Fear and Focus

My mission president (Lester F. Johnson) is one of the most powerful people on the planet. When he interacts with people, he looks them squarely in the eyes, asks engaging questions, listens intently, and smiles and laughs often. In my opinion, it is the perfect form of social engagement. His intense interest and endlessly positive attitude pull peoples' attention to him like gravity.

And he is fearless.

After spending some time with him at a mission reunion two weeks ago, I learned something about fear and focus: fear is the enemy of focus. They cannot fully exist in the same person at the same time.

I'm not going to go into a definition of fear here, but instead will talk about its effects. Fear has a widening effect on focus. It opens our perspective to be aware of periphery threats that might "attack" us from any direction.

Natural Example

A great example of this is the anatomy of prey and predators in nature. Prey are animals that get eaten, and predators are animals that eat the prey.

Naturally, prey are the more fearful of the two, as they are constantly in threat of being killed by a predator. In order to detect threats, they have typically been outfitted with eyes on the sides of their heads. This offers them a very wide field of vision to detect hungry predators.

Predators, on the other hand, who have far fewer threats, have eyes on the front of their heads. Their field of vision is much narrower, and both eyes are able to focus on the same object.

When watching video of predators hunting, I'm always impressed by their extreme focus - they pay no attention to their surroundings, but instead center their attention on their objective.

Fear equals wide perspective! It requires us to dedicate our attention to detect periphery threats, which reduces the depth of our focus.

Power


One of the reasons President Johnson rocks so hard is that his fearlessness allows him to dedicate extreme focus to whatever it is he's doing. While talking to people, he isn't thinking about what those who are watching the interaction will think. When teaching, he isn't worried about whether those he teaches will think he's crazy, instead he focuses his attention on the objective - to achieve understanding.

He is completely comfortable with himself because he does not allow fear to widen his perspective in order to detect threats of criticism or misunderstanding.

He is utterly focused, unapologetically fearless, and tangibly powerful.

Fear is the enemy of focus.