Your brain, I hate to tell you, has been hijacked right now as you're
listening to this, there are probably about 17 different thoughts competing
for the same space in your head.
Your phone just buzzed.
You're thinking about that meeting from earlier today.
You're thinking about the meeting that's gonna happen tomorrow.
You're wondering if you remember to send that damn email and somewhere
buried beneath all that noise is the person you're supposed to become.
But here's what no one tells you about focus.
It's about managing your time.
It's about reclaiming your mind.
And if you don't take it back, someone else will.
Keep using it for free.
Your success, DNA podcast, your success.
This is in your DNA.
What is up?
What the hell is up?
My fellow success seekers, welcome back to another episode of Your success,
DNA, the podcast for my aspiring entrepreneurs and nine to five escapees.
Really, it's for everyone, but we do tend to focus on those aspiring entrepreneurs.
Each episode is designed to deliver some mindset shifts and habit
upgrades, all with a little dose of rebellion, helping you break free
from convention so that you can build not just a life, but a, a business.
Aligned with your version of success, and if you know someone who dreams of
ditching the grime, but still makes time for a little self-help, a little
sprinkle of personal development in there, you might wanna go ahead
and forward this episode to them.
Okay, so today we're diving deep into the most viable real estate you will ever own.
It's not property, it's your mental space.
First, I'm gonna reveal the exact moment that I discovered that my scattered
thinking wasn't a personality flaw.
It was a symptom of living in someone else's mental ecosystem, and how
that realization changed everything about how I approach my days.
Second, we're gonna break down the three invisible thieves.
That are stealing a mental clarity right now and why traditional focus advice
actually makes this problem worse by treating symptoms instead of the source.
And third, I'm gonna give you the precise framework that I call the
mental real estate reclamation.
Wow.
A system that doesn't just help you focus better, but actually expands your capacity
to think, to create and to become the person your future self wants you to be.
Actually, they probably need you to be, but here's what no one is
telling you, and, and here's what no one I think wants to admit.
You're not distracted.
You're colonized.
Well, yeah.
Let that one sink in for a minute.
Your mind has become occupied territory.
You have been so busy trying to manage the chaos that you forgot
you used to be the landlord.
Every notification, every urgent email, every quick question, every ping, every
a, I have something from a coworker.
Those aren't just interruptions.
They are complete invasions, and the worst part, you have
been trained to welcome them.
Let me, let me tell you what about the moment that kind of
made everything click for me.
I was sitting in my car after another soul crushing day in corporate America.
It was, I don't know, it was about quarter to 7, 6 40 or so.
I know it wasn't a Wednesday, it was the middle of the week, and I
was supposed to be driving home.
Heck, I was supposed to have been driving home hours ago, but instead.
I was just sitting there staring at the cement wall of the parking
structure in front of me, basically staring at nothing but the glass
on the windshield in front of me.
My phone was, you know, buzz going off with notification.
My brain was cycling through today's meeting and tomorrow's meetings and next
week's deadlines, and that project that was somehow both urgent and meaningless,
I really felt like I was drowning.
In my own thoughts, that's when something strange happened.
A little memory, uh, percolated to the top of my mind.
Back from when I was, gosh, what was I like 12 years old.
I was sitting by, by a creek on the other side of town.
We lived in this little small town called Christoph, Germany.
My dad's second tour over in Europe, and I remembered how clear my
thinking used to be, uh, not just for when I was sitting at that creek.
There were also this amazing set of woods.
Uh, across the farm field by our home and there was this meadow, I
don't wanna say in the middle of it, but just wasn't in the middle.
But you know what I'm saying?
I remember going and sitting there for hours and how clearly I could think and
I could just sit there four hours just.
Thinking not about tasks, not about deadlines, not about other people's
priorities or political agendas, but just immersed in thinking in
my own thoughts, and I realized when was the last time that I had.
An original thought.
When was the last time that my mind was so quiet that I could hear my own voice?
That's when it hit me.
I wasn't managing my time poorly.
Nope.
I was renting out my mental space to every single body else out there, and I
had forgotten that I owned the deed to the real estate that I was giving away.
My mind is real estate.
