Overcoming distraction is about knowing how to focus on two things at the same time, but exactly what those two things are not commonly understood or practiced.

Many of us go about our business in a state of sensual, mental or emotional distraction. An egregious example is seen in people walking around while phoning, texting or game playing – then walking into walls, falling into water fountains or wrapping their car around a tree. It would be funny if it weren’t pathetic – like in the slapstick comedies of early film.

Distraction is a primary technique of hypnosis. When you’re distracted you become open to the suggestion of the hypnotist or whomever or whatever is distracting you. A person standing on the corner looking up will cause many passersby to also look up. This is the power of suggestion.

To be distracted is to lose yourself – to lose your soul so to speak. Why? Because distraction is a departure or moving away from your center of being – which is your only true reference point as you interface with the world. Virtually all mistakes and misperception happens when in an incorrectly focused state of mind. You make the wrong decision every time.

Take, for example, the distraction of excitement. A stock technique of the high-pressure salesperson is to excite you about his product or service. Once excited you’re virtually sold because excitement distracts you from your reference point of truth or reality.

When you get home and the excitement wears off, you scratch your head wondering why you bought or paid so much for that used car, time-share, “free” vacation or service you really didn’t want or need. – Which is why many states require a 3-day cooling off period before a contract becomes binding. That the government has to protect us from ourselves reveals how little we understand about ourselves. How lacking in self-awareness we are.

The key to living in distraction-free reality is to cultivate a little distance from the person, place or thing you’re relating to in a given situation. See, hear and respond both with your eyes and ears and your higher awareness. That’s what we mean by “two things at the same time.” It’s relating with both a personal faculty – sense, thought or feeling, and your impersonal faculty – which is your awareness or knowing faculty, at the same time. One is necessary to check and empower the other.

Again, we’re not talking about two personal things at the same time – like eating and reading; we’re talking about one personal thing and one impersonal thing – like eating and awareness of eating. Distraction is trying to concentrate on two or more personal things at the same time, and that’s the cause of distraction, misperception, error, and diminished performance.