Focus by Goleman
Ref: Daniel Goleman (2013). Focus. The Hidden Drivers of Excellence. Harper Collins.
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Summary
Mindfulness: Focusing on our experience in the here and now. The capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, non-reactive manner.
When your mind wanders—and you notice that it has wandered—bring it back to your point of focus and sustain your attention there. And when your mind wanders off again, do the same. And again. And again. And again. There are four steps in this cognitive cycle: the mind wanders, you notice it’s wandering, you shift your attention to your breath, and you keep it there.
Meta-Awareness: The antidote to mind-wandering; attention to attention itself. The ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus.
Open Attention: Through mindfulness, taking information in the world around us and the world within us, and picking up subtle cues we’d otherwise miss.
Listen within, to articulate an authentic vision of overall direction that energizes others even as it sets clear expectations. Coach, based on listening to what people want from their life, career, and current job. Pay attention to people’s feelings and needs, and show concern. Listen to advice and expertise; be collaborative and make decisions by consensus when appropriate. Celebrate wins, laugh, know that having a good time together is not a waste of time but a way to build emotional capital.
The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy. The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest. But what rests a mental muscle? Try switching from the effort of top-down control to more passive bottom-up activities, taking a relaxing break in a restful setting. The most restful surroundings are in nature, argues Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, who proposes what he calls “attention restoration theory.” Such restoration occurs when we switch from effortful attention, where the mind needs to suppress distractions, to letting go and allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself. But only certain kinds of bottom-up focus act to restore energy for focused attention. Surfing the Web, playing video games, or answering email does not.
Discover a calling that rivets your attention and mobilizes your creative talents.
Mental overload, stress, and sleep deprivation (not to mention drinking) deplete the executive circuitry needed to make such a cognitive switch, keeping us in our mental ruts.
Focused, goal-oriented attention, inhibits mindless mental habits.
“The strategic allocation of attention,” is the crucial skill.
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Brain
Bottom-Up Mind (System 1): Fast, operating in milliseconds, involuntary and automatic; impulsive, driven by emotion, executor of our habitual routines and guide for our actions. Manager of our mental models of the world. The bottom-up system multitasks, scanning a profusion of inputs in parallel, including features of our surroundings that have not yet come into full focus; it analyzes what’s in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us.
Top-Down Mind (System 2): Slow, voluntary, effortful. The seat of self-control which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and mute emotionally driven impulses. Able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of automatic repertoire. Our top-down mind takes more time to deliberate on what it gets presented with, taking things one at a time and applying more thoughtful analysis.
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Focus
Types 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.
Outer Focus: Helps us navigate in the larger world.
Modes of Focus:
Orienting: Seeking out and immersing ourselves in all kinds of inputs.
Selective Attention: Focusing on one specific creative challenge.
Open Attention: Associating information freely in order to home in on a solution.
Exploration: Disengaging from a current focus to search for new possibilities, allowing flexibility, discovery, and innovation.
Exploitation: Taking sustained focus on what you’re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance.
Flow
There are several doorways to flow. One may open when we tackle a task that challenges our abilities to the maximum—a “just-manageable” demand on our skills. Another entryway can come via doing what we are passionate about; motivation sometimes drives us into flow. But either way the final common pathway is full focus: these are each ways to ratchet up attention. No matter how you get there, a keen focus jump-starts flow.
Self-Awareness: An essential focus that attunes us to the subtle murmurs within that can help guide our way through life. This internal control mechanism makes all the difference between a life well lived and one that falters.
Emotional self-awareness requires collating the information from the right and left-brain hemispheres via cross-talk in the corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the brain’s left and right sides. The stronger the connectivity across this neural bridge, the more fully we can understand our emotions.
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Attention & Distraction
Two Main Distractions
Sensory: The external and internal stimuli continuously processed by the brain.
Emotional: Emotionally loaded signals.
The biggest challenge for even the most focused comes from the emotional turmoil of our lives, like a recent blowup in a close relationship that keeps intruding into your thoughts. Such thoughts barge in for a good reason: to get us to think through what to do about what’s upsetting us.
