Influence in Action Page 5
AWARENESS
For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN
DISCIPLINED AWARENESS
Learning to Control Your Beam of Attention
Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in all its varieties represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN
If, like Steve, you want to take action, have influence, and make a difference, there’s a foundational ability you need to cultivate. Nurses use it to lessen anxiety and enhance their coping skills. Patients use it to reduce the impact of chronic pain and to maintain a positive state of mind during treatment. Pilots use it to improve their communication and decision making in a crisis. Soldiers use it to boost their energy and reaction time in combat, and to guard against post-traumatic stress disorder. Police officers use it to remain clearheaded in high-pressure situations. Teachers use it to more effectively deal with difficult students, parents, administrators, and faculty. Firefighters use it to build their resilience and reduce stress and anxiety. Athletes use it to reach peak performance. You can use it to make your mind more focused and resilient, to reduce pain and stress, and to build your conversational capacity.
What wields such impressive power? Mindful awareness.
It’s clear that mindful awareness isn’t screwball, foo-foo nonsense. It’s being used to improve the performance of people in a variety of high-stress roles. Mindful awareness is mainstream.
But what is it? Mindful awareness is often explained as the ability to notice what’s happening in the moment—both around you and within you—but it’s more than that. When you’re mindfully aware, you’re not just noticing stuff— you’re noticing that you’re noticing. As one researcher puts it, it’s “the intentional use of attention.”1 You’re not just aware, you’re consciously attending to and directing your awareness. You’re paying attention, in other words, to how you’re paying attention.
When you’re mindfully aware, you’re not just noticing stuff—you’re noticing that you’re noticing.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the importance of building your mindful awareness—the ability to willfully direct and concentrate your attention on the subject of your choosing—a bedrock skill that provides a base for all the other competencies you’ll be cultivating. With high mindful awareness, you have the mental discipline to choose the subject of your attention and to hold that focus until you choose to focus elsewhere. The important concepts here are discipline and choice. You are making conscious, deliberate decisions about where to focus your attention and how long to hold it there.
With high mindful awareness, you have the mental discipline to choose the subject of your attention and to hold that focus until you choose to focus elsewhere.
This seems like an obvious and easy thing to do, but to appreciate how deceptively difficult it is, try this simple experiment: After setting a timer for two minutes, focus on a single spot in front of you—a doorknob, a light switch, the number 6 on a clock—and hold your focus on that spot with full concentration without letting your mind wander. If your attention drifts (and trust me, it will) to your thoughts, an itch, or noises, simply notice your attention has drifted and refocus on your object. It’s only two minutes, right? How hard can it be?
It turns out that for most beginners, this task is extremely challenging. I’ve heard people refer to it as painful or torturous. Even in this brief two-minute exercise it becomes obvious your mind doesn’t like being told what to do. Rather than remain focused on one spot, it prefers—like a spider monkey on crystal meth—to bounce from thought to thought, and from object to object, in madcap and erratic ways.
Mindful awareness, then, is the ability to choose what you focus on, and to stay focused on it. It’s an important skill. If you lack this ability, your “monkey mind” jumps around wildly as your untethered thoughts leap from branch to branch on the tree of awareness, never resting long in one place. You may want to focus on an object, but your simian awareness has other ideas, and it’s used to doing as it damned well pleases.
I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Once you begin paying attention to how hard it is to pay attention, you quickly realize you’re up against a formidable challenge. You’re trying to focus on a financial report to prepare for your weekly Friday meeting, but your mind wants to think about the upcoming weekend. You want to focus on what your friend is talking about at lunch, but your mind prefers the game on the television behind the bar. You need to be focused on the busy road on which you’re cycling, but your mind insists on considering the busy day ahead.
It gets worse. You’re so accustomed to it, you usually don’t even recognize that your mind is running around like a five-year-old in a toy store. It just seems normal. A door slams, someone bursts into laughter, or the smell of tacos from the restaurant across the street hits your nose, and boom, your attention flies off the object on which you were previously focused. The harsh reality is that you rarely make deliberate choices about where your mind focuses because, quite frankly, your mind has a mind of its own.2 It’s no wonder that learning to halt all this mental drifting takes a lot of practice.
Your Beam of Attention
Here’s a big part of the problem. You can’t pay attention to everything going on around you because you have such a narrow beam of conscious awareness. We all experience life through the perceptual equivalent of a paper towel tube. Take, for example, your focus on these words. You are noticing the page, the font, the contrast between the letters and the paper. Now move your beam of focus and place it on one of your fingernails for a few seconds. Done? Now move it to something across the room—a cup sitting on a table or a doorknob—and, as you do, pay attention to the act of intentionally moving your beam.
