Your attention is a powerful resource — how can you optimise it for elite-level performance in business?
“Stockbrokers, bankers, traders, they are all the same beast, trying to maintain their focus all the time while not allowing distracting thoughts or stimuli to tear their minds away from the market. The best of the best would be clinical in their concentration. I often would get athletes to come in and speak with the team as a way of capturing some of their abilities to focus.” — Dirk Rossey, former Vice-President Learning and Development JP Morgan
Your success as a business professional is dependent on your concentration. Different activities on projects and business leadership need different types of concentration. Robert Niedeffer is a sports psychology researcher and practitioner who developed the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal style Scale (TAIS). The TAIS measures different types of attention and identifies strengths and weaknesses 1,2. High performers in business, sports and military can work with a sport psychologist trained to administer the TAIS. This scale reveals personality and attentional style insights. TAIS insights can be a catalyst for productive conversations on higher levels of performance.
Does superior attention need you to put yourself under greater pressure? No.
“This idea that we need pressure to succeed is imbedded in us from childhood. From about three years old, the pressure is on — walk faster, talk more, do better. It’s a constant theme throughout our lives.” — Timothy Gallwey, Edd Hanzelik and John Horton. The Inner Game of Stress 3.
Sports psychologists like Gavin Freeman illustrate the use of four quadrants which have unique demands on our attention 4.
Four quadrants of attention
We start with quadrant one. This first quadrant is where you focus on our external world, from a broad perspective. Your attention takes everything in. It does not narrow focus to your bosses frown, nor the annoying clicking noise made by a colleague’s pen. You are sitting in a meeting with our boss when your boss mentions a change to project scope right in the middle of a critical period. Tensions are high as it is and you are feeling quite stressed already.
What if you struggle to sit back and take everything in? You might jump to conclusions or focus too much on one aspect of the information provided. According to Gavin freeman, many people struggle in the first quadrant.
You go back to your desk. You have to figure out a solution to this new problem from your boss, then present it to a stakeholder group with short notice. Quadrant two needs you to be inwardly focused yet be attuned to many possibilities, rather than narrowing your focus.
What if you are not at your best in quadrant two? You might get bogged down with paralysis by analysis. Your focus turns inwards and you might mull over the same thoughts in an impotent loop. No doubt you may feel quite stuck about where to go next.
Yet off you trudge to quadrant three. Now you need inward and narrow focus. This type of attention helps you decide on the best options and conduct some mental rehearsals of your presentation. What if you are not quite at your best in this quadrant? You may find your negative self talk pops into your head. Your negative self-talk influences a low mood. A low mood isn’t going to help your mental rehearsal, nor any effective thinking about contingencies.
So far, not so good. You may have to present the impacts of this scope change in a tight timeframe. Yet due to poor attention:
- In quadrant one to scope the problem;
- Getting bogged down in analysis within quadrant two;
- Then chastising ourselves in quadrant three;
- When the time comes to deliver a presentation or outcome in quadrant four we fall short.
Two “selves” in our striving for better performance
One huge insight from a tennis coach provided sport psychology with a novel take on human performance. Timothy Gallwey worked as a tennis coach, and realised that his tennis students had two “selves”:
“Clearly, there were two “selves” on the court — the one who was actually playing tennis, and the one who was instructing, judging, and worrying. I called the one doing the talking Self 1 — the invented self that was filled with concepts and expectations about right and wrong, should and shouldn’t, desirable and not desirable. I called the one doing the actual playing Self 2. The problem in tennis — and, I came to see, in life — was that Self 1 was like a dime-store calculator trying to run the show, and in the process getting in the way of the performance of a billion-dollar super computer, Self 2.
Self 1 was filled with the concepts and expectations of others, and usually delivered them with the voice of a drill sergeant. He couldn’t play, but, boy, did he have plenty of criticisms! The dialogue created an inner environment of stress that was ultimately destructive to the goal of hitting the ball well. The more Self 1 was engaged, the worse Self 2 performed.
From Self 1’s perspective, learning a skill like playing tennis was hard. You’d have to figure out where to hold your arm, how to get into the proper ready position, and all the mechanics of the strokes. The instant self-judgment came into the mind, stress was evoked, the stroke was thrown off course, and the results suffered.” — Timothy Gallwey, Edd Hanzelik and John Horton. The Inner Game of Stress 3.
Your takeaway from this? How do you focus your attention so completely in the present that there is no room for your “Self 1” to provide stressful criticisms or judgements? As any psychologist trained in cognitive-behavioural therapy will tell you, your negative self-talk has a huge influence on your mood and likely behaviour. Yet a state of relaxed concentration sets a useful foundation for your performance.
Shifting towards better performance through attention
Going back to your story, it is now the day of your presentation. You are in quadrant four and need to focus on external stimuli (your audience) yet still be narrowly focused on your presentation.
What if you are not at your best in quadrant four? You may get distracted by others reactions. When presenting the impacts of your scope change to your audience, you get distracted by faces made by one or two people in the crowd. Then your computer crashes midway through your presentation. Your attention is hampered by distraction — your focus is on your audience’s impatience, making you even more flustered.
Your ability to direct your attention back to your performance is inversely proportionate to the reddening of your face as you struggle to find the next words.
When you think of the word “focus”, would you think of only quadrant three of four? Most of us may struggle with at least one quadrant. Yet what if we are at our best? What if our concentration worked across the four quadrants? The image below suggests how strong attention in each of the four quadrants contribute to an excellent performance in quadrant 4.
