We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.
For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. 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 larger 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.
It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.
Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day – hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.
If there is a remedy, I feel it must lie in how we prepare our young for life.
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 correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12.
You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.
But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks.
As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.
A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.”43.
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.
And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.
Stress makes people stupid.” On.
The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.
The creative mind is, by its very nature, a bit unruly. There is a natural tension between orderly self-control and the innovative urge. It’s not that people who are creative are out-of-control emotionally; rather, they are willing to entertain a wider range of impulse and action than do less adventurous spirits. That is, after all, what creates new possibilities.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient – who bounce back right away – can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.
We do not compete in our careers with people who lack the requisite intelligence to enter and stay in our field – but rather against the much smaller group of those who have managed to jump the hurdles of schooling, entry exams, and other cognitive challenges to get into the field in the first place.
In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.