Are you available….for yourself!

I work and connect with many amazing people…leaders, parents and just fabulous individuals. Whether I’m trying to book a time in their diary for a professional event or meeting, or trying to book lunch with one of the school mums, availability is often a challenge.

Our physical time is often taken up, but what about our mental time?

Being mentally available is challenging

Are you mentally available when you need to be? Are you present and focused often and long enough for your own thinking, and for those around you…and what does that mean?

Researchers have identified a newly recognised neurological phenomenon known as Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). It is our increasing inability to hold our attention for significant periods of time.

It has a negative effect on our productivity because our brains are overwhelmed with internal ‘chatter’.

Essentially, with so much going on, our brain’s attention is required in so many places that it is overwhelmed and the brain issues a ‘threat warning’ and goes into a sort of survival mode – limiting our mental capacity and control and we find it really hard to keep our attention on one thing, and even more so, in the present moment.

We are no long ‘available’

We are no longer ‘available’ for fully logical thinking and assessment and we will tend to mind wander. Our default focus when we mind-wander is to ruminate about ourselves and our situations, and with no conscious control, this can often turn out to be a less than positive experience – we by default focus on the bad stuff.

And of course, we are increasingly not mentally available for those who need our support. In meetings, webinars and phone calls, and even face-to-face conversations we can wander off – negating the value of the moment.

ADT rears it’s head when we are trying to deal with too much and results in

  • a tendency for black and white thinking. Our ability to see the ‘shades of grey’ and alternative perspectives effectively disappears. We just need to ‘survive’ the moment based on a cursory assessment of the situation.
  • difficulty in staying organised, setting priorities and managing time – the day just goes!
  • a constant low level feeling of panic and guilt – “I really needed to get x done today and I didn’t” (Hallowell EM “Overloaded circuits: why smart people underperform” Harvard Business Review 2005)

You may experience this when you have lots of ideas swirling about in your head and can’t focus. You may feel ‘crushed’ under the weight of everything that ‘had’ to get done. You may have technology coming out your ears (when did I last check facebook, has anyone emailed me, I forgot to ‘like’ John’s last post!).

Overwhelm is a major culprit

Or you may be overwhelmed with an emotional response of some kind to a event (a comment, a decision or a formal communication – think the recent Federal Budget news) and react based on the impact on you rather than being able to see the whole picture. We all do it, it’s normal, but it doesn’t always serve us well.

Reacting is easy and normal, responding takes mind control.

So what can we do..?

Mindfulness is a wonderful strategy and life skill worth learning about and focusing on. We can shift from living and leading ‘mindlessly’ to ‘mindfully’ – with presence and control.

Mindfulness is your ability to be and stay in the present moment, without judgement about what is going on in that moment.

Mindful leaders:

  • gather more facts
  • notice subtleties
  • make better decisions
  • have greater perspective, foresight and insight
  • are mentally available and non-judgemental, which means people like dealing with them!

And they do this because they are present and in the moment – limiting their attention to what is at hand and are practiced at the non-judgemental spin as a first response.

You can practice mindfulness

One way you can start to practice mindfulness is to train yourself to respond in a predictable way that works for you. For example, train your brain to respond to challenging and emotional situations with something like… ‘That’s interesting!’… and then take a moment to take a breath and examine the facts.

Ask yourself…

  • What just happened?
  • What was my original response?
  • Is that an appropriate response or am I making some assumptions?
  • What else could be going on that I haven’t tuned in to?
  • What is the other side of the coin, or the other person’s perspective?
  • What questions can I ask to check that out?
  • What is the big picture that I need to consider?

It’s a challenge for us all, and only the Dalai Lama has it totally mastered, but the icing on the cake is that in trying to be mindful we are in fact, exercising and developing our brain’s overall capacity – and that has to be a good thing!

Michelle  🙂

 

 

 

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