The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go—or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry.
When we hit cognitive overwhelm, the dorsolateral gives up, and our decisions and choices get worse and worse as our anxiety rises. We’ve reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Cognitive science tells us that splitting attention (multi-tasking) is a fiction. Rather than having a stretchable balloon of attention to deploy in tandem, we have a narrow, fixed pipeline to allot. Instead of splitting it, we actually switch rapidly. Continual switching saps attention from full, concentrated engagement.
Workplace surveys find large numbers of people are in a very different brain state: they daydream, waste hours cruising the Web or YouTube, and do the bare minimum required. Their attention scatters. Such disengagement and indifference are rampant, especially among repetitive, undemanding jobs. To get the disengaged workers any nearer the focused range demands upping their motivation and enthusiasm, evoking a sense of purpose, and adding a dollop of pressure. On the other hand, another large group are stuck in the state neurobiologists call “frazzle,” where constant stress overloads their nervous system with floods of cortisol and adrenaline. Their attention fixates on their worries, not their job. This emotional exhaustion can lead to burnout.
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Leadership
Great leaders define a mission, acts on many levels, and tackle the biggest problems. Great leaders do not settle for systems as they are, but see what they could become, and so work to transform them for the better, to benefit the widest circle.
Leadership hinges on effectively capturing and directing the collective attention. Leading attention requires first, focusing your own attention, then attracting and directing attention from others, and getting and keeping the attention of employees and peers, of customers or clients.
A well-focused leader can balance an inner focus on the climate and culture with an “other focus” on the competitive landscape, and an outer focus on the larger realities that shape the environment the outfit operates in.
The common cold of leadership is poor listening. Tuned-out leaders see themselves as being far more effective than do those they are guiding. A lack of self-awareness leaves you clueless.
Assess the emotions of your team. Create time and space to talk about what’s on people’s minds and allow for open time to empower creativity.
The most successful leaders are constantly seeking out new information.
Nonacademic abilities like empathy typically outweigh purely cognitive talents in the makeup of outstanding leaders.
So many leaders are preoccupied with today’s immediate problems that they lack bandwidth for the long-term challenges we face as a species.
Pacesetters: High-achieving, super-focused people who lead by example, setting a fast pace and assuming others will imitate. Pacesetters tend to rely on a “command and coerce” leadership strategy where they simply give orders and expect obedience.
There’s an intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power: There are relatively few gaps between one’s own and others’ ratings among lower-level employees. But the higher someone’s position in an organization, the bigger the gap. Self-awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organization’s ladder.
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Empathy & Emotion
Studies in medical schools find that if a doctor looks you in the eye, nods as she listens, touches you gently if you are in pain, and asks, for example, if you’re warm enough on the exam table, she gets high patient ratings. If she mainly looks at her clipboard or computer screen, the ratings are low.
Empathy depends on attention: to tune in to others’ feelings requires we pick up the facial, vocal, and other signals of their emotion. The anterior cingulate, a part of the attention network, tunes us to someone else’s distress by tapping our own amygdala, which resonates with that distress. In this sense, emotional empathy is “embodied”—we actually feel in our physiology what’s going on in the body of the other person.
Those in whom the stirring of sympathetic feelings becomes too strong can suffer themselves—in the helping professions this can sometimes lead to emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue. And those who protect themselves against sympathetic distress by deadening feeling can lose touch with empathy.
One hurdle in such a wide-aperture view is the implicit attitude at work that professionalism demands we ignore our emotions. Some trace this emotional blind spot to the work ethic embedded in the norms of workplaces in the West, which sees work as a moral obligation that demands suppressing attention to our relationships and what we feel, which undermines business effectiveness.
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Power Dynamics
The mapping of attention on lines of power shows up in a simple metric: how long does it take person A to respond to an email from person B? The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes.
The more powerful person in the pairs tended to be more indifferent: to feel less of the other person’s pain—to be less empathic, let alone compassionate.
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Performance
Mental Practice: Just by mentally rehearsing a golf stroke, the axons and dendrites that orchestrate those moves wire together a bit more strongly.
