Pay attention to Attention – it pays off!

Welcome to a blog all about attention. Leaders and entrepreneurs face near-constant challenges: distractions, stress, overwork, and striving to succeed. The ability to use and direct your attention will increase your effectiveness, productivity and resilience. It is the “meta-skill” that will help you to put all of your other skills to optimal use.

In this blog, I’ll be discussing various ways to master your attention, suggesting practical exercises, and explaining how and why a particular practice can be used to address the challenges you face.

As a professional coach and educator with decades of experience, I know a lot about how people learn and change. I’m going to keep the theory simple and the practices short. From coaching hundreds of leaders and entrepreneurs, I know just how precious and scarce your time is. I want you to get the most return on every minute that you spend on my blog.

The concept of mindfulness has come a long way in the last 50 years. What was once considered woo-woo hippie nonsense is now a standard topic in business magazines. At the same time, the concept of mindfulness is still a bit fuzzy. That’s why, in this blog, I’ll be refering more to the art of paying attention, and more specifically, mastery of one’s attention.

Mastery over one’s attention means that we’re aware of what we’re paying attention to, we know the quality of the attention that we’re brining to it, and we’re aware of the impact of paying attention to it in that way.

So to be mindful simply means to know where your attention is at any moment. If you don’t know where your attention is, then you can be said to be mindlessly going along on auto-pilot.

Leaders and entrepreneurs, like everybody else, are constantly paying attention to hundreds of different things: email, social media, employees, clients, the bottom line, expenses, shareholders, news coverage, and so on and so on.

The problems arise when they’re paying attention to the wrong things, or not paying enough attention to certain other things. And they aren’t aware of it.

A classic example is paying attention to a rumination, a train of thought that just goes around in cicles, usually about some imagined future catastrophe. We humans can easily waste hundreds of hours paying attention to those ruminative thoughts, negatively impacting our quality of life.

When we become aware of how much time and attention we’re wasting on rumination, and we try to stop, we find that we have almost no control – the ruminative thoughts just keep coming and we can’t turn our attention away from them.

That’s where these pratices can pay off. Through engaging in these practices, we start to gain control over our attention. A whole new skillset is acquired. Now, we can consciously CHOOSE to direct our attention to something else, whether that be our loved ones, the taste of our food, or creating a plan of action.

The key is that we’re now ABLE to redirect our attention, something we simply couldn’t do before.

The research on the positive impact of mindfulness practice is solid and conclusive: it improves our quality of life. And who wouldn’t want even a small improvement in their quality of life.

You can start right now, if you like. You can ask yourself, what am I paying attention to right now? Part if it will be on this blog post, but it’s likely that something else is vying for your attention. Just notice that. That’s today’s practice: asking yourself multiple times throughout the day, what am I paying attention to. There’s no wrong answer to that question, by the way. The goal of the practice is just to know, to be aware, “oh, my attention is on THIS…ok.”

It’s a really simple exercise, but the real challenge will be to remember to do it! I’d suggest maybe setting a reminder to check in with you attention on your smart phone, or else choose a regular activity, like mealtime, and check where your attention is then, so you do it three times a day.

Check back here regularly for more practices that will strengthen the “muscle” I’m calling mastery over your attention.

Let’s start with a simple concept: if you’re reading this, you’re conscious, and if you’re conscious, you’re paying attention to SOMETHING.

Wherever your attention is, that’s making up a large part of what you’re experiencing. If, while you’re reading this, a fire alarm goes off, your attention will be yanked away from the words in front of your eyes to the sound of the alarm and thoughts about what needs to be done next.

As a result of your attention moving, your experience will change. One minute you’re peacefully reading a blog post, the next you’re planning your exit from the building. But let’s say you decide to quickly finish reading this blog post before heading to the fire exit. Now, your attention is going to be divided. You’ll still see the words, and you’ll also hear the alarm, and you’ll also be planning your exit. Your attention will be partly on each of them. Perfectly normal.

So what SHOULD you pay attention to? That depends on what you’re doing and what your goals are. If you’re playing a sport, you could pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent or to your body’s changing energy level. If you’re meeting with an important client, you could pay attention to their facial expressions, their tone of voice, or their choice of words. If you’re taking a shower, you could pay attention to the sensations of the water or the smells of the products you’re using.

The point I’m making is that what matters is that you be aware of what you’re paying attention to. And that you make sure that it’s where you’re choosing to place your attention.

You can learn to gain control over your attention through deliberate practice. That’s the aim of this blog: to suggest various ways that you can practice working with your attention, to gain control and eventually mastery over it.

I’ll be suggesting many different things that you can pay attention to, including self-talk, pposture, breath, the body, other people, sights, sounds and sensations. They’re all good to learn to pay attention to. Some will work well for. Other won’t work at all. No problem. Keep the ones that work.

What you pay attention to matters in two very important ways. Firstly, it makes actual changes in the physiology of your brain, making certain pathways stronger and faster. Secondly, it directly affects the quality of your experience, which is to say, your life. Not a trivial matter.

Through deliberate practice, you’ll start to gain a lot more control over your attention. The benefits of that, if you stick with it, will be a real increase in your well-being, lower stress, better listening and communication, better relationships and better health. If that sounds like something you’d like, then please join me on this adventure!

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!

Deliberate practice is the most effective way to develop mastery in any domain. It is quite different from regular or ordinary practice, which is really just repetition. That has its place, for example a theatre company rehearsing a play. But it’s really sub-optimal for learning, growing and development.

In ordinary practice, the focus is on what you already know, or how you already perform an action. The aim is just to repeat it often enough that it becomes automatic. The problem with that is that unless the skill you’re practicing is already close to perfect or as good as you’ll ever be, then what you’ll be making automatic is a level of performance that’s less than what you’re capable of.

Deliberate practice, on the other hand, is all about improving, optimizing, and going BEYOND your current “best”.

Shane Parrish, in his excellent blog, Farnham Street, identifies the characteristics of deliberate practice, which include:

• it is structured and methodical
• it is challenging and uncomfortable
• it requires rest and recovery time
• it involves constant feedback and measurement
• it is most effective with the help of a coach
• it requires intrinsic motivation
• it takes time and can be a lifelong process
• it requires intense focus
• it leverages the spacing effect

My goal for this blog is to help leaders and entrepreneurs use the power of deliberate practice to develop mastery over their attention. I believe a focus on deliberate practice will prove the most effective way of doing that.