“Concentration is the root of all the higher abilities in man”
– Bruce Lee
I’m sure you’ve been told: ‘time is your most precious resource’. It’s not, attention is.
Your time is only as valuable as the attention you allocate to it. Moments of distraction are not equal to moments of complete focus. The best use of your time is to increase your attention.
How do we find our ‘highest attention’?
Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, a researcher from the University of Chicago, traveled the world to find out when people felt their best. After 20 years of research, Cziksentmihalyi identified the optimal state of human awareness and attention – he called it ‘Flow’. Cziksentmihalyi came to define flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
When you experience ‘Flow’ your inner critic goes quiet (that nagging voice in your head which second-guesses every decision you make). You become completely engaged in what you’re doing and lose track of time. Things seem effortless – every action leads seamlessly to the next. Everything just seems to flow.
People have used other words to describe the state of ‘Flow’:
- Psychologists call it a ‘Peak Experience’
- Athletes call it being ‘In the Zone’
- Jazz musicians call it being ‘In the Pocket’
A 10-year McKinsey study of top business executives found that being in ‘Flow’ boosted productivity by 500%.
“Major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling of Flow is the holy grail for any manager.”
– Fast Company Magazine
Cziksentmihalyi identified the act of “excluding distraction from consciousness” as a key element involved in achieving ‘Flow’.
The only way to reliably experience a sense of ‘Flow’ while working is to systematically eliminate distraction. Over the next five days I will teach you how to combat the five major emotional distractions we experience at work (use the ‘Day #’ links to navigate to each day):
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At the end of this course you’ll be on your way to developing habits and mindsets that allow you to consistently eliminate these distractions from your life and allow a state of ‘Flow’ to show up while working. When you eliminate these distractions you final a way to get the item on top of your to-do list to ‘Done’, and enjoy the process of doing it.
“I have to keep saying ‘no’ to distractions in order to say ‘yes’ to my dreams”
– Blaise Pascal