Focus is a muscle: Connor O'Leary at TEDxUIUC

so when I was asked to give this TED talk I really had to think about my topic I mean I'm not Jeff Bezos and you guys can see that I'm obviously not Sheryl Sandberg so what kind of 22 year old kid tell a smart group of people that will actually change their lives so I decided that would that I would talk on focus not because I can change your lives but because focus has actually saved mine focus is a muscle standing here looking out at all of you a lot of you look pretty comfortable and I can see some of you sitting with your arms folded so try this for me you have a natural way that your arms fold everyone fold their arms okay now unfold them and try folding them with the opposite arm on top you have to think about ad Lu it's harder than you would have guessed it takes a little focus but if you decide that you're going to start crossing your arms with the opposite arm on top pretty soon it won't take any effort at all and that's because you will strengthen your focus muscle when I was little I loved riding my bike walking seemed like a waste of time when all I had to do was hop on my freedom machine and I didn't know it at the time but cycling would ultimately become my passion and the singular focus of my time and energy now I began racing bikes when I was 13 and I immediately fell in love with the sport and I quickly worked my way up the cycling ladder going from the junior national team to the u23 national team and ultimately racing for the best professional development cycling team in the world and as I progressed in the sport my days were filled with hours and hours of training I usually spent between 4 to 6 hours in the saddle a day I had to concentrate on not only riding but eating well my nutrition resting I know that sounds really hard and an overall focus on improving my performance and that doesn't even include the races themselves well my high school friends would be out living it up I had to make myself get in bed at a decent hour so that I could wake up early go down to the basement and ride for a few hours before school started at 7:30 all my friends would go out to a movie and they'd bring this big bag of candy and I never ate it well I almost never ate it because that I knew that if I did I was going to field on my ride the next day now it sounds pretty extreme and to be honest it is that's because you have to be focused every second year in a bike race let me paint you a picture this is you in the saddle you're riding down this steep narrow road at over 60 miles per hour on tires that are 23 millimeters wide that's about the width of your thumb and it's not like you're on an awesome newly paved road the ground is full of unknown obstacles there's rocks potholes gravel and occasionally wildlife you guys may think squirrels are harmless but you really have no idea and it's not like you're alone there could be as many as 200 other riders all just riding inches away from each other and we haven't even factored in the weather if you lose focus for even one second in this race you could not only potentially harm or kill yourself but others in the peloton it was necessity that forced me to hone my focus muscle for these races and so I worked and worked at it for years and little did I know that my ability to focus would not only help me in my cycling career but it would ultimately end up saving my life I was 19 years old and I was racing with the US national team in Europe and everything was great our team is doing really well and I was living in Belgium I mean how could things not be great but I had this nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right and I thought to myself it's probably just the intense race schedule wearing me down and so I brushed it off but ultimately I did end up going to the doctor and the last thing on earth I expected to hear was you have cancer there's something that happens when you get news like that it's like your heart stops pumping blood for a second making your blood freeze in place making your entire body feel like it's completely dead just for a split second you go numb and then it hits you your new reality is cancer a word so foreign you have no idea where to even start now I really felt like my body had betrayed me for seven years I focused on training well eating well putting all this time and enduring all of this pain I had focused on being healthy and fit and at first I was determined to keep training to do it have been working for me for so many years but not long after I started my treatment I felt like I couldn't think at all never mind focusing on racing training or even getting strong I mean I could not focus on anything but I was determined that cancer wasn't going to change me so I tried to keep going with school with racing and with getting well the days really did seem never-ending for seven hours a day five days a week I set tethered to this chair in the infusion room at the Huntsman Cancer Center while I watched the chemo drip through my veins through this port that I had surgically implanted into my chest I desperately tried to hang on to that awesome life that I had had just five months earlier but my focus was diminishing I was chemo and cancer had really robbed me of my ability to focus which is sometimes known as chemo brain and I learned that if I was going to get better if I was going to beat this disease I needed to identify the essential and eliminate the rest so that's exactly what I did I stopped riding my body is really becoming too weak anyways I dropped all my classes that semester and I focused all of my time and energy onto one thing beating cancer and eventually my treatment was almost over and it was like this hallelujah moment I could see the end of the road it was my second to last round of chemotherapy and I started to experience this really crazy pain in my left collarbone it was kind of a dull pain and it was not something I had never experienced before but trust me I did I had been experiencing a lot of new pains that year and so I brushed it off as another indication that the chemo was probably just doing its thing but then a few hours later that pain moved from my collarbone into my chest and shoulder blade and at that point I was like okay what's going on but again I self diagnosed it whew claiming that I must have pulled a muscle or that it was just another reaction to the chemo drugs but that night that pain moved from those other