Leaders, Entrepreneurs and everyone who’s interested (drum roll)

Welcome to the FIRST PRACTICE!! (hopefully, the first of many, many practices)

Since my goal is to introduce a different practice every week, I’ll be suggesting that you do the attention-training practice for a period of one week. If you like it and want to continue practicing it for another week, or two, or twenty, that’s entirely up to you.

For this week’s practice, we’ll be training our attention to notice our and other people’s complaining. Complaining is a common practice (some would say ubiquitous) but few people realize just how much complaining they do.

I believe this will be a good first practice for many people. Paying attention to complaining will quickly reveal how much of it we and others do it (and usually, we do it mindlessly).

We complain about the weather, the price of groceries, our leaders, taxes, airlines or the guy down the hall. It can even become a way of establishing rapport with another person – if they complain about the weather, we join in that complaining, and now we have a kind of connection.

So, for the next week, I encourage you to be on lookout for complaining. Yours and that of others. Notice how often you complain. Notice how often your partner, your friends, your coworkers, and your employees complain. You may be shocked!

I also encourage you to notice how the very act of complaining affects how you feel and your outlook on things. If you’re like most people, you’ll find that the impact is fairly negative and quite pervasive.

If you want to turn it up a notch and make this a REALLY challenging practice, you could try noticing every time you’re ABOUT TO complain, then choose NOT TO!

There you have it – the first attention-training practice for you to try. I’d love to hear how it goes for you, in the comments.

Thanks for dropping by!