As many of us get stuck in quadrant one when our boss delivers the bad news. Taking a deep breath and re-centring broadens your attention. With our minds open to the entire message from our boss, we are in a far better position. We can evaluate this external stimulus (our boss’ message), rather than narrow our minds to selective parts of what our boss is saying.
When you go back to your desk to analyse a situation, rather than get bogged down with analysis you appraise the resources at your disposal. Just as quickly, you say what skills you need to add to your toolkit so we can get the job at hand done. You may know who can help you — and rapidly enlist their support.
When coaching tennis, Timothy Gallwey found that if his student hit the ball off centre, he would do one thing. He would ask the player to be aware of where the ball was hitting the racquet without trying to make any change. No analysis of performance nor what could be done better. The player just had to focus on awareness of where the ball hit the racquet. Easy.
What happened? Over time, this awareness and pure action calibrated the player’s racquet towards movements that felt better. The ball sounded better when hitting the racquet. No recrimination, coach feedback, feelings of disappointment nor anger, and no storming off the court. Just awareness on one thing, and actions calibrating to meet this awareness.
Moving on to the third quadrant, strengths in this area allow us to focus on our “inner game”. We can rehearse and imagine various risks to our performance. We plan through these risks and keep rehearsing until we feel mentally prepared. Then we can perform to the level where we are not expending too much mental energy in the actual performance.
What does this mean for you?
Focusing on awareness is attention, and where and how you place your attention makes a huge difference in your business career. Timothy Gallwey suggests we place our attention on critical variables. These are variables crucial to your desired outcome.
Focus on what you want to achieve is powerful. Your focus on the how might not be! Shifting your focus from within yourself — what’s going on in your body and mind — to what’s out there — what you’re trying to accomplish — helps keep your mind and actions on track 5.
Are you a Project Manager? Keep your mind on your end goal, not the drama or obstacles from the latest scope change, vendor problem or budget issue. Yes, thinking about risks and subsequent problem-solving is essential to your work — just don’t let obstacles overshadow solution thinking.
“Focusing on critical variables benefits you in two important ways.
First, it keeps your mind in the present and gives you information you need to move in your desired direction.
Second, it doesn’t leave room in your awareness for Self 1 interference about what might happen in the future or what has happened in the past.
It’s being able to just look and see something as it is without the criticism, the right and wrong, the good and bad, the should and could intruding. This is the first step in becoming free enough in your mind to develop wisdom. The secret is, if you want to change something, first increase your awareness of the way it is.” — Timothy Gallwey, Edd Hanzelik and John Horton. The Inner Game of Stress 3.
Moving into quadrant four, you perform a couple of dry run presentations in front of trusted people in your project team in the venue itself. Your dry runs aimed to simulate real-world conditions as much as possible and you seek feedback from your team on what you need to tweak. On the day of performance, you keep your mind on techniques that work for you. Job done!
If you did not score highly in any of these quadrants, this does not suggest a permanent deficit in these areas. What lower scores do suggest is that your attention has difficulties in particular aspects of life on your project. Yet your concentration can improve with good sleep, and a regular exercise routine. Not to mention, work habits that helped keep everything organised so you can focus your attention on the job at hand.
The image here shows how our attention can support us through all stages of performance on a project or in leading a team.
Want to see how you score on a TAIS-inspired quiz?
Here is a short-form version of the 144-item TAIS. I made slight adjustments to the questions for project or business leaders:
This cut-down version has six facets of your attention. Each facet links to two questions. The questions on the left measure effective attention, suggesting a high ability to work well in a busy project environment. The questions on the right measure ineffective attention. High scores suggest you may struggle with paying attention in particular contexts.
This short-form scale tells you a lot about yourself, but it gives you a taste of the 144-item scale. Your attentional strengths and weaknesses influence your ability to perform when it counts.
Hopefully, this article gives you a taste of the types of tools that a sports psychologist can use to help you perform better in business. Niedeffer constructed the TAIS to measure concentration skills and interpersonal characteristics that he believed are the building blocks of performance. The full 144-item scale goes into much more detail about:
- Concentration and information processing abilities;
- Interpersonal characteristics;
- Your self reported levels of confidence;
- Capacity to tolerate risks, and;
- Performance both under pressure and in the long term.
It is important to give your attention to attention (meta-attention, if you will!) if you want to be a high performer in business. Understanding the different facets of attention where you may struggle helps us understand the impact of attention on performance.
Reference
1. Nideffer RM. The Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS) Inventory Technical Manual. 2007. www.mhs.com. Accessed August 13, 2021.
2. Greher MR. MEASURING ATTENTION: AN EVALUATION OF THE SEARCH AND CANCELLATION OF ASCENDING NUMBERS (SCAN) AND THE SHORT FORM OF THE TEST OF ATTENTIONAL AND INTERPERSONAL STYLE (TAIS). 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2529/m2/1/high_res_d/Thesis.pdf.
3. Gallwey T, Hanzelik E, Horton J. The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life’s Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential. Illustrate. Random House; 2009.
4. Freeman G. The Business Olympian: Overcoming Hurdles in Today’s Business Environment. New Holland Publishing Australia Pty Ltd; 2009.
5. Wulf G. How can a shift in focus help you to achieve your goals? | World Economic Forum. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/this-is-how-a-shift-in-focus-can-help-you-achieve-your-goals?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social_video&utm_term=1_1&utm_content=23327_think_like_an_Olympian&utm_campaign=social_video. Published 2021. Accessed August 14, 2021.