The Practice of Paying Attention

Hey, this is Mike Robbins. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of the podcast. Hope you're doing well, you, your family, your team, everyone around you. I want to talk today about attention, the practice of paying attention, the art of paying attention.

And, you know, attention is really one of our most precious resources. I've been thinking about, as I often do, how distracted I can get and how many things are coming at me, just like at you. I was just literally out on a walk. And, you know, I bring my phone with me when I walk most of the time I was, I ran a little bit in the midst of my walk.

I'm taking a few weeks off from running just to kind of rest my legs that have been a little sore. But as I'm listening to a podcast, and then recording an audio text for Michelle, and then looking at stuff on my phone as I'm walking, I'm just sort of laughing at myself in a way because, you know, we live here in beautiful Northern California, Marin County, a little North of San Francisco. And we live in a beautiful neighborhood and with, you know, there's hiking trails behind where we live, where I go and I walk and I'm like, there's so much beauty around me.

Like, what am I paying attention to? And I was trying not to be harsh about it, but just kind of notice, right? It's like, and remembering that we're living in a world where so many different people and technologies and companies are competing for our attention all the time from the moment we wake up in the morning. You know, I've talked about this here on the show.

Like I try and I'm successful. Sometimes I try not to sleep with my phone right next to my bed so that when I wake up in the morning, I have a little bit of time and space before I engage in, you know, texts or emails or social media or the news or the sports scores or whatever, you know, if I do pick up my phone in the morning as I'm doing some of my morning rituals, I try to just limit it to listening to music or listening to a podcast. Because again, you're probably listening to this or watching this on your phone or some device that's designed to work and, you know, help you communicate and connect and all the things we do, But also the business model of many technology companies and companies in general is to get our attention, is to draw our attention in so we buy whatever they're selling or they can advertise to us and keep us engaged in the app or the platform so we're not engaged in our life.

And I say this, you know, somewhat ironically, as you're engaged in your device right now to listen and watch me. So I get it. But if we don't intentionally direct our attention, someone or something else will. So there's a real practice to it.

And there's always been a practice to it. And yes, this is about mindfulness. This is about intention and attention. But it's also more challenging than ever these days.

And I think with the continual rise of sophisticated technology and artificial intelligence, like this is just going to be more and more and more of both a challenge and an opportunity for us as humans, as people in relationship with other people, as parents, as friends, as siblings, as spouses, as leaders, as teammates. And, you know, we really kind of become in a lot of ways what we pay attention to. Our attention shapes, our thoughts and our emotions, our relationships, our beliefs, our experience of life is a lot of what we're focused on.

It's not what happens to us, right? It's what we notice. It's what we pay attention to. It's what we're thinking about, talking about, looking at, if you will.

Again, you can walk around your house. You can walk around your neighborhood. You can pay attention to what's going on in your town or your state or your country or the world, wherever you may live. And your experience of it is going to be a lot of what you pay attention to.

Right. And attention is really a lot of, as I was saying just a minute ago, the kind of the currency of our time. And whether it's, you know, think about social media or news or politics or advertising or even AI. Right.

Everyone wants our attention because attention ultimately influences behavior, right? And that makes our attention incredibly valuable. If you think of it as a resource, if we think of it as a, you know, it's kind of weird to think of it as like a commodity, but it is this thing that we, you and I wake up every morning and we get to choose ultimately where we put our attention. Even with all of the things that may distract us or may be pulling for our attention, at some level it's a choice even though we do it by default right and when we think about this relationally or we think about this in terms of leadership or in terms of our teams our attention is one of the greatest gifts we can give to someone else especially these days like analog human connection human attention it listening it putting our phones away it making eye contact it being curious it allowing the people around us to feel seen and to really make that genuine connection for them but also for us It's like attention is one of the purest forms of appreciation, right?

