Unlocking Your Potential: The Open Focus Approach to Success with Dr. Mary Meduna-Gross

In the fast-paced digital age we live in, our ability to stay present and focused has become increasingly challenging. A simple way to create a healthy space in the mind which allows you to relax and always see the bigger picture is attention training. With distractions at every turn, it's essential to explore how we can regain control of our attention and foster meaningful human interactions. In this episode, we are thrilled to have Dr. Mary Meduna-Gross, an esteemed expert in the field of focus and success, returning as our special guest. Dr. Meduna-Gross introduces us to an innovative approach called "The Open Focus Approach," which offers powerful insights into how to transform our mindset and tap into our full potential, and the four styles of attention. Join us as we explore the principles of this approach and discover how it can unlock new possibilities for success. --- Listen to the podcast here: Unlocking Your Potential: The Open Focus Approach to Success with Dr. Mary Meduna-Gross Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Obviously, one really important aspect of anything that we engage in is what kind of mindset we bring in to something. There's a big difference between coming to an event where you're interacting with people but you're constantly pulling out your phone or pulling out your laptop or even getting distracted by every little thing that you see around you or have something prominent on your mind, something you're mad about, something you're really anxious about, versus being truly present somewhere. Today, I bring back to the program the second time, Dr. Mary Meduna-Gross, who you probably remember from a previous conversation, we talked a lot about having the mindset for success and what kind of thoughts we're putting through our head. Today, we're going to talk about a different new approach to how we're actually focusing. --- Mary, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you. So good to be with you again. It's always wonderful to talk to you, it's always wonderful to hear about all the different things that you're doing because you have a podcast of your own. Right. And the magazine that really is helping bring people of this type of mindset, of building something new, building something better together. Exactly. The magazine, The ConsciousPreneur Magazine, is really all about conscious entrepreneurship. Validating these values of the conscious entrepreneur, you can build a successful business on them, that how do we do that, so lots of information on how to do that with some inspiration. The podcast I have now is Fully Alive and we dive specifically into mindset for leadership. I know that this episode is mostly going to cover this open focus technique, as promised, but one thing I'm wondering as we're talking about conscious entrepreneurship and I've read conscious capitalism and some other similar books is is there still a lot of resistance to the idea that you can, through business, make an impact while also earning your money and everything else? Is there still a lot of people saying no from either one end saying, “No, business has to be business and being nice and being philanthropy, whatever, has to be separate,” or, “Your business has to focus only on it, you can’t consider all those shareholders,” is that still fully alive, not to use your podcast title, but is that still fully there, fully present in our society? I think so. In fact, I had some conversations recently with some marketers. He was talking about the challenges that he was having in terms of shifting beliefs of his prospects and shift that one belief that I can have purpose or I can have profit but I can't do both. Yeah. You said it so much better than I did. Well, we got to the same point. Again, one of the reasons why I created this magazine was because I think there are a lot of us who, whether we're consciously aware of it or not, but we don't really buy into that. And if we don't really buy into that and we don't know it and we're asking for people to help us build our business, most of those people are going to also hold this belief, “You can have profit or you can have purpose, you can have both,” and they kind of make their clients then choose which one are you going to go with. So, it's still very prevalent. I don't know, like my hope is that, eventually, conscious entrepreneurship or conscious business becomes the way that we do business. And I think with each generation, I think we're going to move closer to that. It may not get there before I'm checking out. I think it’s coming. Yeah, so it's moving in that direction. Definitely. Obviously, every single issue of The ConsciousPreneur Magazine, you have a bunch of different people following that kind of paradigm to showcase, to share stories of, so it seems like it's growing, it's just a matter of whether or not like the old school, like you said, you can either have profit or you can have purpose is still the dominant culture at this point. And that one core belief then dictates all of the other decisions that you're going to make. Yeah. So that's why it was really so important to identify those values of the conscious entrepreneur or purpose driven and we care about people, profit, and planet. We've got all of them on our plate. We're not leaving any of them off. There are no sides here. These are all the main course. Yeah. Well, and one thing I love about it is how it takes away this idea of things fighting against each other --- Exactly. --- and brings it together to say, “Okay, I wanna make a good profit, I wanna be an investor, I wanna 10X, 100X,” whatever it is that you decide you want to do, “but I also want to feel good about what the purpose of this business is.” You could do Have a business collecting garbage and if you do it in a conscious way, you're serving a purpose because that garbage needs to be collected, even if it's not this like weird, oh my god, world changing, you're bringing about a whole new era for humanity type of thing. Yeah, no, you're right. It really is about shifting how will we see the value in what we do. And you're right, I've talked about dog walkers could be conscious business people, garbage collectors can be conscious business people. If we're doing it for the purpose of serving others and, again, people, profit, and planet along the way, then that falls into that conscious entrepreneur model.Share on X Most of the time, what we're doing, though, is it's very transactional. Where's the next sale? Who's the next person that I can pitch this to? And conscious entrepreneurship really relies on collaboration over competition. So, you and I, some might look at the two of us and say, “Oh, they’re competitors, I wonder why they would be collaborating together?” Well, that's how we do things, right? Because you and I having conversation, even though maybe our specific topics are a little bit different, we're talking to the same audience and really talking about solving the same kinds of problems. Not only do I want to see purpose and profit but it’s that people part in there as well that's important to me. That really starts with us as the entrepreneur because if I'm not taking care of myself as the entrepreneur, regardless if I'm a solopreneur or I've got teams of hundreds, the leadership is about me and what's the point of me being purposeful for everybody else and even making a profit if I'm running myself into the grave? Yeah. There's no point to that. I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine yesterday about --- so when I was a kid, there was this movie called Clueless out there and it was a movie about a teenage girl in Southern California and her dad was a really powerful lawyer and I remember looking at this and seeing this huge house, fancy yard, maid, staff to take care of everything, but this guy, her father, would always be working. And I remember even thinking to myself all the way back then like, “What's the point? What is the point of having all these wonderful things and making so much money if all he ever does is work and all he ever does is stress out over some sort of multimillion-dollar litigation process?” Exactly, exactly. So that's why I shifted the podcast, the Fully Alive podcast, to be specifically about mindset and leadership, because that's where all of that part of our business is going to originate from. That mindset. And so that is a perfect segue into our primary topic for today's podcast which is open focus, because we've seen the dichotomy, we've seen all the way back in 2009, I read a book by Dr. Maggie Jackson called Distracted about how some of our modern technologies are already starting to cause us to not be able to focus very well and so this idea between are you focused or are you distracted, but open focus takes this entire idea and flips it on its head, gives a whole new parameter to it. So explain what open focus is about for my audience? Absolutely. I love this, and I love how you've set this up because open focus, while it looks like and feels like meditation or mindfulness, the purpose of it is to retrain how we pay attention. So, the underlying theory here is that we've been conditioned to function in a very narrow way of paying attention. So we're taught to look around our environment, what is the priority, what needs my attention now, and then, like a flashlight with a laser light, we just shine our attention on that one thing and so all of the other rest of our experience is really kind of in the dark. And so that's how we've been taught. I was the kid staring out the window at the birds and my teachers and my parents would lament, “Mary, why can't you pay attention more?...