1. The subtle faculty
While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.
Attention works much like a muscle - use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.
Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions, Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the lager world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
Attention connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience.
Attention provides a mechanism that underlie our awareness of the world and the voluntary regulation of our thoughts and feelings
Your focus determines your reality
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
PART I THE ANATOMY OF ATTENTION
2 Basics
The focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself.
There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.
The more our focus gets distracted, the worse we do.
The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain's prefrontal regions. Specialised circuitry in this area boosts the strength of incoming signals we want to concentrate on and dampens down those we choose to ignore.
Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion. That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional wave.
The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.
The stronger our selective attention, the more powerfully we can stay absorbed in what we've chosen to do.
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections.
Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning.
Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections.
One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy.
3. Attention top and bottom
Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems.
Bottom-up brain is
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 analyses what's in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us. 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.
If we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort.
At topmost levels the more you you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.
Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering techinque during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup.
The bottom-up circuitry learns voraciously - and quietly taking in lessons continually as we go through the day. Such implicit learning need never enter our awareness, though it acts as a rudder in life nonetheless, for better or for worse.
Bottom-up awareness makes us suckers for subconscious primes.
We're most prone to emotions driving focus as automatic involuntary choice when - our minds are wandering, when we are distracted or when we're overwhelmed by information - or all three.
We fixate on what's so disturbing and forget the rest. The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are superglue of attention.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets.
The downside of a life lived bottom-up on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what's going on.
4. The value of a mind adrift
Wandering mind may also be considered as not wandering away from from what counts but wandering towards something of value
While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our livers.
Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights.
A classic model of the stages of creativity roughly translates to the three modes of focus: orienting, where we search out and immerse ourselves in all kinds of inputs; selective attention on the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, where we associate freely to let the solution emerge - then home in on the solution.
Our mind holds endless ideas. memories. and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting withe right memory within the right context - and all that coming into the spotlight of attention - diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight.
Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedon in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.
5 Finding balance
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgement, character, and will. - William James
Mind wandering itself seemed to be a cause of unhappiness some or much of the time.
Creative associations aside, mind wandering tends to centre on our self and our preoccupations. While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.
You can't ruminate about yourself while you[re absorbed in a challenging task.
The more our mind wanders, the less we can register what's going on right now, right here.
Whenever you notice your mind wandering bring your mind back to its point of focus.
Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in thought we fail to realise that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta-awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.
An even keel in attention reflects a mental mode where we simply notice what ever comes in to awareness without getting caught up or swept away by any particular thing. Everything flows through.
People who are able to rest their attention in this open mode notice more about their surroundings.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion.
The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest.
Atten 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.
We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure.
Total positive absorption shuts off the inner voice, that running dialogue with ourselves that goes on even during our quiet moments.
PART II SELF AWARENESS
6. The inner rudder
Our subtle physiological reactions reflect the sum total of our experience relevant to the decision at hand.
The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in sub cortical neural network that gather, store, and apply algorithms form every event in our lives - creating our inner rudder.
The brain harbours our deepest sense of purpose and meaning in these sub-cortical regions - areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the neocortex, but richly to the gut. We know our values by first getting a visceral sense of what feels right and what does not , then articulate those feelings for ourselves.
How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Our "gut feelings" are 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.
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 before the top-down circuits come to more reasoned conclusion.
7. Seeing ourselves as other sees us
There is intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power: There are relatively few gaps between one's own and others' ratings among lower-level employees. But higher someone's position in an organisation, the bigger the gap. Self awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organisation's ladder.
The acoustics of our skull case render our voice as it sounds to us very different from what others hear. But our tone of voice matters immensely to the impact of what we say.
Group think begins with the unstated assumption We know everything we need to.
Clarity begins with realising what we do not notice - and don't notice that we don't notice.
Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information input or questionable assumptions. Another 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 hones.
8. A recipe for self control
Attention regulates emotion.
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.
The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak.
In the mind's arena, willpower represents a wrestling match between top and bottom systems. Willpower keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a "cool" mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our "hot" emotional reactions - quick, impulsive, and automatic.
