Focus Training _ Grace Herman

May 10th, 2020, Doing school at home requires a lot of concentration and focus and that is hard. In an attempt to improve my focus I read an article about ways to practice focusing and will be doing the exercises for the rest of the week recording my progress. May 9th: Meditated for 8 minutes. Overall pretty focus but took a couple of minutes to zone out of the world. May 10th: Today at 11:30 I decided I would switch and practice focusing by working on memorization. I decided to memorize the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I work on memorizing the first stanza. I enjoyed it and memorized it pretty quickly. May 11th: 8:20- I work on the second stanza, my focus was moderate. Not great though. May 12th: 9:19- Very unfocused, kinda got the third stanza. May 13th: 11:30- Worked on the third stanza more focus but I found my mind wondering May 14th: 12:44- I worked on the last stanza and then repeated it a couple of times, I missed a couple of words here and there but I was the most focused today than I have been all week. May 15th: 9:21- I practiced the whole thing and have it down pretty well. One of the most focused “sessions” of the week. Ironically I found it harder to focus when I was supposed to be practicing focusing. I normally have pretty good focus, but I really was not that focused during this exercise. I didn't have much intrinsic motivation to do it. And for me even if there is extrinsic motivation without intrinsic motivation it just doesn't come out at my normal level. But now I have Robert Frost's poem memorized. Not sure what I'll use it for but I like it. Thank you for reading, Grace *Show perseverance and commitment to your project, Identify strengths and areas for growth, Challenges were undertaken showing that new skills are learned.