Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, one astonishing fact sticks out: there has not been another similar attack on American soil during all this time. If you recall those days in the aftermath of those horrific attacks, one common theme that came from national security officials was that another attack was a certainty.
As with any complex problem, there are multiple reasons for this so-far fortunate situation: the loss of a sovereign base with the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban, the relentless pursuit and killing of thousands in the Al Qaeda network, including UBL himself last May, hypervigilance on the part of law enforcement, efforts to dry up their sources of financing, and of course, luck. I’m sure there have been other reasons that have not and may never come to light.
But a new book I am reading (Counterstrike: the Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker) brings out one more element that may be surprising: deterrence.
A clear target will improve your chances of gaining agreement
One of the most important steps in any persuasion attempt is to first clarify in your own mind exactly what you want from the other person. This will allow you to improve your approach and help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.
Persuasion is about getting agreement from another person, but it’s not as simple as a yes or no question. There are different degrees of agreement, and by being clear about what you’re trying to accomplish, you can better tailor your approach. This will help you dial down your persuasive efforts in some cases, or crank it up in others.
Using this approach, you first gauge where the audience is, then you think about what degree of agreement you need in the strategic context of your persuasion campaign, then you choose your message and approach accordingly.
First, we need to have a common terminology for the various degrees of agreement. I’m using terminology that Terry Bacon uses in his book, Elements of Influence, with one slight modification. As he says, there is a range of possible attitudes that the other person may have toward your proposal or idea.
- Rebellion
- Resistance
- Skepticism
- Neutrality: apathy, ignorance or indecision
- Compliance
- Commitment
- Leadership
The baseline is neutrality, and this is the one term that I have changed from his scale, in which he calls it apathy. I use neutrality because people can be indifferent or neutral for one of three reasons, apathy, ignorance or indecision. Apathy is one of those reasons: they know about the issue but don’t care about the outcome or decision. The second reason might be ignorance: they are not aware of the issue. The third is indecision: they know and care about the issue but don’t know which course of action is the best. If you want to move them from neutrality, you must know the reason they are neutral. You must either inform them, show them why they should care, or make the case for your solution to the issue.
The “negative” attitudes as they relate to your proposal are:
Skepticism: they don’t support your idea but are not necessarily resisting. Maybe they don’t trust you or haven’t heard enough to make them feel comfortable with the idea.
Resistance: in this case they are actively pulling back from your idea, perhaps seeing disadvantages for themselves favoring a different approach .
Rebellion: besides resisting your idea, the other person is taking an active role in fighting against the idea, either promoting another idea or trying to enlist others on their side as well.
The “positive” attitudes are:
Compliance: the other person goes along with your idea. They may say yes, or agree not to block your efforts.
Commitment: the other person personally commits to seeing that the idea gets implemented. They take an emotional and personal interest in the idea and become enthusiastically committed to it. This is the difference between following the letter of your request and promoting the spirit as well.
Leadership: others make the idea their own and take an active leadership role in promoting and extending it.
Why does it matter?
Being clear about the type of agreement you want will help you improve your assessment, targeting, and persuasive approach.
Assessment is important because you need to know where people are in their attitudes before you begin your persuasion effort. It’s extremely unlikely that you will move someone from rebellion to commitment in one meeting or presentation, for example. You may need to move one stage at a time. You’ll have to be patient. Snap decisions do not lead to lasting commitments. Some salespeople get impatient and begin pushing for agreement, which sometimes works—unless the buyer has a chance to change her mind.
In addition, the process of figuring out their attitudes is going to give you insights into their thinking that can improve your arguments and appeals. That’s why it should be an integral part of your audience analysis.
With persuasion, just as in so many other activities, a clear target improves your aim. You want to aim specifically for the level of agreement that you need, because there are dangers in overshooting or undershooting your target. Sometimes, for example, a speaker who is passionate about a topic might only need compliance, so that others will not stand in their way. Yet they may try too hard to inspire their audience to the same level of commitment, and either talk past the close or turn them off with their “excessive” passion.
On the other hand, it’s even more common for someone to get compliance and think they have achieved commitment. The audience members may be agreeable but that is no guarantee that they will actually do anything about it afterwards. There’s a big difference between compliance and commitment. Anyone trying to implement a new sales process, for example, knows that agreement is not that hard, but ensuring that account managers will embrace it and make it a habit is a much tougher task.
