Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman

“Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” the odds are fifty-fifty their minds will be wandering.1

Where do our thoughts wander when we’re not thinking of anything in particular? Most often, they are all about me. The “me,” William James proposed, weaves together our sense of self by telling our story—fitting random bits of life into a cohesive narrative.

It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.

While many spiritual traditions, like Huxley’s parrots, see mind wandering as a source of woe, evolutionary psychologists see this as a great cognitive leap. Both views have some truth.

Modern life values sitting in school or an office, focusing on one thing at a time—an attentional stance that may not always have paid off in early human history. Survival in the wild, some neuroscientists argue, may have depended at crucial moments on a rapidly shifting attention and swift action, without hesitating to think what to do. What we now diagnose as an attentional deficit may reflect a natural variation in focusing styles that had advantages in evolution—and so continues to be dispersed in our gene pool.

The goal, he adds, is to be better able to engage in mind wandering when you want to, and not otherwise.

Selecting one sharp focus requires inhibiting a multitude of others. The mind has to fight off the pull of everything else, sorting out what’s important from what’s irrelevant. That takes cognitive effort.

The most restful surroundings are in nature, argues Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, who proposes what he calls “attention restoration theory.”15

Such 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. Surfing the Web, playing video games, or answering email does not.

We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our f...

In contrast, a walk through a park or in the woods puts little such demand on attention. We can restore by spending time in nature—even a few minutes strolling in a park or any setting rich in fascinations like the muted reds of clouds at sunset or a butterfly’s flutter. This triggers bottom-up attention “modestly,” as Kaplan’s group put it, allowing circuits for top-down efforts to replenish their energy, restoring attentiveness and memory, and improving cognition.16

the single most focusing activity in anyone’s day, and the most pleasant, is lovemaking.

Self-awareness, then, represents an essential focus, one that attunes us to the subtle murmurs within that can help guide our way through life.

operates as that inner rudder. There are two major streams of self-awareness: “me,” which builds narratives about our past and future; and “I,” which brings us into the immediate present.

Self-awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organization’s ladder.

research has found that when people receive negative performance feedback in a warm, supportive tone of voice, they leave feeling positive—despite the negative feedback.

When this tendency to ignore evidence to the contrary spreads into a shared self-deception, it becomes groupthink.

groupthink begins with the unstated assumption We know everything we need to

Clarity begins with realizing what we do not notice—and don’t notice that we don’t notice.

Attention regulates emotion.

Executive function includes attention to attention itself, or more generally, awareness of our mental states; this lets us monitor our focus and keep it on track.

The greater the demands on our attention, it seems, the poorer we get at resisting temptations.

Our circuitry for empathy was designed for face-to-face moments. Today, working together online poses special challenges for empathy.

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; we can walk by utterly indifferent to their predicament. But once we notice them we can tune in, sense their feelings and needs, and act on our concern.

When resources are scarce the need to compete for them can sometimes suppress empathic concern, and competition is part of life in almost any social group, whether for food, mates, or power—or an appointment with a doctor.

“Systems blindness is the main thing we struggle with in our work,” says John Sterman,

Focusing on what’s wrong about what we do activates circuitry for distressing emotions. Emotions, remember, guide our attention. And attention glides away from the unpleasant.

Negative focus leads to discouragement and disengagement. When our neural centers for distress take over, our focus shifts to the distress itself, and how to ease it. We long to tune out.

When we are motivated by positive emotions, what we do feels more meaningful and the urge to act lasts longer. It all stays longer in attention. In contrast, fear of global warming’s impacts may get our attention quickly, but once we do one thing and feel a little better, we think we’re done.

Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is “deliberate practice,” where an expert coach (essentially what Susan Butcher was for her dogs) takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.

when your mind wanders—and you notice that it has wandered—bring it back to your point of focus and sustain your attention there. And when your mind wanders off again, do the same.

Barbara Fredrickson, who studies positive feelings and their effects, puts it, when we’re feeling good our awareness expands from our usual self-centered focus on “me” to a more inclusive and warm focus on “we.”

A focus on our strengths, Boyatzis argues, urges us toward a desired future and stimulates openness to new ideas, people, and plans. In contrast, spotlighting our weaknesses elicits a defensive sense of obligation and guilt, closing us down.

“You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive,” says Boyatzis. “You need both, but in the right ratio.”

Losada determined that the most effective had a positive/negative ratio of at least 2.9 good feelings to every negative moment

That contrasts with a more common approach that focuses on a person’s weaknesses—whether bad grades or missing quarterly targets—and what to do to remedy them.

One of the worst versions of this approach occurs when parents punish a child for bad grades until he improves. The anxiety associated with being punished actually hampers the child’s prefrontal cortex while he is trying to concentrate and learn, creating further impediment to improvement.

In face-to-face interactions our social circuitry picks up a multitude of cues and signals that help us connect well, and wire together the neurons involved. But during thousands of hours spent online, the wiring of the social brain gets virtually no exercise.

When 3,034 Singaporean children and adolescents were followed for two years, those who became extreme gamers showed increases in anxiety, depression, and social phobia, and a drop in grades. But if they stopped their gaming habit, all those problems decreased.6

hours spent battling hordes intent on killing you understandably encourage “hostile attribution bias,” the instant assumption that the kid who bumped you in the hallway has a grudge. Just as troubling, violent gamers show lessened concern when witnessing people being mean, as in bullying.

Kids who play games that require cooperation show more helpfulness in the course of a day. Perhaps those purely violent, me-against-all games could be redesigned so that a winning strategy demanded coming to the aid of those in trouble and finding helpers and allies—not just a hostile scan.

In a day when online shopping and instant messages encourage gratification now, kids need more help with that practice. One strong conclusion by the scientists who studied the Dunedin, New Zealand, kids was the need for interventions that boost self-control, particularly during early childhood and the teen years.

I saw lessons in emotional intelligence—that is, in self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skills—as synergistic with standard academic courses. Now I’m realizing that the basics of attention training are a next step, a low-tech method for boosting neural circuitry at the heart of emotional intelligence.

An older dichotomy in psychology between “cognitive” and “noncognitive” abilities would put academic skills in a separate category from social and emotional ones. But given how the neural scaffolding for executive control underlies both academic and social/emotional skills, that separation seems as antiquated as the Cartesian split between mind and body. In the design of the brain they are highly interactive, not fully independent. Kids who can’t pay attention can’t learn; they also can’t manage themselves well.

Mindfulness strengthens connections between the prefrontal executive zones and the amygdala, particularly the circuits that can say “no” to impulse—a vital skill for navigating through life

Enhanced executive function widens the gap between impulse and action, in part by building meta-awareness, the capacity to observe our mental processes rather than just be swept away by them. This creates decision points we did not have before: we can squelch troublesome impulses that we usually would act on.

Mindlessness, in the form of mind wandering, may be the single biggest waster of attention in the workplace.

Then there’s multitasking, the bane of efficiency. “Multitasking” really means switching what’s filling the capacity of working memory—and routine disruptions from a given focus at work can mean minutes lost to the original task. It can take ten or fifteen minutes to regain full focus.

Former Medtronic CEO Bill George agrees. “Today’s leaders are besieged. They’re scheduled every fifteen minutes throughout the day, with thousands of interruptions and distractions. You need to find some quiet time in your day just to reflect.”