Did you “see” it move? Did you sense that narrow area of focus you’re able to consciously direct? That is the key: learning to notice, direct, and hold this beam of awareness at will. Your ability to do this is the measure of your mindful awareness.3
Now try something different. Shift your focus to your breathing and hold it there for a minute. Notice the air moving in and out, in and out, in and out. Don’t feel frustrated or discouraged if other thoughts intrude—it’s natural; just notice them as quickly and neutrally as you can and refocus on your breathing.
As you do this, observe how the things that fall outside of your beam of focus disappear into your peripheral vision (peripheral experience is a more accurate term). Said differently, anything outside of your beam is, by definition, out of focus.
Done? Okay, now redirect your beam to a sound—a bird chirping in the yard or the hum of the dishwasher. Keep your beam locked onto the noise, and, when it drifts to other objects or uninvited thoughts, calmly notice the drift and return your beam to the sound.
. . . the faculty of bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgment, character, and will. No one is [a master of himself] if he has it not.
—WILLIAM JAMES
Internal Focus
There’s yet another nifty aspect of your beam: You can direct it inward. Try it. Take your beam and move it internally. What are you feeling? Are you tired? Alert? A little stressed? Annoyed that I’m asking you to do all this?
Now as you notice all these things, also notice that you’re noticing. You’re aware of your beam of consciousness and you’re directing it deliberately. This, again, is the big difference between awareness and mindful awareness. I ca
n be vaguely aware of the smell of pizza wafting in from the kitchen, but not be aware of my awareness. I smell it, but I’m not focused on the smell. “That pizza smells good,” says a friend, and then, suddenly, I’m not just aware of the smell. I’m aware I’m aware. The smell of pizza suddenly snaps into focus as my beam locks onto it.
Disciplined Awareness
Given that people with high mindful awareness are able to make more deliberate choices about where to focus their beam, and then to sustain that focus despite internal and external distractions, disciplined awareness is a more accurate term. With disciplined awareness you’re able to tame your “monkey mind” and stay locked onto an issue in a more deliberate and sustained way. With undisciplined awareness, on the other hand, your beam of attention bounces around willy-nilly, from one thing to another.
Why Is It so Important?
The ability to direct your beam at will is a powerful competence for several reasons.
It’s Transformational
Mindful awareness transforms your experience. This stands out in one of my passions in life: trail running. When I run without a mindful focus (most easily accomplished by listening to music), my immediate experience largely disappears. I’m out of touch with my breathing, my heart rate, my pace, and my energy level. At the same time, the outside world fades away as I focus on what I need to do after the run, my next trip, an upcoming call with my editor, or a thousand other monkey-mind thoughts. The trail becomes such a hazy, abstract thing that after my run I can’t remember entire sections of my route. But that really shouldn’t be a surprise. I really wasn’t there. My mind wasn’t on the trail much at all.
I no longer listen to music when I run. Instead, I’ve adopted the practice of meditative running.4 Learning to remain mindful transforms my experience of the trail. My worlds, both inner and outer, suddenly snap into sharper focus. I’m keenly aware of my breathing, the feel of my feet on the uneven ground, the cool wind on my face, the smell of the blooming sage, the cirrus clouds in the sky, the color of the rocks on the trail, the call of a meadowlark, and the joyous meanderings of my dog, Harley, as she runs ahead of me up the hill. What’s more, when the run is over, I feel more refreshed, clear-headed, and upbeat.
I experience this same contrast in meetings. When I’m mindless, I retreat into my head—drifting along aimlessly in a steady stream of chaotic thoughts—and the meeting dissolves away. After the meeting I can’t recall much of what was discussed or decided because, physically present but mentally absent, I really wasn’t there. But with a mindful focus the conversations snap into sharp relief. I see more clearly both my own behavior and the behavior of others. Fully in the meeting, I’m better at recognizing when the way we’re talking together and the reason we’re talking together are out of alignment, so I’m able to participate in a more intentional and constructive way.