Learning how to improve any skill requires top-down focus. Neuroplasticity, the strengthening of old brain circuits and building of new ones for a skill we are practicing, requires our paying attention: When practice occurs while we are focusing elsewhere, the brain does not rewire the relevant circuitry for that particular routine.
As you master how to execute a new routine, repeated practice transfers control of that skill from the top-down system for intentional focus to bottom-up circuits that eventually make its execution effortless. At that point you don’t need to think about it—you can do the routine well enough on automatic. And this is where amateurs and experts part ways.
Amateurs: Content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about 50h of training—whether in skiing or driving—people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.
Experts: Keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau. “The expert performer,” says Ericsson, “actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current level of performance.” Moreover, “The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.”
Smart Practice Techniques for Teachers
Clear objectives at progressively more difficult levels.
Adapt to the pace of the specific learner.
Provide immediate feedback and graduated practice challenges to the point of mastery.
Practice the same skills in different contexts, encouraging skill transference.
Ericsson finds world-class competitors—whether weight lifters, pianists, or a dog sled team—tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into their training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session. Optimal practice maintains optimal concentration.
Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind’s processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing.
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Problem Solving
If our emotional circuitry (particularly the amygdala, the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response) perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come; the amygdala hardly blinks.
We are finely tuned to a rustling in the leaves that may signal a stalking tiger. But we have no perceptual apparatus that can sense the thinning of the atmosphere’s ozone layer, nor the carcinogens in the particulates we breathe on a smoggy day. Both can eventually be fatal, but our brain has no direct radar for these threats.
We have strong cognitive biases toward our present needs, and are weak thinkers about the long away future. But at least we’re starting to recognize the degree to which we have put human and natural systems at risk. What we need now is leadership. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.
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Misc Quotes
“Statistical analysis found that a child’s level of self-control is every bit as powerful a predictor of her adult financial success and health (and criminal record, for that matter) as are social class, wealth of family of origin, or IQ. Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life success—in fact, for financial success, self-control in childhood proved a stronger predictor than either IQ or social class of the family of origin.”
“Kids can have the most economically privileged childhood, yet if they don’t master how to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals those early advantages may wash out in the course of life. In the US, for example, only two in five children of parents in the top 20% of wealth end up in that privileged status; about 6% drift down to the bottom 20% in income.”
“Much of the time, people attribute what happens to them to events close in time and space, when in reality it’s the result of the dynamics of the larger system within which they are embedded.”-Sterman.
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Terminology
Anthropocene: Began with the Industrial Revolution, marks the first geologic epoch in which the activities of one species, humans, are inexorably degrading the handful of global systems that support life on earth.
Crystallized Intelligence: Recognizing what matters, the signal within the noise. Some call it wisdom.
Frazzle: A state in which constant stress overloads the nervous system with floods of cortisol and adrenaline. Attention fixates on worries, and not work, which can lead to burnout.
Groupthink: The self-deceptive tendency to ignore evidence to the contrary. The unstated need to protect a treasured opinion (by discounting crucial disconfirming data) drives shared blind spots that lead to bad decisions.
“Facts that challenge basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed.”
An antidote to groupthink: expand your circle of connection beyond your comfort zone and inoculate against in-group isolation by building an ample circle of no-BS confidants who keep you honest. A smart diversification goes beyond gender and ethnic diversity.
Gut Feelings: Messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our intuition.
Magical Number: 7 ± 2; the chunks of information taken as the upper limit of the beam of attention (George Miller, 1950s).
Social Intuition: How accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send; the silent modifiers of what they are saying.
Sociopaths: Instead of registering emotion in their brain’s limbic centers, sociopaths show activity in the frontal areas, particularly the language centers. They tell themselves about emotions, but do not feel them directly as other people do; instead of a normal bottom-up emotional reaction, sociopaths “feel” top-down.
Somatic Marker: The sensations in our body that tell us when a choice feels wrong or right. This bottom-up circuitry telegraphs its conclusions through our gut feelings, often long before the top-down circuits come to a more reasoned conclusion.
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