Coaching in The Attention Era
How Attention Became The World’s Most Endangered Resource
A friend recently recommended to me an episode of Know Your Enemy, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell’s podcast, in which they interview Chris Hayes about his new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
I haven’t yet read the book, but listening to their conversation about it has bumped it up to the top of my list and revealed many powerful connections to my work as a coach.
Some of my main takeaways:
As the amount of information we have access to continues to increase, what becomes most scarce and valuable is attention.
Modern capitalism—and social media in particular—takes hold of our brains (by their deep evolutionary roots) to exert control over where we expend our finite quantity of attention.
A crucial skill in paying attention is negation: choosing what to ignore.
Paying attention is a profoundly spiritual practice.
To coordinate human effort attention is necessary but not sufficient.
I also appreciated their discussion of Chris’s job as a cable news host in this era (he endearingly compares himself to a tobacco executive that smokes three packs a day”) amidst the Trump Administration working to manipulate, fragment, and overwhelm our attention. Matt, Sam, and Chris do an excellent job of articulating the political implications and opportunities presented by the “attention economy” in which we live.
I highly recommend focusing and hour of your attention on this episode.
Coaching in The Attention Era
Their conversation got me thinking about my role as coach at this time when our attention is such an endangered resource.
We’re fighting against sophisticated engineering teams and pathologically attention-seeking politicians, both of whom have agendas that trade our well-being for profit and power. For many of us, we know what we want to pay attention to—whatever’s most meaningful to us—but consistently focusing our sustained attention there is a battle with these powerful attention-hoarding forces.
One way that I support my clients is as a masterful wrangler of their attention.
At the beginning of my work with a client, I get a sense of what’s most important to them—what they really want to be focusing their attention on—and I build a sort of enclosure around these sacred topics. Then, when their normal human brain comes along and tries to throw open the gate to let their attention run wild in the fields of anxiety, doubt, and projection, I get to swoop in and corral their focus. Our strongest tools to support our success (creativity, wisdom, discipline) can be accessed when our attention is focused in the present moment.
Not only do I wrangle their attention back into the sacred enclosure of what they care about most, but I support my clients to observe which thoughts and feelings are responsible for picking the lock. When we look closely and compassionately at this process, it reveals to us so much about where we’ve been getting in our own way. Over the course of several months in coaching, my clients not only get hours of my professional wrangling services, but they also get to build their skills in refocusing their own attention where it’s most useful: here, now.
The present moment is the only place where we get to exert our precious effort which is ultimately what produces results. Attention is necessary, but not sufficient.
Focusing our attention requires our brain to do two things at once:
Choose what to pay attention to, and
Ignore distractions.
These tasks have never been more difficult than they are today in the Attention Era, and the less we practice them the harder they become. I’ve found the coaching arena to be a uniquely powerful context in which to build these skills and I consider it an enormous privilege to support others in focusing their attention on the matter of their own lives.