A ‘Kwik’ Productivity Hack – Changing Nouns to Verbs

I’ve recently discovered Jim Kwik, a leading expert in optimal brain performance, and a truly fascinating and knowledgeable guy.

I’ve been listening to his podcast, ‘Kwik Brain’, which manages to be insightful and useful despite a listening time of under 20 minutes. Score!

Don’t believe me? Here’s a tip from his podcast, ‘134: How to Use Your Power to Get What You Want,’ and it’s one that I managed to take in and actually apply straight away.

He talked about how people want to feel when they wake up; the states that we need to be in, in order to do what we need to do. i.e. I need to feel focused tomorrow, because I’ve got a lot of work to get through and some of it is quite complicated.

Kwik suggests that here, we can change or nouns into verbs, and focus on the doing rather than the having.

Switch ‘how can I have focus?’ to ‘how can I ‘do’ focus?

Switch ‘how can I have energy?’ to ‘how can I ‘do’ energy?

Switch ‘how can I have creativity?’ to ‘how can I ‘do’ creativity?

When we ask, ‘how can I have focus?’ for example, we’re passive and reactive. We’re ‘waiting’ for focus to happen. As if by magic.

Actually though, we very likely have some idea of how we can create focus – of how we can ‘do’ focus.

So by focusing on ‘doing’ focus, rather than having it, we can switch from a passive to pro-active state. We can create the states that we need, in order to accomplish what we need to.

Though my inner-teacher is tutting wildly about the incorrect use of grammar, I’ll let it go – because this simple little swap got me to get off my backside and exercise first-thing this morning, all in the interest of ‘doing’ focus.

It also got me to meditate, reflect on my life goals, write in my gratitude diary and give 5 minutes to NLP visualisation.

Why? Because that’s how I do focus. And motivation. And bold. And creativity.