KEY 5 FOCUS Adjusting our lens of attention
Imagine. It's World War I. You are an officer in the British Army; not a cushy, General Sir Hogmanay Melchett in Blackadder sort of officer. No Sah. You are in the trenches with your men, just another fellow in the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, although you do have a bit of a propensity for danger missions into no man's land.
Now you are sitting there in the trenches on the front in Ploegsteert, Belgium. Unlike most of the waterlogged, rat-infested bogholes that make up the front line, the 6th's trenches have a remarkable lack of one thing. Lice. That's because you are Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, later Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, and the first thing you did as commander of the battalion was recognise the need to de-louse your men so they aren't distracted from the task at hand.
The ability to focus on what really matters, and to do it quickly and confidently, is seen as one of most essential attributes for success in the modern business arena. But this tells only half the story. What matters more is our ability to ignore the multitude of distractions that work to pull us away from the task at hand. As Sir Winston said, ‘You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks’.
We need to be able not only to focus, but to fix that focus and narrow it to an attention span that remains constant and unwavering.
Our ability to pay attention is a survival tool that the brain developed ...
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