right.

6 Go back through this memory at least three more times  with the slider all the way to the right.

7 Now, gently move the slider back over to the left and think of another time when you have been relaxed and absorbed in a state of passive concentration.

8 Now, gently move the slider back over to the right and think of another time when you were fully engaged in a state of active concentration.

Repeat this back and forth movement of the slider at  least three more times, being sure to stop at the far left  and far right long enough to remember at least one specific incident of passive concentration on the left and one specific incident of active concentration when the slider is on  the right.

Now that we have set up your concentration slider, we are going to give you even more control over your concentration.

WHY I'M ABLE TO DRIVE LIKE THE STIG

The Stig: Model of excellence

HOW TO LEARN NATURALLY
Learning things more quickly needs improved concentration and chunking down, but I’ll now show you another useful technique called ‘modelling’.

In school, teachers use simple repetition as their master strategy. While this is an effective way of mastering skills like addition and multiplication, it is a terrible strategy for most things we want to understand and apply.

Think about how people learn to drive cars. For years, before we ever get behind the wheel, we watch Mum and Dad drive to see how it’s done. When it’s finally our turn to learn, we’ve seen it so often that we’re able to do it with a minimal amount of instruction.

So when your primary goal is the application of what you have learned in the form of a new or advanced level of skill, the simplest strategy is to observe someone who is already excellent at that skill until we’re ready to copy it.

For example, years ago I had the chance to appear on Top Gear and drive the ‘Reasonably Priced Car’ around the track. I was fiercely competitive, so I decided to apply the natural learning strategy to see how quickly I could improve.

So I asked a model of excellence — in this case the Stig — if I could watch him drive around the track several times from inside the car.

I paid particular attention to the details of what he did — when he put his foot to floor, how hard and how often he braked, and how far he spun the steering wheel round when he took the turns.

I also asked him questions to get insights into what was going on in his mind. I wanted to know how he knew when to speed up and slow down, and how he knew when to begin his turns and when to accelerate out of them.

Finally, I used the mind-programming technique I am about to share with you to mentally rehearse the drive. I watched him race the track in my mind’s eye, and then imagined being him, stepping into the car and seeing the track through his eyes.

One of the things I noticed when I was ‘being’ him was that I could see a little curve in my mind which represented the line to take around the track. By the time I actually stepped into the car, I had already driven the race dozens of times in my mind.

Afterwards, the Stig commented on how quickly I had picked up the handling of the car and the track. This was not because of any special driving ability I had, but simply because of the effectiveness of the strategy I used to learn.

This ‘modelling’ process is something you can use to accelerate your learning curve with almost any skill you can imagine. Simply by watching what someone excellent at the skill does and moving our body in the same way, we can shortcut the learning process.

The unconscious learns through immersion and absorption, so each time we repeat the process we are creating a new muscle memory which will then be available to us when we need it.
Surprisingly often, we gain insights into their thought process as well.

EMULATE THE MASTERS

1. Choose a skill you would like to learn or master. Identify someone who is a model of excellence for that skill.

2.  Spend as much time as you can studying that person in action. If you don’t have direct access to them, you can watch them on video. If you are able to speak with them, ask any questions that occur to you about how they know to do what they are doing and how they know when to do it.

3. When you feel you have a real sense of what they do and how they do it, take some time to relax. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a comfortable movie theatre. You are about to watch a movie of your model of excellence doing what it is they do so well.

4.  After you’ve watched the movie through a few times, step into the image on the screen so you’re seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears and feeling what they feel in their body.
If for any reason that is uncomfortable for you, imagine yourself on screen next to them, shadowing their every move in perfect sync. Then step into your on-screen self, seeing through your eyes, hearing through your ears and feeling what it feels like to do these new behaviours.

5.  After you have repeated this process as many times as you like, step back out of the movie and return to the present moment, fully awake and alert.

GET THE MIX RIGHT

1 When you’re ready, slide  your concentration slider all the way to the left and enjoy the feeling of relaxed, passive concentration.

2 Now, move your slider just a little bit to the right, going slowly enough that a little bit of active concentration begins to come into the mix. Move the slider slowly to the right, in 10??per cent increments, so that the two concentrations start to gently mix.

3 As the slider approaches the middle, you feel a 50/50 mix of passive and active concentration, like a special effect in a movie when one scene slowly dissolves into another.  As you move your concentration slider more towards the right, the passive concen- tration fades out completely and the active concentration fades in.

4 When you get all the way to the right, slowly move the slider back the other way. Notice the active concentration fade out as the slider moves back to the middle, and then the passive concentration come up more and more as the slider continues over to the left.

5 Repeat this process at least five times, sliding from left to right (passive to active) and then back from right to left (active to passive). Do it again and again until you can feel your concentration shifting in synch with the slider in your mind.

You now have a greater degree of control over your concentration, so that you can boost your levels of active or passive concentration in any situation and at any time!

Now we can apply that improved concentration to learning new things, whether that’s a subject such as geography, maths or science or a social skill, such as public speaking or making new friends.

Whatever you choose, here’s the most important thing  you need to know before  you begin to learn something  new: To what level do you want to  learn it?

THREE LEVELS  OF LEARNING

Essentially, there are three different levels at which we can learn. The first level is information — we simply want to get some new fact into our head for the purpose of repeating it back or putting it to use later (such as a school exam or pub quiz).

But if you want to go deeper than the mere parroting of facts and figures, the second level of learning goes to a deeper understanding of the subject you  are learning.

Finally, sometimes your primary goal in learning is application — that is, you want to be able to put what you are learning into practice.

Whether you are learning to drive or do brain surgery, your goal is application, and you know you’ve learned successfully when you can perform the task.

WHY BITE-SIZED CHUNKS ARE BEST

New book: All the tips here are extracted from I Can Make You Smarter by Paul McKenna, to be published by Bantam on Thursday at ￡10.99

Dr Richard Bandler, the co-creator of the field of Neuro- Linguistic Programming (NLP), helped develop the principle of ‘chunking down’ — the breaking down of a subject or task into small enough chunks that they can easily be learned and mastered before moving on, and then reassembling those chunks until the entire subject or task has  been learned.

Now, in the same way, you can learn anything, no matter how complex, if you first take the time to break down the task into small enough chunks for you to understand and master.

One of my favourite examples of this came when I was working with my friend, the actor Dougray Scott. He was due to appear in the West End in the title role of the play Beckett, which is over three hours long and had more dialogue in it than any part he had played. He asked me if I would help him.

In order to make the task less daunting, I asked Dougray to divide the play into quarters and tell me the gist of what each quarter was about. I then had him divide each quarter into individual scenes and describe each scene in his own words.

Before long, we had broken the entire play down into a series of easily learnable chunks. Within a few weeks, he had learned the entire part.

Of course, sometimes the problem is exactly the opposite — we can get caught up in the details of something and lose sight of the big picture.

The strategy we used in this instance is called ‘chunking up’. To do this for yourself, take a number of seemingly separate ideas and find the common theme or essence that unites them.

You can then continue to chunk up until you are left with one simple idea that encompasses all of the smaller ones.