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This article was first published in March 2012 at: http://positivepowerinc.com/category/newsletter-blog/ Positive Power Strategies Blog

 

Why Practice Paying Attention?

by Laura Canter - Performance Psychologist, \CanterAssociates

 

Today I was thinking of a famous line from one of George Carlin’s acts: "I've been uplinked and downloaded. I've been inputted and outsourced. I know the upside of downsizing; I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal mutlitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond."

This led me to think:  how good are you at multi-tasking? In this day and age, we multi-task everything: family & work. Funny enough, despite having the wonderful technology to help us ‘save time’ – we are busier now than we have ever been in the past. But, here comes the problem:  even though we are capable of doing many tasks at one time, we fail to excel at all of the tasks. We have a limited capacity to access all of our available resources to make sure we are excelling or just completing a task for success.

This semester I’ve been teaching a Motor Control in the department of Kinesiology at a local university. One of the lessons we’ve learned this year is: preparation for and performance of specific skills and tasks are influenced by our limited capacity to select and attend to information.  The theories of Motor Control are true, not just for high performing athletes, but also high performing leaders in the workplace.  Are we actively engaged with and actively listening to what is going on in the moment? Or are we thinking of our own to-do list or our own agenda?

Nobel laureate & Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, Daniel Kahneman, proposed Attention Theory in 1973.  It states: the amount of available attention we can have varies depending on certain conditions related to the individual, the tasks being performed and the situation.  Now, consider for a moment the Action Effect Hypothesis.  This hypothesis proposes that actions are best planned and controlled by their intended efforts. 

What does this mean? Well, learning and performing of skills are optimized when our attention is directed to the intended outcome of the action, rather than on the movements themselves.

Famous ballerina Suzanne Farrell emphasizes that dancers need to concentrate on the effect they want to create with their movements rather than on the movements themselves. This will make them successful ballerinas and have amazing flawless performances.

So, if a leader in the workplace wants to improve on his or her performance, they need to consider the intended outcome first, their actions are best planned and controlled by their intended efforts. And practice does make perfect when it comes to having successful performance outcomes.  Once we have learned and committed a skill to memory, we have a sense of automaticity – the ability to implement knowledge and procedures with little or no demand on attention capacity. Determine what kind of leader you wish to be; practice, and eventually it will be second nature to your overall performance.