If you’re finding it harder to focus you’re not alone.
Prioritising this vital skill in the workplace can enhance wellbeing, staff satisfaction, patient outcomes and business success.
Are you finding it harder to focus? You’re not alone.
I consider myself to be fairly dedicated to training my capacity to focus after years of yoga and mindfulness, yet I’ve noticed that there is more of a pull of my attention in different directions. Apparently, I’m not alone. This is important. A scattered mind doesn’t feel good, tends to be more reactive and negative biased and makes it harder to get things done. Being able to pay attention is important to many aspects of our daily life including wellbeing, problem solving, productivity and relationships.
Johann Hari in his wonderful book Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention, presents research from all over the world about our declining ability to pay attention. I felt validated reading about the societal, information technology and economic drive factors at play. He doesn’t talk much about internal skills but instead focuses on external factors. My take, however, is that changing societal issues such as the global focus on acceleration to achieve economic growth (not wellbeing) and information technology strategies to keep us connected to our devices, will take time and considerable community activism. Meanwhile, each of us can take action to protect our attention. The benefits go far beyond our personal needs. As Hari explains, we need people who can pay attention to help solve these societal issues and prevent the demise of our precious natural world.
For people whose job it is to help others, such as health professionals, there is a need to focus intently on the person, to observe the nuances in both verbal and body language, to build a connecting relationship and conduct a relevant examination. If our minds are distracted and we are unable to listen clearly, collate the various elements of a person’s story and recall different patterns of presentation and management, then our clinical reasoning will be unreliable. It will be harder to create an appropriate and meaningful treatment plan and help a person achieve their goals. If this becomes our pattern, we won’t feel as accomplished in supporting our clients, and more likely to feel overwhelmed and the risk of burnout will increase.
Working with people is challenging and unpredictable but building the capacity to pay attention in a kind and curious way increases the chance of a positive outcome for the client. Happy clients, accomplished and productive staff are ingredients for business success.
There are many ways to help build attentional capacity. Mindfulness, defined as paying attention, on purpose, without judgement, is one way. There are a variety of mindfulness practices to build the skill of paying attention. These include attention during normal daily activities, brief moments of connecting to the body and formal practices where we take time to practice in the same way that we might learn a musical instrument.
We usually use the term practice to describe a purposeful intention to do something to build a skill. We could also use the word exercise. We can exercise to build both physical and mental strength or flexibility or balance. For example, mindfulness ‘exercises’ can help us focus on one thing or task, take in multiple aspects of a situation or turn inwards to be more aware of our inner world of sensations, thoughts and emotions to understand ourselves more clearly.
Ultimately as we build the skill of paying attention with curiosity and kindness, we increase the breadth of our responses and discover greater choice, focus and wisdom in how we respond to life moments.
As I ramp up my practice, I pose the challenge to you, to remember to pay attention one moment at a time.
Would you like help? My next Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction MBSR course provides guidance over 8 weeks to integrate practices for paying attention into your life. The next course is August 7th 2023 at the beautiful Sophia Centre in Adelaide.