places to my back in my rib cage and I literally felt like I had been shot now I've never actually been shot but I'm assuming that it feels something like that it literally felt like I've broken every rib I had so that night I remember sleeping in this chair in my parents living room and I scoured the entire house for any painkiller I could find the pain was absolutely excruciating I couldn't drink eat sleep or even lay down the pain was so bad in the next morning my parents came into the living room and saw me sitting in that chair and at that point they knew they needed to get me to the ER so they rushed me to the ER and at that point I was literally on the verge of passing out my pain level was through the roof and my heart was racing out of control in the ER the doctor came in and he told me Connor you're lucky to be alive he explained me that I had pulmonary emboli which are basically big blood clots and that they had exploded in my lungs like hand grenades and that I still had one large clot hanging off of that port in my heart and that they were still extremely worried that it could break loose and go to my brain and trust me we definitely did not want that so I spent the next week or so lying in a hospital bed coughing up blood well the blood thinners ran through my veins trying to break down those clots hands down it was one of the scariest experiences of my life but ultimately I was released I was able to go home and I was able to finish those last few rounds of chemotherapy now it wasn't until I got home from the hospital that I realized it was my focus that I had to thank for being alive it was those sometimes endless thankless cold terrible hot days of training that it served an even greater purpose than a spot on the podium it was my focus that saved my life now eventually after my chemo and my blood clots I was able to get back on the bike and I was able to start really training again and eventually I did get back to the top of the sport but before that when the when the chemo draw the chemo and the blood clots were over I was starting from Ground Zero and I knew that I couldn't just start riding immediately so I focused on the lowest impact sport I could possibly think of which at the time was swimming and I remember going to the local community pool and it must have been seniors night out or seniors get half off because the place is absolutely crawling with bald-headed old guys and I'm not going to lie I fit right in so at the pool they had this kind of resistance track where you walk against the current and so I decided okay I'm going to start there so I hopped in and started walking against the current and I quickly realized that I was getting lapped by a 90 year old man not 1990 granted he was a really fit 9 year old but I remember thinking to myself man this is what I've become I went from being an elite level athlete to now getting lapped in a community pool by a bunch of old people I'm not going to like crush my soul but I remembered that focus is a muscle and it has memory muscle memory although my body wasn't cooperating my mind hadn't forgotten all of my cycling and training and I could still remember those stories that I would tell myself when I'm really hurting in a race it is key to compartmentalize I can't think of the big picture in the moment so if I'm on this climb with ten kilometers to go I'm thinking of the challenge or in this case the climb in the smallest increments possible I focus on 30 seconds I tell myself okay Connor you can do anything for 30 seconds and then I tell myself that same thing 30 seconds later and I do this again and again and again until ultimately I'm at the top of that climb I've learned through cycling that our minds really do tend to give out before our bodies and focus is about being able to tell ourselves the story whatever story that may be now like I said I was altima be able to get back on the bike really start training and get back to the top of the sport and I didn't know it at the time but I had one more big race ahead of me now anybody who knows knows me knows that I love traveling and I love exploring and so when I heard that CBS was accepting applications for The Amazing Race I knew there was no question I had to apply so I grabbed my dad we went into the garage and we shot this quick five-minute application video and then before I knew it less than six months later there we are lined up on the start line ready to go with ten other teams on a race around the world now anybody who has seen the race or has watched a few episodes knows that you have to read the clue the entire clue those that don't usually get eliminated quickly so there my dad and I are we're on the second leg somehow we're in the lead and we're in Bora Bora so we whip that clue open and we take off headed to dive for pearls so we get to the dive location and we realize we don't have our dive bags which we needed for the dive challenge we hadn't read the entire clue and we hadn't followed the rule that we set for ourselves before the race even began which was to read the clue slowly thoroughly and focus on what the clue actually said but instead of letting ourselves get distracted by our huge stupid mistake we knew we had to refocus and get on bed and get back on track immediately so that's exactly what we did you have to be able to adapt on the Amazing Race there are so many variables that can really hinder your ability to focus just like everyday life instead in this case you have a camera in your face you're very sleep-deprived you're in who-knows-where and you're racing for a million dollars so like I said you have to be able to adapt but focus isn't just about being singular in mind like I said it's about adaptability and if you learned how to focus when you need to change directions in your live life's you will do so much easier and quicker if you strengthen this mental muscle now even though you may never be a professional cyclist and I hope that you never have to go through cancer and I really wish that you could all go on the Amazing Race but even if that doesn't happen for you whatever you decide to do in your life you will do a better because you've learned how to focus and you never know it might just save you one day thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 328,529

Keywords: tedx, ted talk, tedx talks, ted, TEDx, ted talks, ted x, tedx talk

Id: hURIav09gXY

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 18 2014