PART III READING OTHERS
9. The woman who know too much
Gestures always occur just before the most emphasised part of what you're saying.
The timing of the gesture interprets its meaning. If your timing is off, a positive statement can have negative impact.
Such readings of meta-message in nonverbal channels occur to us instantly, unconsciously, and automatically. Everything we attend to in another person generates meaning at an unconscious level, and our bottom-up circuitry constantly reads it.
10. The empathy triad
Super-sensitive reading of emotional signals represents a zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three main varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience.
In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through.
The third variety, empathetic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them mobilising us to help if need be.
An inquisitive nature, which predisposes us to learn from every body, feeds our cognitive empathy, amplifyiing our understanding of other people's worlds.
You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.
Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning in to ourselves.
Compassion builds on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others. If self-absorbed, we simply do not notice other people.
By being more self-aware you can see what's being projected on to you, and what you're projecting on to others.
The more you can pick up the subtle cues of emotion the more emphatic understanding you are able to have.
11 Social sensitivity
Social intuition tells us how accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send, silent modifiers of what they are saying.
Ground rules for what's appropriate can create invisible barriers when people from different cultures work together.
Attention to context lets us pick up subtle social cues that can guide how we behave.
The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay - and the more attention you pay, the more you care.
PART IV THE BIGGER CONTEXT
12. Patterns, Systems, And Messes
Systems are virtually invisible to the naked eye, but their working can be rendered visible by gathering data from enough points that the outlines of their dynamics come into focus. The more data, the clearer the map becomes.
13. System Blindness
Systems are, at first glance, invisible to our brain - we have no direct perception of any of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly, through mental models and take actions based on those models. The more grounded iin data those models are, the more effective our interventions.
Native lore has been a crutial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time.
In a system there are no side effects - just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as "side effect" simply reflect our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realise.
It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal.
14. Distant Threats
You can plan for a hundred years, but you don't know what will happen the next moment. - Neem Karoli baba
We've reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices.
Better: Zero in on a manageable number of meaningful patterns within a data torrent and ignore the rest.
PART V SMART PRACTICE
15. The Myth of 10,000 hours
You don't get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal - Andres Ericsson
You have to tweak the system by pushing allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.
Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is "deliberate practice," where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.
Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practising makes a crucial difference.
Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognise errors and correct them. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye - and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don't get to the top ranks.
The feedback matters and the concentration does, too - not just the hours.
After about fifty hours of training 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.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain's urge to automatise 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, of 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 actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current of performance. The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.
Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. World-class competitors 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.
Memory is like an index; expert have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognise.
Negativity focuses us on a narrow range - what's upsetting us. A rule of thumb in cognitive therapy holds that focusing on the negatives in experience offers a recipe for depression.
Positive emotions widen our span of attention; we're free to take it all in.
16 Brain on Games
A lot of tedh is oriented towards distracting. But with calming tech, we're asking how can bring more balance to the world.
17. Breathing buddies
Stopping on cue is the holy grail of cognitive control.
Deliberate, top-down attention holds a key to self-management.
Mindfulness boosts the classic attention network in the rain's fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.
Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractions. This lets us focus on what's important rather than be distracted by what's going on around us.
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correction your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.
Mindfulness develops our capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, nonreactive manner.
PART VI THE WELL-FOCUSED LEADER
18 How leaders direct attention
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Stories do more than grab our attention: they keep it.
Attention tends to focus on what has meaning - what matters. The story a leader tells can imbue a particular focus with such resonance, and so implies a choice for the others on where to put their attention and energy.
First the people running the old system don't notice the change. Whey they do, they assume it's minor. Then it's a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to search for new possibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery and innovation. Exploitation takes sustained focus on what you;re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance.
Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing - though the risks of failure are greater and the horizon for payback is further away.
19 The leader's triple focus
The sweet spot for smart decisions comes not just from being a domain expert but also from having high self-awareness. If you know yourself as well as your business then you can be shrewder in interpreting the facts.
Leaders who inspire can articulate shared values that resonate with and motivate the group. But to speak from the heart to the heart a leader must first know her values. That takes self awareness.