Different targets require different approaches. For example, compliance can generally be won through logical and rational reasons. Commitment and leadership usually require an emotional component as well.
In writing this article, I aimed for compliance. Whether you commit to try this is up to you. I assumed that my readers are in neutral, either through ignorance or apathy, and that’s why I’ve tried to inform you and tell you why you should care.
Who owns YOUR attention?
Last week we looked at the benefits of being in control of your own attention. This article tells you how to do it.
The good news is that attention is a skill that can be improved with practice. You can make adjustments in how you work on a regular basis, and if you’re really ambitious you can even try some ideas on ways to train your brain to improve its capacity for sustained focus.
Personal adjustments in how you work
Pay attention to your attention. The first step in any skill improvement is to gauge how well you’re doing. Be aware of times that your mind wanders, or the number of times you interrupt an important task. It’s probably far higher than you imagined. One study measured the number of “unimportant interruptions” in a typical knowledge worker’s day totaled 28% of their time. (This figure includes the time it takes to recover mentally from the interruption.)
Invest your attention like Warren Buffett. Attention is an investment in the quality of your work and relationships, but most of us invest it like a day trader, jumping in and out of our “positions” to chase after higher returns. Buffett has been successful by choosing his investments very carefully and then holding them for a long time.
Worthwhile tasks require quality time, and the best way to get it is to carve out time to force yourself into a specified time period or task. Peter Drucker, in his book The Effective Executive, suggests finding ways to consolidate your discretionary time. It’s not so hard to find ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there throughout the day, but it’s also not very effective.
For starters, I recommend a web site devoted to the Pomodoro Technique which involves setting a timer for 25 minutes at a time, which seems to be long enough to get something done and short enough to handle. It works well, but larger chunks of uninterrupted time are much more conducive to quality and depth of thought. The appropriate length will vary, and you will need to find what works best for you, but it’s probably longer than you typically spend now.
In order to set aside the time period, it helps to arrange your calendar and/or your space so that you’re not distracted by others and so you don’t have to interrupt your flow to get something you forgot. Set specific times to check emails and surf the web.
If time is too arbitrary for you, set a target, for example two chapters read in the book before you put it down, or 500 words written.
Besides carving out time, you can also make space for yourself. Disconnect. Ironically, the more “connected” we are electronically, the more disconnected we become personally. Here’s one simple change you can make that will have a huge impact: position your computer screen so that you can’t see it when you’re on the phone.
Get away from the distractions. It seems unthinkable today to leave the house without taking your phone, but most of us alive today used to do that all the time. Go on, give it a shot. Even within your own house, is there a room that does not contain a screen of some sort? If not, make one.
Write things down. I carry some form of Moleskine notebook everywhere I go, and I’ve found that helps me deal with distractions in two ways. First, taking the time to write down a thought, observation or idea usually helps me think it through a little better. Second, as David Allen says in Getting Things Done, if you get it out of your head and down on paper, it won’t be a nagging distraction.
There are tons of other ways to arrange your day for better focus—if you can take the time to think about them!
Improvements in your brain’s capacity to focus
For most people, adjusting personal habits as discussed above will be enough, and should make a significant impact on your capacity to control your own attention productively. If you want to take it a step further, there are some approaches that may make a difference.
I say may because, as the Boomer generation ages, an entire industry has sprung up to sell us “solutions” to train our brains and keep them young, so it’s hard to separate fact from marketing. I’ll limit this to two suggestions, one of which I’ve worked with extensively and one which I still hope to give a good effort to in the future.
The Dual n-back task is a fiendishly difficult and laborious yet addictive application that supposedly helps you improve the capacity of your working memory. I forced myself to do it almost daily for over two months and kept a record of my results. I saw huge improvements in my score on the game. I also noticed what I thought were clear improvements in my ability to focus and remember. (Which proves absolutely nothing, of course; it may have been confirmation bias, wishful thinking, or the placebo effect. However, I still go back to the game occasionally for a tuneup.)