Oftentimes, I mean, so much of my work over the years is focused on appreciation. And we think of appreciation as praise, as thanking people, as letting people know what we value about them and honoring them and acknowledging them, which it is, absolutely. but sometimes it's just paying attention and listening and stopping what we're doing and letting the other person know you matter more to me than whatever's in my email inbox or on my screen or whatever right i think about the many times over the last 20 years as a parent and it's gotten harder you know as again the technology has gotten more sophisticated and the phone has become more ubiquitous with everything that we do in life where it's like, I'm not paying attention to my own children, even though now they're 20 and 17 and looking at their own phones and have been for years.

But you know what I mean? It's like, wait a minute, what am I doing? Who matters to me? Right.

We're sitting on the couch with our spouse. We're sitting in meetings with our teams and we're all on various screens. And again, this isn't about screens and phones and, you know, technology per se, but that is one of the primary ways that it's challenging for us to pay attention or our attention gets pulled. You know, all of the ways in which our phone and our computers and our screens and our devices and our tablets and everything are dinging and alerting us for things.

And yeah, we need to be reminded when we have meetings and stuff's going on, but like, what is really important? Who is really important? Right. I think sometimes we, we confuse being informed with being consumed, right?

There's a lot going on in the world, in the country. And I'm, you know, like you trying to pay attention to it as much as I can. I don't know how much, a little, what's healthy. I want to know what's going on.

I want to be informed. I want to be engaged. I want to participate, but I also like, it can get consuming. And do I really need to check all the time what's happening in the latest headline or the score or this or that.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's good to know what's happening, but it's another thing to spend hours every day feeding our anxiety and obsessing about what's happening. I mean, we can ask ourselves, what really deserves my attention today or in this moment? And if you've ever gone on a period of time where you fast from the news or fast from your phone or whatever, or you're unplugged for a certain amount of time or at a retreat or whatever, you notice like it's weird at first, but then it's not that big of a deal.

Like, and if something big happens, you'll probably find out. You're not going to like miss major significant events and activities happening in the world if you're not obsessively checking, right? And it's also important for us to pay attention to ourselves, not in some self-absorbed, self-serving way, but like paying attention to our bodies, paying attention to our health, paying attention to how do I feel? What's going on?

Paying attention to our emotions. How am I actually feeling? Our thoughts, our ideas, our intuition, our, right, paying attention to the space between us. I mean, I noticed one of the things that I try to do, you know, when I get up to speak, and I, you know, I've been doing this for 25, going on 26 years, is like, pay attention to what's actually happening in the room, reading the room, feeling the room.

And sometimes when I, You know, you can even do this virtually. It's harder because you're staring at a screen as I am right now recording this. And like, you can't really, you know, we're not, this isn't a live conversation where there's other people engaging with me. I'm having a one-way conversation with you that I'm recording that you're either listening to or watching.

But like, even when I'm on Zoom or Teams or WebEx and I'm doing a virtual session or having a conversation, a meeting or, you know, facilitating a workshop or speaking to a group, even that while harder, there's still a collective field of energy. Definitely in a room physically with another human, a group of humans, a big group of people, we can pay attention to kind of what's happening in that room. And sometimes we're so focused on all kinds of external things, we're not actually paying attention to what's happening inside of us, but also what might be happening in the space between us and other people.

So paying attention is really important for us in our communication, in our connection, in our well-being, but we do have to start by paying attention to ourselves in a healthy way. You know, there's this notion of what we appreciate grows, right? What we focus on expands. And this has a lot to do with attention, right?

If we intentionally notice kindness and beauty and generosity and progress and effort and people doing things that we value and like looking for good stuff, right? My very first book is called Focus on the Good Stuff. It's about appreciation primarily, right? And gratitude, but it's about attention.

