Don’t just pay attention, monitor where your attention is going.
While monitoring your attention is ONLY a starting point, it’s important to start. It’s easy to get stuck just allowing life to happen around you and reacting to it unconsciously. Perhaps more so in the age of social media where your attention is captured and held by the constantly changing shiny balls.This past week Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about how your data (where your attention is going) allows companies to, perhaps, understand you better than you understand yourself. Time to reverse this trend!?
While this week’s podcast episode is focusing on what makes noticing where your attention goes and corralling it to your own benefit significant, this blog post and the week’s newsletter focus more on the importance of harnessing your attention: the unconscious and the intentional. Treat your attention like money – it’s a type of currency – and invest it wisely EVERY day.
Unconscious Attention
If you’ve read Kahneman’s book – Thinking Fast and Slow – or you’ve been exposed to the research he did with the late Taversky, you’ll understand when I reference system 1 and system 2. Is this reminding you of the a favourite Dr. Seuss book and his Thing-1 and Thing-2? You’re not alone – that was my first thought when reading the book and seeking to apply some of the lessons OR maybe this dates my childhood to the 60’s!
Unconscious attention is driven by system 1; the fast and instinctual drivers of your daily life. This is a critical part of surviving at any time AND perhaps understanding it is most important in today’s world. However, refusing to take stock and inform this part of your brain could take you into attention bankruptcy. That’s why you have a system 2, which I explore below.
I’m suggesting that you value both systems in your brain. Your ability to respond instinctively reading a situation and adjusting appropriately supports your decision making skills (system 1). Your ability to build healthy habits (system 2) that reduce your need to concentrate and expend excessive energy by then transferring the insights into system 1, increases your efficiency and capacity. Honing your thinking processes to assess and evaluate the efficacy of your daily habits and project the impact they’ll have on your future (system 2) is essential to building a successful career and life.
The Shiny Balls
What’s your attention span like? Have you ever been so caught up in a project or book that you lost time? When you finally come up for air, you felt accomplished and exhausted in a thrilling way. In this deep focus, you were able to ward off the call from the shiny ball. Have you ever finished a day and you couldn’t describe what you did? It felt as though you were meandering through a bunch of different tasks without direction. This may be evidence of shiny ball syndrome. When you’re reacting to everything, you’re unable to focus on anything. This is the attention span of a child.
Here’s the interesting part of it. Children learn at significantly higher rates than adults do EVEN while suffering, or perhaps in part because of, their limited attention spans. However, this isn’t conscious thoughtful learning. It’s proximity learning. They learn what they see, hear and feel around them. This is learning driven largely by the system 1 processing. When children are taught to manage and harness their attention, the next level of learning becomes possible. If you haven’t learned how to assess the lessons learned through system 2 processing, you’ll continue be lead around by the shiniest object in your life. That’s not a free life; that’s not making choices and decisions for yourself.
Only by learning skills to pay attention will you be capable of seeing and ignoring the shining object. Only THEN will you be the captain of your own ship.
My First Pet and What She Taught Me
My first pet was a Quarter Horse/Thoroughbred mix who measured over 16.2 hands high. Surprised at the age of 7 when my father, while visiting an old friend who owned a ranch and was packing it up to move to British Columbia, bought me this 7 year old mare. If you know the measure of hands, you realize she is far too much horse for a small child. All the way home I lay on the back ledge of the car (no seat belt rules then) watching her in the horse trailer, frankly wishing, after begging, to ride in the trailer with her. See my Instagram feed where I share more of this story.
This beautiful gray mare was the pride of my childhood AND I loved riding her at top speeds through the back hills behind our house. She had been well trained by the Rancher. Neck-reined and harness trained, she could run like the wind and cut the sharpest corners; I remember once, when pushing her to perform, when my short little legs literally rubbed the ground as she was cutting corners sharply at my command. It was thrilling! She was VERY spirited too! Early on, my father was advised to put blinders, usually reserved for a horse harnessed to a wagon, on her for my safety.
Loving my spirited horse, I refused the blinders; I thought it would impair her. She would sometimes resist me which just tested the grit of our respective wills, which was energizing. Rather than limiting her with the blinders, I believed it was my responsibility to figure out how to navigate her in the direction I wanted to go without breaking her spirit.
I feel the same for my attention. How about you? Willing to release your attention while learning to harness its energy productively?
