The Power of Your Attention
A little piece on why you better get a hold of your attention.,
Pay attention, or pay
I loathed the word “Attention” for the first twenty-five years of my life.
To me, “attention” always had a negative ring of urgency and emergency to it.
Too many teachers barked “Pay attention!”; too many times I heard “The kid lacks attention”. So I created the story that attention is a very serious thing. In my world, attention was something to learn through willpower and discipline.
And I thought to myself:
“I am just not good at paying attention!”
And so I paid a lot of attention to this belief, and tried harder to pay attention.
While I thought I was improving my attention…
I only added tension to my body: neck, back, eyes, shoulders.
As a result, I got more tired and stressed. Bad eyesight. And bashed myself more:
“See, you can’t pay attention.”
Then I went down the spiral again:
tried harder to pay attention
felt more tired by the tension
played violent video games
judged myself
started a new cycle
What attention really is.
Attention is the single most natural thing we do all the time.
At any given second, we are attending to something. Literally, you can never not pay attention.
That means there are no more or less attentive people. What can vary is
The content of what they are attending to, right now.
The quality of their attention
Here’s a little picture to consider:
Imagine a tiny peephole in the middle of an infinite wall. Beyond the wall is a vast, colorful, incredibly awesome show. But you can’t see the whole thing. You are limited by whatever little perspective your peephole offers you. There would be more to take in, many different angles and viepoints, but the peephole (your attention) defines your perspective on the show.
This is the story of your life and your attention in a nutshell.
Attention is the fragment of what you could register that you are actively registering, right now, out of the entire possibility of your awareness. Now, as humans, we can register in a distinctly human way.
Every moment, we can attend to:
a certain range of audible frequencies
a certain spectrum of visible colours
a narrow range of smells/tastes/touch impressions
certain bodily sensations, feelings, moods, or emotions
verbal, non-verbal, and hybrid forms of thought/ideas/vision
If your awareness is the grand potential of all “things” you could register…
… your attention is the gatekeeper of what you are actively registering.
It’s through attention that we give power to certain things in our world.
The Quality of your Attention…
Here goes a bold claim: The quality of your attention determines the quality of your life.
Your active memory tells the story of what you attended to. You can only remember what you actively registered. Every story you tell can be told in a million ways, but you are bound by what you actively paid attention to, day after day. Your attention is the gatekeeper of what you let into your world, and allow to grow as a part of you.
If you only attend to thoughts, you will remember your day as a succession of them.
If you only attend to screens all day, hectically clicking, your life is likely scattered and hectic.
If you only attend to “The News” all day, your life is what others tell you it should be.
If you only attend to work someone gives you, of course you are lacking purpose.
If you only attend to puppies all day, your life will be kind of fluffy.
Of course, these are extremes, for we never just attend to one activity.
But this simple truth can’t be overstated:
What you are attending to and how you are attending defines what you see as your life.
The story of your life is the story of your attention and your attention is the lifeblood of your world.
Where focus (attention) goes, energy flows!
Now, a logical question is this: Who is in charge of your attention?
Who’s in charge here?
I live in Prague, close to the famous castle.
There is a popular viewpoint next to the entrance.
From there, you can see the picturesque red roofs of the Old Town.
Next to the Starbucks, you find a few coin-operated binoculars.
Now, imagine wanting to look at the city and explore things. You drop your hard-earned money into the slot. You step onto the little platform and place your eyes behind the lens. The shutter opens and you find that…
... neither the zoom nor the rotation arm works.
The machinery is fixed onto one boring wall, and you can’t move it. Bummer!
By all means, you wasted your money, right?
What would be considered a broken device is many people’s daily attention default mode.
Someone else pre-defined and fixed:
What we are attending to (crop)
The quality of our attention (zoom and focus)
With the binocular, we could of course just walk away, or complain.
We could get our money back. But paid attention is non-refundable!
But our attention is closer to us. It’s so hard to see because it defines what and how we see.
And so, many humans habitually live with their attention inside their thoughts, 96% of the time.
The ways we attend to the world become second-nature, and we forget that we have a choice.
Over time, we get comfortable with our peephole or broken binoculars.
But there is so much more to explore, if we shift our attention.
Reclaim your attention.
Here goes another bold statement:
To bring about lasting change in your world, you have to re-learn to direct your attention.
When I first realised that my attention was pre-set, I was down for a while.
I had to admit that the ways I paid attention (and what I attended to) were not my own choices, but reactive, conditioned ways. Starting with school, I learned to “pay attention” to arbitrary authorities and their ideas of what I should focus on. I learned to habitually attend to thoughts and figure out how to make a good impression. I learned to give attention to problem-solving and found myself creating problems in my own mind.
It was like my mother lived inside my head, asking me math-questions out of nowhere!
My attention always had a nervous glimmer and some shock-like jumps to it.
And let’s be honest…
Some people make a killing by binding your attention to your social media feed. It’s not that data is the most valuable resource. Your attention is. Data is just a means to an end. The richest companies control your attention the longest. You are trained early to pay attention in ways that benefit others.
So, how can you reclaim your attention?
Time-tested practices like meditation, creating art, Yoga, or Tai-chi definitely help. But they are just training wheels. At any given second, you can ask yourself “where is my attention now?” or “what do I notice now?”. To begin, keep things simple. Stick to three simple categories. Is your attention more in your body, the external world, or your thoughts?
Likely, if you are like most people I work with and myself, it will be in your thoughts.
See if you can just notice thoughts, without adding more fuel to the fire.
Of course, I teach Radical Honesty workshops, so I am biased. Take it with objective distance, but I personally like to think that the most effective way to reclaim attention is by telling the truth. If I align my words with my perception, I notice my thoughts quieting down and my attention becoming more focused.
If you don’t take charge of your attention, someone else sure will. You need your attention to bring about your own ideas. Without this, you will likely feel like a captive ball inside the pinball machine called life.
