The Power Of Focus

We had my friend Roger around the other week for Sunday lunch. He’d done me a favour by acting as a referee on a job application for my daughter.

You wouldn’t believe the amount of detail it takes for a teenager to get a job airside at Gatwick. The process generated a never ending labyrinthine paper trail of random forms, emails and phone calls for the guy.

Anyway, I wanted to thank him and I knew full well that a never ending plateful of slow roast lamb shoulder with crispy roast spuds, red wine gravy and all the trimmings was the way to do it.

And when I say gravy I mean proper gravy. Oh yes.

A New Clarity

I’ve mentioned before now that how you thank people is important. You should do it in a way that suits them, not you.

Me cooking a slap up feed is perhaps the best way I could thank Roger. On the Sunday we sat in our kitchen with a glass of something convivial while I brought all the food together. 

Now I don’t know about you but when other people are around the house I notice our surroundings a bit more keenly than usual. 

While I was at the sink, washing up a few utensils I noticed the most enormous spider’s web almost covering the top window above the draining board.

It was massive. It clearly wasn’t a newly spun addition. To get to that size and look so established it must have been there a good few days. At least.

But this was the first time I, or anyone else, had noticed it. And I had been at the sink a good few times over the preceding days.

The Power Of Focus

Not noticing stuff that’s all around us is a common occurrence. It’s about focus. Conscious focus in particular.

Where you direct your focus is an important choice. Noticing or not noticing stuff can be either useful and a hindrance depending on the circumstances.

But the important part is knowing that you have a choice, and then purposefully acting (or not) on that choice.

It's fascinating how our capacity for focus shapes our perception of the world around us.

There’s an exercise I often do on my wellbeing courses that really brings attention to it. I’ll share it with you now so we can delve deeper into the power of focus and our tendency to overlook elements in our surroundings.

What Do You Notice?

Consider this exercise for a moment: 

You find yourself in a familiar room, a space you've occupied for at least one hour and 45 minutes – a duration that implies a significant level of engagement (and also usually about the time it takes in one of my training days to reach this point). 

Now, if it's convenient and safe, close your eyes momentarily. As you do, take a mental inventory of the room. Specifically, count the number of blue items within it.

With your eyes shut, reimagine the room and trust your mind to tally these blue objects. 

After you’re satisfied you’ve covered the whole room, decide on the number. 

In the exercise I get people to call out their number. Which of course, then means that other people, still with their eyes closed scrunch up their face, trying to work out where the extra items are! What have they missed?

What Do You Ignore?

Now, open your eyes and observe your surroundings once more. This is always a fun revelation.

How many details did you overlook during the past two hours, despite your extended stay in this room?

Did you think about the chair or seat you're resting on, your attire, the colour of the walls, or the pattern of the carpet? You might have even pondered the presence of any blue stationary items that may have escaped your prior attention. 

Often people have discounted the fact that they’re wearing a whole blue outfit!

This simple exercise offers a profound insight into our cognitive processes. It illustrates our remarkable ability to focus on a particular task or aspect while unintentionally neglecting the rest of our environment. 

I think this phenomenon is really cool and really underscores the selectivity of our attention – we choose what to perceive and what to disregard.

So that’s an opportunity right?!

The power of focus is not just about what we choose to concentrate on; it's also about what we opt to omit. In our quest for productivity and efficiency, we often employ a mechanism of selective deletion. 

Delete, Distort Or Generalise

In NLP (go Google it) there’s this idea that in order to deal with the many many things going on at the same time we run three processes that help us cope. We delete, distort or generalise. 

We do all three to a certain degree and it’s mostly a natural, unconscious process.

Deletion is when we filter out background noises, blur out irrelevant objects, and streamline our sensory inputs to maintain concentration.

This filtering process, though automatic and often essential for our tasks, can mean that we miss out on the rich tapestry of sensory information that surrounds us.

We miss all the blue things for a start, (although I could live with not ever seeing Chelsea play again).

Notice The Details

Imagine this email is me talking to you.

If you’ve heard me deliver maybe you already do hear my voice when you read my Top Tips newsletter.

I know I do this when I get newsletters from certain people - I read the words but hear their voice delivering them. (I read a book by Robert Peston a while ago and it took me forever to finish. In my head I was doing all his weird pauses and elongating the words!)

So as I pause in our conversation, I want you to notice the subtle sounds around you that you might have ignored before.

I’m pausing . . . now!

Perhaps, just like when I ask delegates on a course to close their eyes, you can now perceive something new.

As I shut my own mouth for a minute (finally!) I can hear the faint hum of the bathroom fan in the distance. 

That noise signifies that someone in the house entered the bathroom, switched on the light, and exited without turning the light off, leaving the fan running. (Again!)

But I only noticed it when I stopped thinking and tuned my senses into the ‘what’s going on out there’ zone.

Choose To Be Aware

These auditory cues, easily muted in our minds, demonstrate how we routinely filter and delete information to enhance our focus.

In our race to always be productive and busy, we naturally generalise, distort, and delete aspects of our surroundings. Sometimes too many.

The challenge lies in finding that delicate balance between focus and awareness. We need to recognise when it’s appropriate to narrow our attention for a task.

On the other hand we also need to consider when it’s best to broaden our perception to fully appreciate the world around us.

Ultimately, the power of focus is a double-edged sword, and understanding its intricacies can empower us to choose what we want to notice and when, enabling a richer, more mindful experience of life and . . . oooh! Look! A squirrel!

At the end of our Sunday lunch I directed my powers of observation towards Roger and his twice emptied and scraped clean plate.

Using my carefully honed power of focus I noticed that he was fully satiated and thus we were both happy. Mission accomplished.