Do You Have Your Full Attention?

Have you ever had a conversation with someone and noticed midway that your mind is somewhere else and you have no idea what they just said? Or sat at your desk, hands on the computer keyboard and realized you’ve done nothing for the last ten minutes? Or have you ever...hello? Excuse me, are you there?

So often we allow our minds to be taken over by “unauthorized” thoughts, like a territory under foreign occupation. We live on auto-pilot, going through the motions of the day without fully enjoying or at least focusing on activities. Then, because our attention is so loosely tethered, we immediately react to external stimuli rather than making a conscious decision – responding reflexively to an email instead of concentrating on an important report. In reactive mode, we’re less grounded and more vulnerable to stress.

To achieve flow, peak performance and productivity, I work with my clients to develop and train the “attention muscle:” the ability to be keenly aware and in control of what they’re thinking, feeling and doing. Here are a few exercises, the mental equivalents of bicep curls, to beef up your focus and concentration.

Do a spot check. Develop the habit of checking in on your mind and what it’s thinking. Is it producing useful ideas for the presentation you’re preparing, or preoccupied with your friend’s snide comment last night? Probe around a bit to uncover any running commentary that might be creating anxiety – they may be so ingrained in your mental landscape that you don’t notice they’re there.

Make a “what’s on my mind” list. The best way to get things off your mind is to put them down on paper. Sometimes this alone is enough to quiet the chatter. If you still can’t stop ruminating, give yourself five minutes to scribble down all your stream-of-consciousness thoughts about a particular topic – why that snide comment annoyed you, what prompted it, how you could have responded, etc. Then tell your mind, “Okay, that’s enough for now,” and put it aside.

Determine your focus. Now that you’ve got your full attention, decide where you want to direct it by setting mini-goals. Before making a phone call or writing an email, ask yourself: “What am I trying to achieve?” or create some urgency by seeing how many slides of your presentation you can do in 30 minutes.

Train your attention to stay put. Okay, so that worked for five minutes but you keep getting distracted. First, notice when your mind wanders off and see if you can gently coax it back to the task at hand, without making a big deal of it – getting angry or critical usually doesn’t work. (Just like it didn’t when I was a child and my mother used to walk by the living room where I was (silently) practicing the piano and yell out, “Concentrate!”)

Then, narrow even further your point of focus. Make a bullet point list of what you need to say in that company-wide email. In an endless conference call or meeting? Home in on each person when they speak and see if you can, without judgment, rate the qualities in their voice such as “warmth,” “irritation,” or “interest” on a scale of one to ten.

Developing your attention muscle is an iterative process not a one-time fix. The reward is that by devoting your full attention to the moment at hand, you will be able to delve deeper and gain greater satisfaction in everything you do.