It's about paying attention to what is good What can we celebrate And look it easier to celebrate when we winning It easier to decide That was what I talked about a couple weeks ago you know the permission to celebrate We often feel that permission when something good happens, when, you know, the team wins the championship, when, you know, our company hits our numbers for the quarter or the year or whatever, like, yeah, but what can we notice? What can we pay attention to? What can we acknowledge?

it's not that the circumstances necessarily change it's what we're looking at what we're focused on and this isn't about pollyanna sugarcoating looks if we fail we fail if the numbers aren't great they're not great if things aren't going well but there's often so many things that go well like think of all the things that have gone well in your day today just for you to be sitting in this moment listening to or watching this whether it's early in the morning or late at night whether it's the middle of the day whether you're driving your car or on a walk or doing dishes or sitting at your desk or whatever you're doing at this moment, in addition to listening to or watching me, I would bet that a whole bunch of things had to work out for you just to be in this moment to have the space to even do this.

But are we paying attention to that? Right? A story I used to share a lot, but I think illustrates this. Michelle and I, when we lived together in San Francisco many years ago, we rented a place inside the Presidio.

And the Presidio is, it's a national park. It was, it's a former military base. It's in San Francisco on sort of the, it's in the city right before you get to the Golden Gate Bridge and head over to Marin where we live now, a little north of San Francisco, but it's this beautiful place. And where we lived on the side of the Presidio, we could literally walk from our place, our townhouse, down to Baker Beach, where there's this beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge and of the Pacific Ocean.

And I mean, just gorgeous. And there was a spot on the road up above there where people literally, it's like this beautiful lookout point where tourists come and take photos of the bridge behind them. I mean, it's gorgeous, even if it's really foggy, which sometimes it would be, but it's just this amazing view. And when we first moved in there, we were like, oh my gosh, can you believe we live right here in the Presidio, right by the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is incredible. You know, we're both from the Bay Area. Michelle grew up in Marin and I grew up over in Oakland, but like, you know, living right there was so cool. And we'd walk and look at this and we were so enamored.

And after a few months, the initial sort of being enamored by it wore off a little bit. And then there would be days I would be in my car and I'd be driving in and out from where we live in that area, right by wherever one stops to take photos, sometimes gets backed up and congested because, you know, there's people in their cars sort of looking and people stopping to take photos and people crossing the street, whatever. And I would find myself annoyed. What are all these people doing?

Get out of my way. And forgetting, like the reason that they're there is because this is one of the most beautiful spots, not only in San Francisco, not only in California, not only in the United States, but literally in the world, it's a beautiful, amazing, you know, landmark. Anyway, you get my point, right? It's like, I was paying attention to the annoyance of the backup of the traffic and people being in my way.

So I couldn't get where I was going instead of paying attention to, Oh dude, you live right by here in this incredible place that people come from all over the world to take photos in your neighborhood. Like it's a function of attention. What are we paying attention to? Now look, attention is a practice for us as humans, for us as parents, for us as spouses, for us as leaders.

Can we pay attention? It's not about perfection. It's about choice. It's about noticing.

It's about mindfulness. Again, what deserves my attention today? What am I giving this powerful and finite resource to? I appreciate you taking the time and giving your attention to me right now to watch this or listen to this, which I don't take lightly and I don't take for granted.

But what are some things that we can do? What specifically can you do? Can I do? Can we do to enhance our ability to really consciously pay attention to understand and embody the art of paying attention?

So first thing that we can do is notice where our attention goes today. So just in this moment right now and moving forward, or if you think back over the last few hours or whatever, the course of this day, whatever time it may be. Without judgment, just see if you can notice. Where is my attention?

Where is it right now? Where is it going in the next hour or two? Where has it been in the previous few hours? Just start paying more attention, right?

I remember years ago, I was taking a communication workshop and they said, you know, one of the ways you become a better listener is start noticing when you're not listening, which seemed a little strange. But yeah, if I'm not listening, oh, now I'm listening. I'm not listening. Oh, now I'm listening.

So notice what you're paying attention to and where it goes without judgment, but see if you can bring more awareness to that. A second thing we can do is give one person our complete attention. Just over the next few hours or over the next day or so, see if you can, no phone, no multitasking, just presence. Maybe it's with someone in your family.

