Newsletter: Awareness

I remember watching a Health and Safety Video. A bunch of actors in white gorilla costumes were playing a basketball game. The game built to a pitch of even scores with a couple of minutes left. During the last minute a black gorilla (with actor inside) danced across the pitch. None of the audience reported seeing the black gorilla, and when the tape was replayed we were amazed that something so obvious was missed.

Our ability to concentrate is highly tuned, and of course that is where a lot of our successses come from, but often it means that we lack awareness. Probably about 40% of readers will have spotted the error in the last sentence, the rest of us will have just skipped over it because we are focused on scanning this newsletter quickly.

We all try now and again to ‘smell the flowers’ or ‘enjoy the journey rather than focus on the destination’. Then under the pressure of work our new intent tends to fade away and we get back down to business. Then perhaps we watch a programme on TV where someone has had an alarming experience, possibly been close to death, and we vow to enjoy every minute of life and the whole cycle of good intent starts again. It’s hard to keep it up though.

Of course, a wider awareness is a huge business advantage. If we have wide experience and wide awareness we can introduce good practice from one area to another. We can utilise people from one area of business in other areas, adapt systems and processes we have come across, give customers new perspectives and fresh approaches. An increasingly key element in our CVs is ‘breadth of experience’.

So how do we increase awareness?

For me (being sad and very focused) the only way is through the diary. That is, scheduling time to:

- Read material which is more fringe to normal business activity

- Hold discussions and brief team meetings on non-critical topics

- Switch off work and enjoy a conversation with a friend

- Develop a new skill, learn something different.

The electronic diary is particularly useful, because if we haven’t got time to do the activity we can postpone, it will come back and nag us. I have an activity called ‘Idea: use computer games to help deliver better training courses’. It comes up about every 6 weeks, and I delay it another 6 weeks. But it is nagging me and I will get round to it. If we get round to only 10% of what we intend, well at least that’s an increase in awareness.

Another useful approach is to sit and think. It is pretty hard at work because we get strange looks, but it can be done when driving and works even better if we just take 10 minutes out of a day to muse. This encourages awareness of things we may not have considered because we have been so busy. A change of environment (e.g. sitting in the park in summer or walking round the streets in winter) usually lifts us out of current issues and helps awareness improve.

As a final note, widening our awareness is generally good for our health and feeling of well-being. Our main aim in life is of course our happiness, and all of us have experienced twinges of regret because we were so focused on one thing we missed out on something valuable. Exercise and diet, definitely, then complete the package with a ‘time to be aware’ moment each day.



Mark Miller is Director of Goodfoot., click here for further details