Your mind is real estate, and right now you're letting squatters live there.
Rent free.
Yeah.
Okay.
Here's how I took back.
What's yours?
Let's call this the mind method, MIND.
And it's designed to work even if you are still trapped in
the corporate chaos right now.
M, map out your mental territory.
First, you need to see what's actually happening inside your head.
I know sometimes, for some of you, it's gonna be kind of scary
to open up the doors and peek inside for the next three days.
I want you to do something kind of radical every time your attention gets
pulled away from what you are doing.
I want you to write down what hijacked it.
Don't judge it.
Don't edit it, just.
Track it.
In doing this, you're gonna discover some patterns.
Maybe it's Slack notifications between two and 4:00 PM Maybe it's your
brain spinning outta control on the weekend plans come Thursday afternoon.
Maybe it's that coworker who just had a quick question, but they had that quick
question 17 times every single day.
This isn't about fixing anything yet.
This is just about becoming aware of who's living in your mental
space without your permission.
Okay, now I is install mental boundaries.
So once you know the patterns, you can begin to create some boundaries.
You know, gonna set up some white picket fences, as it were.
But here's where most people are gonna get this completely wrong.
They're gonna try to block out everything, right?
How about that?
Quiet?
Yeah.
Sometimes it's a little uncomfortable.
You're not trying to stop a flood.
Was a paper towel.
You just can't do it.
It just won't, it won't work.
Not even the tougher picker uppers.
Okay?
Instead, you're gonna start creating designated spaces.
Think of this, of like, like zoning laws for your brain zone one.
Is your deep thinking territory.
This my friend, is gonna be your sacred space.
For me, it's like the first hour of my day and the last hour before bed.
No phones, no inputs, just me and my thoughts.
This is where I have my best ideas.
This is where your best ideas are gonna live for me.
Another thing is this time I'm having right now, Sundays right about three
to four hours, I hop on the microphone here and I. Empty my brain to you.
Hopefully you get some value out of it.
That's my deep thinking territory zone number two, reactive response area.
This is where you're gonna handle the emails and the messages and the other
people's priorities, but you control when this zone is open for business.
You set the the business hours you could say, and zone
three is the processing plaza.
This is where you sort through the day's inputs and you decide
what deserves space in your head.
Here's the key inside this.
You're not managing distractions.
You are architecting attention.
Okay, now that moves us to N. You're gonna nurture your mental silence.
And here's what changed everything for me.
I stopped trying to fill in.
Every quiet moment, most people are completely terrified of mental
silence because that's where they might actually hear what they
really think about their life.
Yeah, it scares them.
They don't wanna hear that voice.
Start with five minutes a day of what I call.
Productive boredom.
Yeah.
Really it's not really boring, but given what you're probably experiencing
right now, it might feel boring.
No phone, no music.
Not even podcasts.
Yeah, not even this one.
Just you in whatever thoughts bubble to the surface.
This isn't meditation, this isn't trying to clear your mind.
This is just letting it wander and see where it goes.
Starting with five minutes.
And you will be amazed what emerges when you stop pumping shit into your brain.
Stop feeding your brain with other people's content and you start
listening to your own signal.
Yeah.
Very important.
I guess that's to D, defend your cognitive sovereignty.
This is gonna be the hardest part because it requires saying no to
people who are used to having unlimited access to your mental bandwidth.
Yeah.
Put up a big hard stop sign.
You're gonna start treating interruptions like what?
They really are requests for your most valuable resource, your
time right, and your thoughts, your mind, your real estate.
And just like you won't let someone walk into your house and steal your furniture.
You don't have to let them walk into your mind and steal your focus.
Practice this phrase, I'm in deep work mode right now.
Can we schedule time to discuss this at a proper time?
You're giving them a reason why you need to schedule a different time.
Nothing wrong with that.
Okay?
Most people will respect your boundaries once you've made it clear that they exist.
What most people don't do is, one, they don't put up a boundary,
and two, they don't make it clear that that boundary exists.
Okay?
And speaking of mental clarity and building habits that support your
transformation, if you're serious about claiming not just your focus, but your
entire approach to personal development, you need to join the community of
people who are already doing this.
