How do you spend your attention?
How aware are you of how you spend your attention? For most of us, we are little aware of where our attention goes on a minute-by-minute basis, let alone hour-by hour. Shame, given that our attention is, in my opinion, our most precious resource.
Attention, and it’s more effective sibling, focus, are the currency of engagement (it is the X-factor of the influential and charismatic), change and growth. Consider the analogy: if you pay little attention to how you spend your money you can have little chance of wealth or prosperity. Similarly, if you are not at least sometimes strategic with your attention and focus, you have little chance of creating anything better for yourself.
Today, I have been using a wonderful tool for exposing where my business attention should be going: the IMPACT-EASE tool. I am not a list person, nor am I good with detail. This tool is brilliant for providing clarity on what it is that should be done. Little surprise, then, that getting back to my blog and writing a post was high on my impact-ease analysis today!
Download the impact-ease-worksheet (with instructions) to do your own anaysis.
I am yet to find who to attribute this file to – please let me know if you know who the author is.
The Ten Best Questions for Growth or Change
10 Best Questions for Reflection, Clarity, Insight and Growth
The list of questions below are proven questions to help another person, or yourself, find reflection, clarity and insight around an issue. The intention is to show the general structure of these questions as examples, rather than ‘exact’ questions that you would quote verbatim. Shape them to your needs as required, considering the content and context.
You can use these questions as individual points of reflection, or as a sequence.
- If things were perfect tomorrow (with regard to the issue), what would be different (in what you see and how you feel)?
- What aspects of this situation are you happy with?
- How would you rate your effectiveness/satisfaction here, say out of 10?
- What rating would be pleased with, or would help you meet the current challenge?
- What do you need to do to move towards your preferred/needed rating?
- How is your current thinking or feeling impacting on the outcomes, results or goal?
- What thinking or feeling do you need to have to meet your goal(s) or challenge?
- What learning emerges for you (either from your experience, the situation or these questions)?
- What are the implications for your next steps?
- What are your next steps or actions?
Bonus Question Group: Johari Question Set
Based on the Johari Window concept, the following four questions are powerful and can be asked in many contexts (reflection, conflict management:
- How do I see myself? (skills, behaviour, attitudes, thinking)
- How do others see me?
- How would I like to be seen?
- How do I need to be to be effective? (or to find resolution, or to meet the challenge)
In the blender – traps for second marriages with children
Have you seen the statistics for second marriage failures? Try these from the US National Center for Health Statistics (2002):
Second marriage failure rates for women in the US:
After 10 years of remarriage, the probability of that marriage ending is
- 32 percent for women with no children at remarriage
- 40% for women with children, but none of whom were reported as unwanted
- 44% for women with children, and any of whom were reported as unwanted (slightly higher, at 47 percent, among white women)
The presence of children from a previous marriage for either partner increases the chance of this second marriage failing. These statistics are replicated in most western cultures, with second marriage failure rates seemingly higher than first marriage stats, particularly where children are involved. Clearly, other factors contribute to second marriage breakdown, though most of this have similar hallmarks to the issue of children.
You see, our brains are good at spotting patterns, and applying assumptions. Further, our brains actively seek evidence for held assumptions and beliefs, preventing us from seeing the complete picture.
For ‘blended families’ – second marriages where children are present from the previous relationship of one or both of the partners – the assumptions, judgements and beliefs in play can erode the primary relationship. All the more so given that often these assumptions and beliefs are not obvious. Some of the traps here include:
- “Love me, love my kids”…I must love my partner’s children as much or in the same way as I love my own. Once you uncover this assumption and give each other permission to feel differently about own and step children, then the shackles of expectation are released. I would argue it a biological condition to love your own child at least in a different way, if not a more intense way.
- “Love availability” is limited, not abundant. Because attention is limited we sometimes assume our love is equally limited. In reality, we have, or can have limitless love for each member in a family, with that love being possibly quite diverse in nature and type. A key question for discussion or reflection: how can I distribute my attention so that love/respect is felt unconditionally.
