How to Enhance Cognitive Focus so You Can Think and Talk at the Same Time

Do you ever get into a situation where you are explaining something and you lose focus on what it is you are talking about?

Perhaps you struggle to express your ideas or opinions at work or find it difficult to make a fluent presentation. Maybe you can’t quite get to the end of explaining an event to friends and family because you lose track of the structure of your story.

These experiences are very common and can be quite embarrassing. In a work setting. They can even hamper your career.

Do you know that you can improve this by improving your cognitive FOCUS?

Keep reading to find out how to improve focus when speaking.

What Is Cognitive Focus?

Cognitive focus is the ability to direct your attention to a particular idea and expand on it over an extended period of time.

There are a number of factors that affect cognitive focus. These include the complexity of the information being communicated, how familiar you are with the content and your mood. If you are interested in what you are talking about it is much easier to focus.

You might remember in school when the teacher explained a maths concept to the class. You might have followed along for a while, but at a certain point, you started to think about something else. You lost focus. This loss of focus affected your ability to understand the concept fully at the time.

To be able to understand or talk about something clearly, it needs to be kept firmly in the centre of our attention.

If we can do that, then the words we use to talk about that thing come naturally. If we are struggling with fluency in a presentation it’s usually because we are not focused on what it is we are explaining.

How to Think and Talk at the Same Time

The brain is malleable and has the capacity for adaptive change. It has learned complex processing by applying and expanding basic processes that are in play for simple tasks.

If you can improve your brain’s basic ability to maintain focus, it will automatically improve your ability to manage increasingly complex tasks.

If you do exercises to improve your attention span and focus, this will impact your ability to speak more fluently when thinking on your feet.

Simple Exercises for Complex Problems

There are a number of activities specifically designed to improve your capacity to focus where you need to repeatedly engage your brain to perform increasingly complex processes. . These activities are designed to strengthen your neural pathways.

For example, repeatedly doing symbol relations exercises will train your brain to be more focused when dealing with complex problems.

Likewise, doing memory exercises will improve your brain’s capacity to quickly focus on the thing you are remembering.

Hopefully, you now understand the importance of cognitive focus and how you might improve this. Thinking and talking on your feet will get easier through improving your cognitive focus.