Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

by David Rock

Ohlsson finds that when someone hits an impasse, telling her what not to think tends to help only 5 percent of the time. Giving people clues about what they should think about tends to help only 8 percent of the time.

As people are often already anxious when stuck at an impasse, and anxiety generally makes people’s views narrow and their brains noisier, it’s important to reduce people’s anxiety and increase their positive emotions—in other words, to shift them from an away state to a toward state. A great way to do this is using elements of the SCARF model. You could help the person increase her sense of status, perhaps by encouraging her. Or increase someone’s sense of certainty by making implicit issues more explicit, say, by clarifying your objectives. Or increase a person’s sense of autonomy by ensuring that he is making the decisions and coming up with the ideas, not just listening to your suggestions. Another useful step is to help people simplify a problem into as few words as possible, to reduce the load on their prefrontal cortex and thus reduce its overall activation level. Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own. Once the other person is in the right state of mind, and you have a problem stated simply, your job, according to the research, is to help people reflect, though in a quiet way. You want people to look inward, but without dwelling on the details of the problem.

These kinds of questions generate a whole new thread to follow. Instead of your looking for a gap in the form of the source of another person’s problem, the other person is finding a gap in his own thinking process. It’s not you searching for problems; it’s him searching for gaps in his thinking process. You want people to look for assumptions or decisions that don’t make sense upon further reflection.

“One out of fifty people in college are good writers, in my experience,” Lieberman explains. “I make a point that I do not grade my students on the draft they have written of their paper. I grade them on how successfully they have critiqued their work. I build an incentive structure for being able to successfully attack their own work. The better they do that, the better they do in class.”

Lieberman plays with this traditional incentive structure. He grades his students’ work based on how well they incorporate their own earlier criticisms into their writing, on how much they improve. He links people’s sense of status to how much they can change. Their status is linked to the criticizing side, instead of to being criticized.

Lieberman has shown that people are, in theory, capable of giving themselves feedback, especially if their status isn’t threatened. They may even be more capable if their status is harnessed. But it’s not status itself that is the active ingredient in the change process; Lieberman gets people to activate their director, using status as the reward to do so.

The more you can help people find their own insights, the easier it will be to help others be effective, even when someone has lost the plot on an important project. Bringing other people to insight means letting go of “constructive performance feedback,” and replacing it with “facilitating positive change.” Instead of thinking about people’s problems and giving feedback or making suggestions, change can be facilitated faster in many instances if you think about people’s thinking, and help others think about their own thinking better. However, letting go of the default approach to problem-solving requires working against the way your brain wants to go, which requires a good director. And to be most effective at bringing others to insight, your goal is to activate other people’s director, too.

While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before. The best way to help someone see something new is to help quiet her mind so that she can have a moment of insight.

Surprises About the Brain Giving feedback often creates an intense threat response that doesn’t help people improve performance. The problem-solving approach may not be the most effective pathway to solutions. Providing suggestions often results in a lot of wasted time. Bringing people to their own insights is a fast way of getting people back on track. Some Things to Try Catch yourself when you go to give feedback, problem solve, or provide solutions. Help people think about their own thinking by focusing them on their own subtle internal thoughts, without getting into too much detail. Find ways to make it valuable for people to give themselves feedback; reward them for activating their director.

We are at the beginning of a new theoretical framework for change that draws from the science of the brain. At the heart of this framework is the idea that it is attention itself that changes the brain. It’s not the carrot-and-stick approach that creates change, it’s what this approach sometimes does, which is to focus people’s attention in the right way.

unit. Professor Robert Desimone from MIT studies neural synchrony. He believes that attending to stimuli involves use of nearly all of the brain. A 2006 study by Lawrence Ward at the University of British Columbia and four other scientists found that neural synchrony plays an important role in the integration of functional modules in the brain. They even found that neural synchrony is affected by how noisy the brain is. This links back to all of act 2, the way you can’t focus when there’s too much neuronal activity, such as over-arousal from sensing a threat.

A study by research psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz showed that changing the way you pay attention can change the circuitry of the brain not just over months, but even within a few weeks, enough to show up on a brain scan. “The power is in the focus,” Jeff would say to me over and again in our meetings. Schwartz, working with Henry P. Stapp, a renowned quantum physicist, and neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, has taken steps to explain the physics of how cells that fire together wire together, in a paper called “Quantum Physics in Neuroscience and Psychology.” “The act of observing, in and of itself, makes a difference, in the material world,” Schwartz explains.

Until people’s minds are at ease, focusing their attention on your goals is an uphill battle.

You can’t just keep offering these to motivate people, because if people expect this reward it tends to become less valuable, and a reward isn’t so rewarding unless it gets bigger each time, which isn’t sustainable.

An effective and more direct way to focus attention is simply to ask people the right question, to give them a gap to close. The brain is quite happy closing any gap, as long as it doesn’t take too much effort.

In summary, once the general threat level is reduced in a group, focus people’s attention on exactly the direction you want them to go in. Remember that the brain is chaotic and easily distracted, so be as clear and specific as possible.

The trouble is, because problems come to mind so much easier than solutions, people are always setting away goals instead of toward goals. Also, problems are more certain than unknown solutions, and the brain naturally steers toward certainty. For these reasons and more, toward goals are rare, and setting them might require getting some help from someone else, such as a mentor or coach.

The lesson here: if you are planning on setting goals for other people, perhaps instead create a framework for them to set goals for themselves.

The term “attention density,” coined by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, provides a scientific framework for future research about repeated attention. This density can be measured with such variables as frequency, duration, intensity, or amplitude of attention.

How do you get other people to pay regular attention to something that’s important to you? One of the best ways involves getting them to collaborate. Remember that the brain is eminently social, so if you can get a change you desire linked to the social world, you’re on the right track. Creating systems and processes that require people to talk about a project regularly can be as simple as bringing an idea up once a week and having people share their thoughts. Ideas, and brain circuits, come alive in conversation.

empathy. We know that these two networks are inversely correlated: when one is active, the other tends to be deactivated. It does suggest possibly that there is something inversely correlated about social and nonsocial abilities.” This makes sense when you understand that the networks you pay attention to are the ones that grow. If you spend a lot of time in cognitive tasks, your ability to have empathy with people reduces simply because that circuitry doesn’t get used much.

This like the Cherokee story about "the one you feed"

Leaders who want to drive change more effectively may want to practice becoming more intelligent about their inner world as a first step. A great way to do this is to discover more about your own brain.

Surprises About the Brain While human change appears hard, change in the brain is constant. Focused attention changes the brain. Attention goes all too easily to the threat. Once you focus attention away from threat, you can create new connections with the right questions. Creating long-term change requires paying regular attention to deepen new circuits, especially when they are new. Some Things to Try Practice watching for people’s emotional state when you want to facilitate change. Don’t try to influence people when they are in a strong away state. Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state. Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people’s attention directly on the specific circuits you want to bring to life. Invent ways to have people pay repeated attention to new circuits.

For thousands of years philosophers have said that to “know yourself” was the key to a healthy and successful life. Perhaps what is emerging from the new research about the brain is a new way of thinking about “self-awareness.” Only in this case, the “self” is the functioning of your own brain.

However, the only way to be more than just a machine is to deeply understand the machine-like nature of your brain. When you begin to know the machine-like nature of your brain, you are building your director. This enables you to say, “That’s just my brain,” in more situations, which gives you more choices of behaviors. Your capacity to change yourself, change others, and even change the world, may boil down to how well you know your brain, and your capacity to consciously intervene in otherwise automatic processes.