- Conditional vs unconditional: particularly prevalent in the step-parent relationship is the limiting/undermining element of conditionality. “If you behave then…”, “If you respect me then …”. Strong setp-parent/step-child relationships are built on unconditionality: in spite of you not yet connecting with me (or doing what I want etc) I will listen to you, respect you and believe in you. Quite literally, children today live by “if you don’t listen to me, why should I listen to you?”. Listening is the key here. Listen, don’t judge or assume.
The secrets to building a lasting blended family sit with the following list:
- Accept ‘love diversity” – it’s OK to love biological and step kids differently.
- Start by unconditionally respecting your step-kids. Listen to them, believe in them. Most often, unconditional respect will grow into unconditional love.
- Know how to stay calm under pressure.
- Be aware of your attentional biases
- Have a consistent plan of behaviour expectation that you as co-parents talk about, agree upon and implement
- Accept conflict as it occurs – in spite of it being uncomfortable, when it is managed through a calm, listening and observational position, it is the indicator of growth. Conflict will occur, how you manage it is the key.
- Talk with your partner – ask yourselves what are we assuming, what are we not seeing, what are we judging?
Blended families are like a plane – some have both parents up the font as true co-pilots, some have one as the pilot and the other as passenger, and some even have the kids flying the plane. The only lasting option is the first – which one are you?
Ten ways to kill a conversation …
There are many ways that we can disengage another buy applying conversation-killing habits. Oftentimes we don’t even know that we have reduced the engagement. The secret element of connection with another person is attention. Not just any attention – authentic attention on them for them.
Each of the conversation killers listed below act in some way to drain your available attention, or allow you to use the available attention for yourself, not the other person.
Killer #1: Distraction: attention on your own thinking, activities or needs.
Killer #2: Assumption: assuming where the conversation is going, what they need or finishing sentences for them.
Killer #3: Judgement: making value judgements on them, their thinking or actions
Killer #4: Interruption: not allowing them to finish
Killer #5: Not listening to them: listening for your chance to say something, listening to yourself
Killer #6: I have the answer: a common form of assumption
Killer #7: You must be wrong: a common form of judgement
Killer #8: Total Control: you need to steer where the conversation goes
Killer #9: Dominate: you do more talking than listening
Killer #10: Focus on yourself: you are more concerned for your outcomes than theirs
Ways to combat these conversation killers can be found in the book “The Success Zone“.
The irony of influence…
Most people I know would like to think that they are influential. Anything from being able to influence the decisions of their children to wanting to influence whole populations. You may not want to be a President or Prime Minister, but what would being able to influence others more effectively be worth to you? How would it change your world?
The thing is, the more you try to influence, the less you actually influence. Influence is passive, not active. It emerges more from who you are and what you do (which stems from who you are) than what you say. Take, as an example, the person who has influenced me most this year. Matt Church is a Sydney based entrepreneur, author and public speaker. His message, his content is first class. His influence comes not from the quality of his content, but his attitudes and behaviours. Indeed, his content is validated by his authenticity. Through this combination of a powerful message and high integrity, I learn much more than his content. I learn from his generosity, from his family and community orientation, and I learn from his commitment to adding value to others.
Your most influential teacher will have had this dual ‘channel’ of connection: great content/content delivery and great people engagement skills. Like Matt, the clarity of integrity allows them to listen, believe in, unconditionally respect (or love) and challenge. One of the quickest and most effective ways to create ‘influence capital’ with others is to listen well. We use optimistic and observational listening as training models to help others re-learn their listening skills for greater influence.
Influence can only be achieved by consistency, integrity and unconditional respect. Trying to influence is really only coercion. Are you a coercer or an influencer?
Love is blind, they say, but what about anger?
When were you last in your own “heat of the moment”? Take a minute to remember this state. Was your attention tightly focused on the object of your ‘heat’, or did you have wide peripheral vision? Was you thinking, similarly, broad or narrow?