Meditation is touted as the best long term approach to improving your attention, and there is much more evidence and literature about its benefits. I have no reason to doubt it; it’s just that I have tried to do it and have so far failed miserably every time. I try to concentrate on my breathing, or a spot on the wall. When distractions intrude, I “gently push them away”, but they come back stronger than ever. If you have the time and willpower to devote to meditation, go for it. If you’ve mastered it, let me know how you did it.
Not the best way to succeed
Any commodity that is rare and useful it is bound to be very valuable. That is why in today’s frenetic world, attention is the new literacy.[1] It’s good to pay attention, but those who have the capacity and skill to invest their attention most productively will have a huge advantage in business, relationships, and life in general.
We all know how difficult it is to maintain focus for very long on one particular topic. In this age of continuous and ubiquitous connection, there are so many stimuli competing for our limited attention that very few of us feel like our attention fully belongs to us anymore.
Linda Stone coined the term, continuous partial attention, to describe our tendency to constantly be on alert for anything that might be more pressing than what we are doing right now. You experience it when you talk to someone. Although you know you should focus entirely on the person across from you, you are classically conditioned to respond to the chirp of your phone which announces an incoming message. At least the pigeons in Skinner’s boxes got a worthwhile reward for their mindless actions—yours is probably spam, but you’re powerless to resist anyway.
You see it when you try to sit down at your desk and focus on that project you’ve been putting off (such as this article). You know that you don’t hit your creative zone until about thirty minutes into it, but you just can’t resist stealing a glance at the screen, or getting up to walk around the house for a few minutes. When you give in to the interruption, it takes several minutes to get back up to cruising speed.
How much does it matter? I believe it matters a lot. Control of your attention is a hugely critical factor in the quality of your life and the arc of your success for the simple reason that your attention is the gateway through which all inputs that affect you enter your mind. Even when the inputs have entered within your mind, attention dictates how your mind uses them.
Where and how you invest your attention make you who you are. In short, you are the sum of what you invest your attention in. By improving your skill at investing attention, you will learn more, get more done, and improve your relationships.
There is no scientific proof of the old myth that we use less than 10% of our brains, but I believe that myth is still useful as a metaphor. I’d like to rephrase it by saying that we use less than 10% of our attention productively.[2] Most of the time our minds run on autopilot, passively taking in what’s around us and having a lot of cycle time available for unstructured musing and ruminating. It may be a song lyric playing over and over, or daydreaming, or worrying about whether you’re going to get that next deal. Very rarely are we thinking actively, deeply and constructively about an issue, so how can we even remotely approach our best work?
Attention is the foundation of all our other mental skills. For example, a lot of people complain that their memory is not that good, but I suspect that it’s more due to inattention than to memory. For example, I decided several years ago that I would master the art of quickly memorizing people’s names when they come into my classes. I pride myself on being able to take in and retain (for the duration of the class only, I admit) up to about 30 names. When people ask me how I do it, I tell them that it is almost entirely about listening to them when they tell me their name. At that moment, their name is the most important thing to me—not how I come across to them or what I want to say next—just their name.
Sustained attention is also critical to reflection and creativity. You have to spend quality time with a problem or a topic if you want to get that flash of insight that enables you to see the answer. You don’t have to be thinking about it all the time; in fact, those flashes usually come when you’re not thinking consciously about it. But you do have to spend time thinking about it to plant the seeds that will bear the fruit of insight.
Being in the moment is the only way to squeeze every ounce of juice out of life. If you’re here but not here, you’re not getting the full benefit of either where you are physically or where you are in your thoughts.
Your attention also determines the quality of your personal relationships. It is a cheap yet priceless gift that you can give to others. I know I need to be reminded of that on occasion. My wife once said to me: “I can’t believe you actually teach a module on listening,” to which I replied, “I try not to bring my work home with me.”
Think back to the last time someone gave you their deep and undivided attention for more than a few minutes. It felt pretty good, didn’t it? How often have you given the same to someone else? Or reflect on the opposite situation: you meet someone at a function and they don’t even look you in the eye when they shake your hand because they’re too busy scanning the room to see if there is anyone more important they should be talking to. How does that feel?
The good news to all this is that attention is a skill that can be improved with technique and practice, and that will be the subject of the next article.
[1] I love this phrase, and as near as I can tell, it was coined by Howard Rheingold.
[2] This figure of 10% is only a personal estimate; I don’t know of any research that has calculated the true percentage.