Maybe it's someone you work with. Maybe it's your spouse. Maybe it a friend Maybe it a stranger on the street or someone you know the barista at Starbucks whatever It just look them in the eye if you you know with them in person or can do that And just give them your full attention. See what that feels like and start seeing if you can do that as a practice.

Another thing that we can do is pay attention to something that you find beautiful. a tree a flower a sunset a piece of music someone laughing a photo or picture on the wall we often rush these moments but if you see something that gets your attention you think wow that's beautiful see if you can take in a few breaths and a few more beats and really just take it in wow look at that flower last night was it last night maybe two nights ago i noticed where we live on the hill, sometimes behind the hill at night when the sun is setting, it's really beautiful.

And you know, some sunsets are different than others, but I noticed it was just ending, but I caught the tail end of it as I was standing at the sink washing dishes. I saw out the window and I walked outside with my bare feet in the grass and just looked at the sunset. And I even put my arms up in the air and was like, ah, just to kind of drink in the beauty of it. And so I'm not saying that to brag necessarily, but just it was a moment that I really paid attention to.

and I wanted to try to capture that. But that's something we can do, even if we're sitting on the bus, even if we're rushing through our day, even if it's, you know, in the middle of our workday, in the middle of the office, in, you know, bumper to bumper traffic, sometimes we'll see something beautiful like a bird in the sky or something. We don't have to rush through these moments. We can pay attention to them and that expands our capacity for attention.

The fourth thing we can do is limit one unnecessary distraction. again asking does this deserve my attention whatever it is you know one of the things i did many years ago maybe you've done this is i turned off all the notifications on my phone the only thing i get and i even had one of my daughters i think rosie was able to help me several months ago figure out how to the one notification that i had on all the time was my text and it wouldn't notify me as much as it would just put a little banner up on the phone but i get a lot of texts all day as i'm sure you do and i was happening a lot a lot a lot and it was distracting me.

And I, and Rosie was like, Oh dad, you can just say which ones. So the only texts that come up, there's like a handful of people, you know, both the girls and Michelle and Jessica who works for me and a few other key people. Like when their texts come in, the little banner shows up on my screen so that I see that a text has come in. But otherwise I have no notifications on my phone.

And for me, it's a little way of, of trying to have more power and more autonomy with the phone myself, as opposed to the phone dictating ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, you have a text, you have an email, you have a comment on LinkedIn or whatever, all the things like, so that those I found to be unnecessary distractions for myself. There's probably things for you. What are unnecessary distractions that currently exist on your computer, on your phone, in your space?

Could you remove them? Sometimes I get distracted by clutter on my desk or in my space. And in the middle of stuff, I will just stop and clean the clutter because if I don't, like my mind is not as clear. So again, there's different things we can do, but see if you can limit one or more unnecessary distraction that's going to allow you to pay more attention.

And then the fifth thing that we can do is at the end of the day, today, tonight, when you go to sleep, and maybe it's the evening as you're listening to this or watching this, see if you can just check in with yourself. What did I pay attention to today? and what do I want to pay attention to tomorrow or you could do it in the morning where you say to yourself what do I want to pay attention to today it's just like setting yourself up reminding yourself putting yourself in that mindset remember it's a practice it's not perfection it's mindfulness it's presence it's bringing ourselves into the present moment that's what attention is about our lives are shaped by what we consistently pay attention to right and attention is one of the greatest gifts we can give to another person it's one of the most valuable resources that we have if we don't choose where our attention goes someone or something else will choose it for us you know we'll do it sort of by default and not consciously it's really as i said one of the purest forms of appreciation and when we pay attention to what we're paying attention to, and we consistently notice it, we can have much more impact on the people around us and in our lives.

So thanks for your attention today, watching, listening to this. Thanks. Whether this is the very first time you've ever watched or listened to the show, I am grateful. Check out the show notes below where there's some links where you can connect with me on social media and learn more about me and my work.

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And until next time, keep bringing your whole self to work and to life. And remember, we're all in this thing together.