For most people, their Red Zone causes a narrowing of awareness in more than one dimension. Think of being in your Red Zone as being in a small room. In a strong Red Zone state, you only experience the room, not you being in the room. Ironically, in this state, your awareness focuses increasingly on the ‘objects’ that keep you in the room, not those that can help you out of it.
Imagine, then, that while in this state you began ’scoping’ the room. Rotating slowly, seeing things you might have missed. This simple (but often not easy) shift in perspective allows you to both experience the room, and you in the room. Don’t be fooled – this is not a small shift, but a quantum change in perspective. It is the first and necessary step to creating an alternative outcome.
Amazingly, as you move more from being immersed in the Red Zone to observing yourself and your surrounds, your perception widens. The more you observe, the greater the distance you can observe from. To continue the metaphor, you now begin to see the room in house-plan view, along with other connecting rooms, even the whole building.
Observation is the key here: observation of yourself and of the ‘object’ or your Red Zone. the more you observe, the more you disengage your hard-wired habits of judging and emotional responses. The more you observe, the more you actually see (not what you were assuming you were seeing).
Try this with someone at work that you normally don’t have time for. In your next interaction with them, watch for expressions, inflections and emphases. Look for things that, until now, you had not seen before. Your old habitual thoughts and judgements might still be there, but let them come and go without ‘jumping on board’ with any of them.
Don’t be blinded by your emotions and habits. Think of an flight attendant saying “the exits are here, here and here”. Observation will illuminate your exits.
Further reading:http://healthmad.com/mental-health/physiology-of-anger/
The Success Zone publishing updates
The Success Zone
Our new book, “The Success Zone” is in its final processes of publishing and should be available for sale later this month (Oct 09).
Pre orders are available at http://www.gr8education.com/book/thesuccesszone.html
Some thoughts about insights and visions
I am writing this on a plane between England and Australia. I have been in England doing a mix of work and marketing, essentially talking with a lot of people about our work and testing new ways of both articulating what we do and delivering it. As this was happening I began to get an inkling of some major new insights stirring in my mind. I emailed my partners and said what was happening and that I was confident that on the flight home these insights would crystallise. I wrote this because my experience over at least 15 such flights in the last 3 years is that this always happens, insights crystallise on long haul trips. I am writing this now after some of the biggest insights of the last 5 years have appeared, fully formed in my mind.
Coincidentally, before this flight I went into my daughter’s bedroom looking for a book to read on the flight and my daughter, like me, is an avid and wide reader. I picked up Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” which contains two essays, one about Huxley’s experimentation with the mind altering drug mescalin and the second about how we open our minds to new thoughts or visions. At the risk of simplifying too much, he argues that our minds are open to new thoughts (amongst other conditions e.g. low sugar through fasting) when the oxygen level falls or the carbon dioxide level rises in our brains. This occurs, for example, through singing or chanting such as achieved in churches (when chanting we tend to breathe out more than we breathe in thus depleting our oxygen levels) or, as many traditions do, through meditating at the top of a mountain … or in a plane.
As a trade off between hull strength and human survivability, planes are designed to have an internal atmospheric pressure equivalent to being at about 8,000 feet above sea level once they are sealed and up in the air.
So, unbeknownst to me I have been putting myself 20 odd hours at a time in the perfect state to have new thoughts, visions and insights, just after I have had a range of new inputs, ideas and experiences. The perfect conditions to crystallise new thinking. On this particular flight everything has been enhanced as it is an old 747 with no backseat screens and, in any case, my whole audio/visual display controls are not working, including the overhead light! So I am sitting in the dark half dozing, half thinking as insights form in my head.
I wonder if this works for other people as well!
Decision-making and organisation
Jonah Lehrer’s book the Decisive Moment gives strong insight into how we make decisions. Insight that helps to explain why we are at a turning point in human and societal development.
The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.
Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.
The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.
One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?
As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!
The Question Is…
Last post I discussed the Red and Blue Zones, and linked each to ineffective and effective communicators respectively. Reactive Red Zone people use their limbic systems to manage communication and conflict, while those who can deal with conflict and communication with equanimity and care use far more of their prefrontal cortex capacity (that is, the Blue Zone).
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