Keeping Focused -- Lessons Learned from a Game of Darts

“All you have to do is know where you're going. The answers will come to you of their own accord.” ~ Earl Nightingale

Several years ago, my husband and his family were part of a dart team, and they met every Wednesday evening to compete against other people. Having just arrived to the US from Italy where darts are pretty much un unknown sport, I was intrigued by the accuracy of their game; the few times I tried to throw darts myself, I was relieved that no living being was around – one would have thought I had disjointed arms and aimed the darts at everything but the board.

One day, while we were at his parents’ house and the whole family was practicing for the next tournament, I asked my husband if he could share the secret of his success. “Just fix your eyes on the bullseye,” he said, “and you can’t go wrong.”

Ha! Maybe that worked for him, but in my case I think my eyes and my hands were going through a bit of a cold war and were not talking to one another. I fixed my gaze on the red spot intensely enough that I could have burned a hole into it, but my darts were still all over the place. Angry at myself for my lack of skill, I thought about giving up, but something bigger than that – pride, I think they call it – refused to lift the white flag, and here I was again the next weekend - alone this time to at least save my dignity – shooting darts like a toddler playing with a new water gun. With time my ability to at least hit the board improved, and I even managed to score decently a few times, although I never gained the level of skill the rest of the family had achieved over the years. I wasn’t good enough to play at tournaments, but I could hold my own in a match played at home with the family.

Through the years I realized that approaching new challenges is no different than learning how to shoot darts. You set your eyes on the goal and move through the motions, allowing your mind to evaluate and adjust each time you obtain a less than desirable result. In the end, you might not become an expert, but you will have learned that nothing is unachievable if you continue to try.

The greatest problem with meeting challenges is that many times we don’t focus in the right direction. If rather than staring at the small, red spot in the middle of the board I stared instead at the picture frame hung nearby, sooner rather than later I would have shot a dart in the forehead of the hound in the picture. Focusing on the challenge and assimilating it through our senses is what enables us to send the right data to our higher mind. Once we have a clear picture of what we plan to achieve, our inner mind gets to work to figure out ways to bypass obstacles and deliver us at the doorstep of success.

Clarity is the first step to going somewhere and achieving anything. If a mother wants a more challenging job which will pay her more but will require her to work longer hours, she might find herself in a pickle of a situation trying to figure out how to meet the demands of childcare, so although she doesn’t do it intentionally, she will self-sabotage to give herself more time to work out the details. If she decides the job is what she truly wants, and childcare is the only obstacle in the way, then she can give her mind something well defined to work toward. When I have asked a few people what they want out of life, many of them have replied that they just want to be happy, but what does that exactly mean? Each person is wired to find happiness at different levels, so by saying they want to be happy, they leave the spectrum of possibilities too wide open for the mind to come up with a plan.

Building a beautiful house is not too difficult a job, if one has taken the time to draw a good model plan.

On the Path to Success

"Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin." Robert Collier


Focus oriented in the right direction is one of the fundamental tools necessary to overcome. If you think it sounds too easy and simple to be true, think again. Many people loudly broadcast their wishes, but their words rarely match their thoughts, beliefs and expectations. While one minute is spent wishing for something, the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of their day are intensely spent visualizing the impossibility of the wish.

Given the right impetus and desire, every wish can become reality. The only blocks are the lack of emotional charge necessary to propel our wishes forward, the mental image we implant into our subconscious, and whether we feel we deserve the blessing. The fuel is provided by emotions; without emotions behind them, thoughts are quickly discarded as unimportant. The Universal mind only works on images we create in our conscious minds, which get deposited into our subconscious minds. Once an image is perceived by our Higher Self, if fueled properly, it will manifest in our realities. So, if for one minute we claim to wish for something, but then we repeatedly saturate our subconscious with images of poverty, disease, fear and lack of love, our Higher-Self assimilates that poverty, disease, fear and lack of love are just what we want. Like actions, images speak louder than words. The last block is usually caused by misplaced guilt; if we feel guilty of something – even if we didn’t initiate the action – we believe we shouldn’t be rewarded.

When we wish for something but then expect to see its opposite manifest, our focus is centered on what we don’t want. As we think of what we don’t want, we form mental images of the misery that will come, and we bring those images to life by feeding them with our emotions. In order to be successful in attaining our wishes, we need to re-program our conscious minds, since that’s where the process starts. Our free will allows us to choose what to focus on, and once we make a choice, we need to concentrate every emotion we feel toward our goal, rather than toward the obstacles on our path.

Very often, our realities are impacted by old images buried deep into our subconscious. By allowing painful memories to rise up at a time when we can give them our full attention, we take away their power of being in charge of us. When we choose to face them, we can feel them, hear them, see them and even feed them emotions for a brief period of time, and then make a conscious effort to release them before shifting our focus toward the goals we wish to conquer. One thing is certain – those old wounds will not go away until we consciously decide to meet them face to face, honor them for their purpose in our lives and ask them to rest in peace. Once we are aware of their existence, it is imperative that don’t linger on their effects. We are in control of how long we will allow ourselves to think about them.

Changing our realities is possible, as long as our thoughts go hand in hand with our words. And if, by force of habit, we go down the wrong thinking path at any given time, we always have the option to stop, turn around and walk in a different direction.