It Elevates Your Self-Awareness
You’re able to observe your behavior from an elevated place of awareness as if you’re up on the balcony. You’re also able to watch your own thoughts and actions as if they are actors down on a stage. In their book, The Mind & The Brain, Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley write that “. . . through mindful awareness, you can stand outside your own mind as if you were watching what is happening to another rather than experiencing it yourself.” Someone with high mindful awareness, they continue, “views his thoughts, feelings, and expectations much as a scientist views experimental data—that is, as natural phenomenon to be noted, investigated, reflected on, and learned from. Viewing one’s own inner experience as data allows the meditator to become in essence his own experimental subject.”5
It Exercises Your “Cold Brain”
Disciplined awareness also helps you build your conversational capacity because it exercises your “cold brain.” What does that mean? It turns out that there are two parts of your brain: the “hot brain” and the “cold brain.” The emotional hot part is the older, deeper, more reactive part of the brain from which your potent emotional fight-or-flight responses emanate. The more rational cold part of your brain, newer and centered in your neocortex, is where your goal-oriented, self-disciplined behavior springs. When these two parts of the brain work against each other, they render you dumber and more incompetent. Why? When your emotional hot brain overrides your cold brain, your behavior and your intentions swiftly part ways. This explains Daniel Goleman’s observation that “out of control emotions can make smart people stupid.”6
It was the clash of the hot and cold regions of my brain, in fact, that produced the intentional conflict I described at the beginning of my first book Conversational Capacity.* When I saw my friend on the playground, in the grips of a seizure and being abused by a group of older kids, my strategic cold brain told me to “help out and speak up.” But the defensive hot part of my brain told me to “watch out and shut up.” Because the hot brain is older, faster, and more emotionally charged—and I lacked the awareness to catch the conflict— “watch out” won out. I didn’t help my friend.
The problem is that your hot brain is older and faster, so it enjoys an unfair advantage in affecting your behavior—and it always wants to scarf down the first marshmallow. But you can level the playing field, so to speak, and give your cold brain a greater advantage, by building your disciplined awareness. The greater your ability to recognize and resolve the conflict between your hot and cold brains, the easier it is to align your behavior and your intentions under pressure. As you build your awareness you’re strengthening the part of your brain that is willing to wait for the second marshmallow. By so doing, you gain more self-control because your higher level of awareness gives you more choices about how to respond. (You’ll learn more about this topic in the next chapter.)
A Foundational Competence
Disciplined awareness is a foundational competence if you’re to remain balanced under pressure. Your capacity to control your beam of attention determines whether you keep your cold brain in the driver’s seat when your hot brain tries to take the wheel, and it determines your ability to focus on what matters in a conversation. Moreover, to build your conversational capacity you must cultivate disciplined awareness and apply it on two fronts:
1. Personal Awareness. The ability to remain poised under stress by monitoring your internal state and refusing to allow your emotional reactions to hijack your good intentions. (This is the subject of the next chapter.)
2. Situational Awareness. The ability to notice what’s happening in the here and now and then compare that with the overarching goals in the situation. With high situational awareness, you’re able to assess your context and keep your beam of attention focused on what matters in the moment. You’re closely monitoring the fit between the purpose of the conversation and the patterns of the conversation. (This is the subject of Chapter 4.)
In the next two chapters, you’ll see that building your ability to focus more deliberately—on your self and on your context—results in a presence of mind that allows you to stay grounded, focused, and intentional in situations in which everyone else is caving in or wigging out.
* See Conversational Capacity: Chapter 2: “Intentional Conflict: Why Good Intentions Are Never Enough,” pages 33–59.
PERSONAL AWARENESS
The First Step in Getting Out of Your Own Way
Self-awareness is the meta-skill of the twenty-first century.
—TASHA EURICH
I received a phone call one evening from a client I’d been coaching. “Do you have a minute?” he asked. “I’m feeling really frustrated right now. In my afternoon meeting, today, I shot my finance guy in the face.”
“Like Dick Cheney?” I asked.
“No. Of course not. He just said something I didn’t like, and I didn’t listen, I didn’t inquire. I just shot him down and moved on. But that’s not why I’m calling. What frustrates me is that I didn’t realize what I’d done until I was driving home. How the hell am I supposed to stay in the sweet spot if I don’t eve
n recognize when I’m leaving it?”
That’s a good question. You have little hope of staying balanced, after all, if you don’t even notice when you’re losing it. So how do you get better at catching it when you start to slide?
In the last chapter, we explored your beam of attention and the power you gain in learning to control it. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to focus this beam internally, on what you’re thinking and feeling in a situation. I’ll show you how building your personal awareness will increase your conversational capacity by empowering you to monitor and manage your reactions to what’s going on in the moment.
What Is Personal Awareness?
Personal awareness is the ability to pay attention to the workings of your inner world—your thoughts, tendencies, and emotions—in real time. If you want to be more disciplined and deliberate when things get difficult—and less a hostage to your knee-jerk reactions—learning to focus your beam internally is the first step.
Strengthening your personal awareness is key to staying in the sweet spot for a very simple reason: You can’t solve a problem you can’t see. Without the ability to control and focus your attention, you’re blind to when your intentions and your behavior part ways. In a tough conversation, trying to stay in a learning-focused state of mind without personal awareness is like trying to navigate a mountain road in a car without windows. It’s unlikely you’ll reach your intended destination.