Inspiring leadership demands attuning both to an inner emotional reality and to that of those we seek to inspire.
The common cold of leadership is poor listening.
Every organisation needs people with a keen focus on goals that matter, the talent to continually learn how to do even better, and the ability to tune out distractions. Innovation, productivity and growth depend on such high performers.
Focus is not just selection the right thing but also saying no to the wrong ones. Single pointed fixation on a goal morphs into over-achievement when the category of "distractions" expands to include other people's concerns, their smart ideas and their crucial information. Not to mention their morale, loyalty and motivation.
Managing your impact on others - by skillful leveraging of their visibility and role to have a positive impact.
To anticipate how people will react you have to read people's reactions to you. That takes self awareness and empatahy in a self reinforcing cycle. You become more aware of how you're coming across to other people.
With high self awareness you can more readily develop good self management. If you manage yourself better you will influence better.
20 What makes a leader?
Emotional aperture the ability to percieve subtle cues in a group oerates a bit like a camera. We can zoom in to focus on one person's feelings or zoom out to take in the collective whether a classroom or a work group.
For leaders aperture ensures a more accurate reading for exaple support or antagonism for a proposal. Reading it well can mean the difference between a failed initiative and a helpful mid-course correction.
Two of the main mental ruts that threaten the ability to notice are unquestioned assumptions and overly relied on rules of thumb.
Top performing teams follow norms that enhance the collective self awareness such as by surfacing simmering disagreements and settling them before they boil over.
To harvest the collective wisdom of a group you need tow things: mindful presence and a sense of safety.
Play equals trust a space where people can take risks. Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.
PART VII THE BIG PICTURE
21 Leading for the long future
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, How will what we do today matter in a century or in five hundred years?
We have strong cognitive biases towards our present needs and are weak thinkers about the long away future. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.
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.
While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.
Attention works much like a muscle - use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.
Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions, Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the lager world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
Attention connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience.
Attention provides a mechanism that underlie our awareness of the world and the voluntary regulation of our thoughts and feelings
Your focus determines your reality
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
PART I THE ANATOMY OF ATTENTION
2 Basics
The focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself.
There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.
The more our focus gets distracted, the worse we do.
The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain's prefrontal regions. Specialised circuitry in this area boosts the strength of incoming signals we want to concentrate on and dampens down those we choose to ignore.
Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion. That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional wave.
The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.
The stronger our selective attention, the more powerfully we can stay absorbed in what we've chosen to do.
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections.
Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning.
Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections.
One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy.
3. Attention top and bottom
Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems.
Bottom-up brain is
- faster in brain time, which operats in milliseconds
- involuntary and automatic: always on
- intuitive, operating through networks of asssociation
- impulsive driven by emotions
- executor of our habitual routines and guide fro our actoins
- manager for our mental models of the world
By contrast top-down mind is:
- slower
- voluntary
- effortful
- the seat of self control, which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and nute emotionally driven impulses
- able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of our automatic repertoire - to an extent
Voluntary attention, willpower and intentional choice are top down; reflexive attention, impulse, and rote habit are bottom-up
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 analyses what's in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us. 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.
If we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort.
At topmost levels the more you you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.
Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering techinque during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup.
The bottom-up circuitry learns voraciously - and quietly taking in lessons continually as we go through the day. Such implicit learning need never enter our awareness, though it acts as a rudder in life nonetheless, for better or for worse.
Bottom-up awareness makes us suckers for subconscious primes.
We're most prone to emotions driving focus as automatic involuntary choice when - our minds are wandering, when we are distracted or when we're overwhelmed by information - or all three.
We fixate on what's so disturbing and forget the rest. The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are superglue of attention.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets.
The downside of a life lived bottom-up on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what's going on.
4. The value of a mind adrift
Wandering mind may also be considered as not wandering away from from what counts but wandering towards something of value
While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our livers.
Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights.
A classic model of the stages of creativity roughly translates to the three modes of focus: orienting, where we search out and immerse ourselves in all kinds of inputs; selective attention on the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, where we associate freely to let the solution emerge - then home in on the solution.