With us, sign up for the Unleash Your Success DNA newsletter.
It's specifically designed for you listeners right now, folks just like you.
If you're listening this far in, it's for you.
Each week we dive deeper into mindset shifts and habit upgrades, and we keep
throwing at you those doses of rebellion to help you break free from the convention
and the mind numbness that's out there so that you can build a business and a life.
Aligned with your version of success.
Doesn't have to be my version, right?
It's your version.
And this is not just another generic self-help newsletter.
This is your weekly reminder that you weren't born to rent
out the space in your mind.
And you can find the link down in the show notes, or go ahead and go to your
success DNA and sign up right there.
Okay?
But let's, let's zoom out for a minute for Ken.
Why does this matter in the first place and why does it matter
beyond feeling less scattered?
Well.
You could say we're living through, let's call it a, uh, an attention apocalypse.
Maybe it's a little extreme, but you get what I'm going for here.
Every app, every platform, every piece of technology is literally designed
by teams of neuroscience and behavior economists whose job is to capture and
monetize your mental real estate period.
Hard stop right there.
That's how they get you.
And this isn't an accident.
Your distraction is literally their business model.
But here's the bigger paradigm shift.
The people who learn to protect and direct their mental energy will become.
The new elite, not because you're smarter, but because you'll be the only ones who
can still think clearly enough to see the opportunities that others are missing.
Yeah, because you have regained control of your own damn attention, it's yours.
Stop parsing it out.
While people everywhere are drowning in digital noise, you'll be one of
the few people that can sit quietly.
Here the signal.
You'll be the one who can think three moves ahead, four
moves ahead, five moves ahead.
Because your mind isn't so consistently reacting to every single notification,
every single scroll, every single TikTok video, whatever it is.
This is about more than productivity.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is literally about cognitive sovereignty.
This is about becoming ungovernable in your own head.
So that said, here's your Whiskered wisdom for this week.
Your attention is your autobiography.
Whatever you consistently focus on is literally writing the story
for who you're about to become.
If your attention is scattered across 17 different priorities that are not yours,
you're letting other people write your success story, write your life story, or
write your failure story, whatever it is.
But when you.
Pause and reclaim your mental real estate.
Something truly profound begins to happen.
You don't just get more done.
You become more of yourself.
You start having thoughts that are actually your thoughts.
You're like, wow, I didn't even know I could think of that.
You can, you have, you just haven't been able to hear it.
You start seeing opportunities that were always there, but
they were hidden by the noise.
They were hidden beneath the noise.
So here's your specific action for today.
Go ahead and set that timer for five minutes right after this
episode ends, and sit there.
Quiet, put your phone in and another room and just think for five minutes.
Let just let your brain wander.
We're not talking about meditating, like I said earlier.
Don't try to solve anything.
Don't try to be productive.
Just notice what thoughts bubble to the surface when you
give them the space to do it.
This isn't meditation.
This isn't even mindfulness.
I'm a big fan of mindfulness.
This is mental real estate reconnaissance.
Okay?
That's my military.
Coming out, you're surveying your own territory to see what's actually
there when the squatters leave.
Yeah.
Okay.
Are there weeds everywhere?
Did they trample all of your flowers?
I guarantee you they did.
Listen, you've been conditioned to believe that a busy mind is a
productive mind, and that my friends is corporate programming designed to
keep you reactive instead of creative.
The truth is your best ideas, your clearest insights and your most
authentic self can only emerge in the space between thoughts.
You don't need more focus techniques.
No, no, and I can give you more.
But that's not what you need.
You need to remember that your mind belongs to you, and
once you start to reclaim it, everything else becomes possible.
The world doesn't need another person who's good at responding
to other people's priorities.
That seems to be everyone else's job.
It needs you thinking your own thoughts, seeing your own vision.
And building your own path.
Your mental real estate is the foundation of everything you will ever create.
Whether you wanna create it today or you wanna create it tomorrow, and
it's time to evict all those damn squatters and remember what it feels
like to be at home in your own head.
And with that, I'm gonna leave you as I always do, think
successfully and take action.
Kick out those squatters.