Intentional Attention
Being intentional with your attention takes effort. Cognitive effort is something human beings have learned to avoid. Why? Well it seems that our brains are wired to preserve this capacity and it turns out we do have limits, which is why system 1 is our default way of being. System 2 requires so much more of you AND it is the mechanism to help you train system 1; this means you need to employ it wisely.
System 2 is the part of your brain used when learning something new. Think about the last time you decided to do something that required you to really concentrate. It’s tough. Even as I’m writing this I’m thinking of recent, often involving technical skills, projects that have demanded this type of concentration. As I look back on the first 2-3 months of employing these new skills, I recall how much effort it took. NOW, my system 1 kicks in and the process is seamless.
Want to take your career to another level? Do you want to win that big contract or promotion or new job? You need to work NOW to build the necessary skills. Whether you need to build communication, resilience, or self-regulation skills, they’re transferable to EVERY position or engagement in your future. Building them, at first, will take effort and focus – attention – but it will pay-off.
System 2 allows you to train your brain by firing the necessary synapses (paying attention) and connecting pathways in your brain so eventually they wire together seamlessly allowing you to perform the necessary skills to deliver with consistent excellence when system 1 calls them up.
While Learning to Drive
In the corresponding podcast episode I tell the story about learning to drive and the lesson my drivers’ education teacher taught me.
Learning about how distractions can impact performance in this episode has a second application to this theme of attention. When you were learning to drive, didn’t it require all of your system 2 processing? It was stressful and if you grew up around ice and snow the way I did it may have taken you a while to get comfortable managing an out of control car or truck; that’s why I was so happy to learn and mostly drive 5-speed standard transmission vehicles because I believe I had more options. BUT, I had to learn how to deploy these options until they became second nature.
Second nature is when learning is transferred from system 2 to system 1 application. Think about a time when you drove somewhere you go often – to work or a friend’s house – and you arrived there without being able to remember the journey but the song on the radio continued to invade your consciousness. That’s because you were performing out of habit; you were enjoying the benefits of system 1 processing. If you drove in winter conditions regularly you learned to instinctively turn into a skid and, before anti-lock breaking became standard, to pump your brakes and gear down.
Now, think of the last time you drove in a new city or even country, perhaps where they drive on the wrong side of the road even. Did you have to pay attention and operate in your system 2 processing? Of course you did. Learning where your attention is taking you before allowing your system 1 to kick-in IS what I do with my clients. Becoming conscious of where your attention is going AND building the skills and traits in yourself that help you get where you WANT to go is my goal. What’s yours?
Perspective: The Gift of Visualization
Paying attention, as the story about my horse suggests, is about maintaining access to a full range of views. You lose perspective if you need to use blinders to move forward. Are you cutting off possible options and opportunities? You don’t need to make that sacrifice. Instead learn how to visualize where you want to go and find the path that takes you there. Learn to notice the world rushing by on every side without letting it distract you AND without missing the lessons or warnings the rushing world is teaching along the way.
In life you can’t always literally see in front of you the vision you want for your future. Visualization techniques can help you imagine what you want and using this technique can help you find your path to create it. Einstein was clear when declaring that imagination is more significant than knowledge because it allowed access to the entire world.
Re-Framing: Context
Framing and re-framing what you are seeing, experiencing and feeling is part of embedding the learning consciously. Using system 2 processing skills, you can adjust habits that are currently holding you back from the life you want to learn. Like driving in a new country when you pay attention to what you want AND can re-frame your current system 1 reactions and habits, you have a chance to make the shift to create the life you really want.
I will meet you where you are and walk with you to build the new frame and the perspective and vision that you consciously choose AND together we’ll build a path to get there.
How We Can Walk together…
Your attention is currency; invest it wisely. Listening to my signature story – available on the player below OR you can click over on my website – you’ll hear me struggle with squandering it in my BIG WHY Story on the services pages. Being conscious of where your attention is going is a life skill that you’ll find supports a progressive, consistently growing, career. When you hand over control of your attention to outside forces you surrender a big part of yourself. While my signature story suggests I refused to do that, I’ll offer that my intentional attention was far too extreme.
Need to get unstuck in your career? Together, we’ll find a path that works for you.
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Once you have the skills to unpack the emotions and barriers and triggers and mindset challenges with the skills in my system, you’ll begin to see the impact in your career and you’ll find what matters most to you.
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