Our mind holds endless ideas. memories. and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting withe right memory within the right context - and all that coming into the spotlight of attention - diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight.
Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedon in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.
5 Finding balance
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgement, character, and will. - William James
Mind wandering itself seemed to be a cause of unhappiness some or much of the time.
Creative associations aside, mind wandering tends to centre on our self and our preoccupations. While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.
You can't ruminate about yourself while you[re absorbed in a challenging task.
The more our mind wanders, the less we can register what's going on right now, right here.
Whenever you notice your mind wandering bring your mind back to its point of focus.
Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in thought we fail to realise that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta-awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.
An even keel in attention reflects a mental mode where we simply notice what ever comes in to awareness without getting caught up or swept away by any particular thing. Everything flows through.
People who are able to rest their attention in this open mode notice more about their surroundings.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion.
The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest.
Atten 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.
We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure.
Total positive absorption shuts off the inner voice, that running dialogue with ourselves that goes on even during our quiet moments.
PART II SELF AWARENESS
6. The inner rudder
Our subtle physiological reactions reflect the sum total of our experience relevant to the decision at hand.
The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in sub cortical neural network that gather, store, and apply algorithms form every event in our lives - creating our inner rudder.
The brain harbours our deepest sense of purpose and meaning in these sub-cortical regions - areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the neocortex, but richly to the gut. We know our values by first getting a visceral sense of what feels right and what does not , then articulate those feelings for ourselves.
How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Our "gut feelings" are 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.
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 before the top-down circuits come to more reasoned conclusion.
7. Seeing ourselves as other sees us
There is intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power: There are relatively few gaps between one's own and others' ratings among lower-level employees. But higher someone's position in an organisation, the bigger the gap. Self awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organisation's ladder.
The acoustics of our skull case render our voice as it sounds to us very different from what others hear. But our tone of voice matters immensely to the impact of what we say.
Group think begins with the unstated assumption We know everything we need to.
Clarity begins with realising what we do not notice - and don't notice that we don't notice.
Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information input or questionable assumptions. Another 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 hones.
8. A recipe for self control
Attention regulates emotion.
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.
The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak.
In the mind's arena, willpower represents a wrestling match between top and bottom systems. Willpower keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a "cool" mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our "hot" emotional reactions - quick, impulsive, and automatic.
PART III READING OTHERS
9. The woman who know too much
Gestures always occur just before the most emphasised part of what you're saying.
The timing of the gesture interprets its meaning. If your timing is off, a positive statement can have negative impact.
Such readings of meta-message in nonverbal channels occur to us instantly, unconsciously, and automatically. Everything we attend to in another person generates meaning at an unconscious level, and our bottom-up circuitry constantly reads it.
10. The empathy triad
Super-sensitive reading of emotional signals represents a zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three main varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience.
In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through.
The third variety, empathetic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them mobilising us to help if need be.
An inquisitive nature, which predisposes us to learn from every body, feeds our cognitive empathy, amplifyiing our understanding of other people's worlds.
You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.
Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning in to ourselves.
Compassion builds on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others. If self-absorbed, we simply do not notice other people.
By being more self-aware you can see what's being projected on to you, and what you're projecting on to others.
The more you can pick up the subtle cues of emotion the more emphatic understanding you are able to have.
11 Social sensitivity
Social intuition tells us how accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send, silent modifiers of what they are saying.
Ground rules for what's appropriate can create invisible barriers when people from different cultures work together.
Attention to context lets us pick up subtle social cues that can guide how we behave.
The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay - and the more attention you pay, the more you care.
PART IV THE BIGGER CONTEXT
12. Patterns, Systems, And Messes
Systems are virtually invisible to the naked eye, but their working can be rendered visible by gathering data from enough points that the outlines of their dynamics come into focus. The more data, the clearer the map becomes.
13. System Blindness
Systems are, at first glance, invisible to our brain - we have no direct perception of any of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly, through mental models and take actions based on those models. The more grounded iin data those models are, the more effective our interventions.
Native lore has been a crutial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time.
In a system there are no side effects - just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as "side effect" simply reflect our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realise.
It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal.
14. Distant Threats
You can plan for a hundred years, but you don't know what will happen the next moment. - Neem Karoli baba
We've reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices.
Better: Zero in on a manageable number of meaningful patterns within a data torrent and ignore the rest.
PART V SMART PRACTICE
15. The Myth of 10,000 hours
You don't get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal - Andres Ericsson
You have to tweak the system by pushing allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.
Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is "deliberate practice," where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.
Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practising makes a crucial difference.
Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognise errors and correct them. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye - and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don't get to the top ranks.
The feedback matters and the concentration does, too - not just the hours.
After about fifty hours of training 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.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain's urge to automatise 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, of 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 actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current of performance. The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.
Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. World-class competitors 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.
Memory is like an index; expert have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognise.
Negativity focuses us on a narrow range - what's upsetting us. A rule of thumb in cognitive therapy holds that focusing on the negatives in experience offers a recipe for depression.
Positive emotions widen our span of attention; we're free to take it all in.
16 Brain on Games
A lot of tedh is oriented towards distracting. But with calming tech, we're asking how can bring more balance to the world.
17. Breathing buddies
Stopping on cue is the holy grail of cognitive control.
Deliberate, top-down attention holds a key to self-management.
Mindfulness boosts the classic attention network in the rain's fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.
Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractions. This lets us focus on what's important rather than be distracted by what's going on around us.
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correction your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.
Mindfulness develops our capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, nonreactive manner.
PART VI THE WELL-FOCUSED LEADER
18 How leaders direct attention
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Stories do more than grab our attention: they keep it.
Attention tends to focus on what has meaning - what matters. The story a leader tells can imbue a particular focus with such resonance, and so implies a choice for the others on where to put their attention and energy.
First the people running the old system don't notice the change. Whey they do, they assume it's minor. Then it's a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to search for new possibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery and innovation. Exploitation takes sustained focus on what you;re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance.
Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing - though the risks of failure are greater and the horizon for payback is further away.
19 The leader's triple focus
The sweet spot for smart decisions comes not just from being a domain expert but also from having high self-awareness. If you know yourself as well as your business then you can be shrewder in interpreting the facts.
Leaders who inspire can articulate shared values that resonate with and motivate the group. But to speak from the heart to the heart a leader must first know her values. That takes self awareness.
Inspiring leadership demands attuning both to an inner emotional reality and to that of those we seek to inspire.
The common cold of leadership is poor listening.
Every organisation needs people with a keen focus on goals that matter, the talent to continually learn how to do even better, and the ability to tune out distractions. Innovation, productivity and growth depend on such high performers.
Focus is not just selection the right thing but also saying no to the wrong ones. Single pointed fixation on a goal morphs into over-achievement when the category of "distractions" expands to include other people's concerns, their smart ideas and their crucial information. Not to mention their morale, loyalty and motivation.
Managing your impact on others - by skillful leveraging of their visibility and role to have a positive impact.
To anticipate how people will react you have to read people's reactions to you. That takes self awareness and empatahy in a self reinforcing cycle. You become more aware of how you're coming across to other people.
With high self awareness you can more readily develop good self management. If you manage yourself better you will influence better.
20 What makes a leader?
Emotional aperture the ability to percieve subtle cues in a group oerates a bit like a camera. We can zoom in to focus on one person's feelings or zoom out to take in the collective whether a classroom or a work group.
For leaders aperture ensures a more accurate reading for exaple support or antagonism for a proposal. Reading it well can mean the difference between a failed initiative and a helpful mid-course correction.
Two of the main mental ruts that threaten the ability to notice are unquestioned assumptions and overly relied on rules of thumb.
Top performing teams follow norms that enhance the collective self awareness such as by surfacing simmering disagreements and settling them before they boil over.
To harvest the collective wisdom of a group you need tow things: mindful presence and a sense of safety.
Play equals trust a space where people can take risks. Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.
PART VII THE BIG PICTURE
21 Leading for the long future
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, How will what we do today matter in a century or in five hundred years?
We have strong cognitive biases towards our present needs and are weak thinkers about the long away future. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.
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.
