Getting
egged on

Last evening I posted on social media “Never let a
pan of boiled eggs burn dry – what a sulphurous stink!”

After putting a couple of eggs on to hard boil
slowly in a pan on a low heat, I had walked away from the kitchen to get on with something else. I then
became aware, sometime later, of a foul stench pervading the air around the
house.

Now modern living and our approach to life in the 21st
century, involves us in a lot of multi-tasking. We are required, by society it
seems, to be able to do a number of things at once. Our level of adroitness,
how adept we are, gains us points on the ‘cleverness’ scale. How effortless our
physical or mental dexterity IS or is perceived or judged, when performing this
array of tasks, also gains us kudos
on that self-same scale. 

We even have a word for it – artistry.

Finesse

In ski-jumping, style
marks are awarded to a jumper’s score – because in this event it isn’t just
about coming down the ramp at 50mph, executing a perfectly timed take off,
optimally controlling the body in flight and then landing as far away from the
end of the ramp as possible though now is it?

With entertainment programmes like Masterchef and Strictly Come Dancing, the audience are invited, over weeks, to
witness the competitors’ growing levels of multi-ability, of artistry, of
sustained and increasingly effortless finesse.

Yet, as I admire, marvel at and even egg on my
various favourite performers – what is the common thread between what goes on
in their metaphorical “kitchens” and my own real live one?

A
tension, or attention?

We often set up actions in our lives that should
remain part of our undivided attention. These are things we should be “in the
present moment” with – yet for various reasons and excuses we aren’t. In terms
of performance, this is where we get in our own way and – at some unspecified present moment later – discover we have
messed up big time.

If we are performing ANY kind of action – when we
divide our attention we are sowing seeds of failure. These may germinate and
grow into little failures, medium failures or big failures.

I’d define “failure” here as not doing something as
well as we possibly could do, given our level of skills. If we are attempting
something beyond those levels of skills then there is NO failure. There is an
outcome, a result – yes. And sometimes that outcome will open a door to
increasing and progressing our skills levels.

Failure – if it occurs – is down to a dilution or a
distraction of our absorbed attention, from its maximum of 100%.

“Oh,
he’s not on form today.”
Reason – he’s paying less than
100% absorbed attention to what he’s doing. He’s not suddenly become a poor
player, or a less than capable player. Nothing has changed there. He’s just not
bringing 100% attention to what he’s doing.
“My
mind was not in the right place,”
he might say in the post-match interview, which rather suggests that his mind moves around from one place to
another. A wacky notion if ever there was one!

Often, when we divide up our attention, tension
creeps in to fill the void. We might not necessarily be aware of this – until
the moment we do, of course. And when there’s tension in mind (as it moves from place to place!) we’ll
react to it, in varying degrees. That reaction can take the form of panic,
anxiety, a degradation of motor or cognitive skills, all the way down to a
minor adjustment or perhaps nothing at all.

The
Quick and the Dead

I was making my way down the High Street in my home
town yesterday and observed a man walk out from behind a bus into the path of
an oncoming car. I knew the car was there as I’d seen it a few seconds earlier.
The man hadn’t because the bus had blocked his visibility. 

What happened next –
as I tensed up, preparing myself to witness an RTA? 

Well both the man and the
driver reacted with minor adjustments – man increased his walking speed and
driver slowed down. They were both “lucky” in the sense that neither carried
any tension, and they were both attentively “on task” in the moment they saw each
other.

Of course a faster moving car and a slower moving
man would have changed the dynamics of the potential RTA – yet, still, the key
“lucky” component here was their collective levels both of attention and
tension. 

Change the man for an old lady, anxious about crossing the road, and
the attentive driver for one who was talking on his mobile phone – and now
there is another dynamic.

As it was, I was able to admire the artistry of the
man as he smoothly lengthened his stride to reach the pavement opposite with
aplomb, whilst at the same time marvelling at the driver’s effortless
application of the brake without even batting an eyelid.

Task
Management

So what’s my advice via this 21st century
parable – both to you, the reader, and also to myself?     

We can only attend to one thing at a time. 
You may
consider this not to be the case because you cannot yet see the difference
between multi-tasking and multi-attention. It will help you with that
realisation if you divide the time-frames of attention into moment-by-moment
ones.

If I leave the kitchen in the frame where I know I’m multi-tasking, then my task management will
help me remember I’ve left eggs in a pan of boiling water. However, if I leave
the kitchen in the frame of
switching my attention over to doing something else, then I’ll ALWAYS stink the
house out, and maybe even burn it down! Unless I’m “lucky” of course – or
someone else points out my lack of attention.

Yea
But, No But, Yea But

But – I hear you cry – what about the pianist, or
the touch typist? Or the Grandma, knitting whilst reading a book AND listening
to music on the radio; or the airline pilot, or grand-prix driver, or even the
ordinary driver? 

Aren’t they doing what they’re doing in multi-attention?

Nope, they are multi-tasking. Some tasks seemingly
run on “autopilot” – and these need very little moments of attention in terms
of execution.

Grandma doesn’t need to stop knitting so she can
read or listen. She may need to pause her knitting to turn the page, or change
the radio programme – yet her knitting artistry
may be such that she can knit with one hand! Ergo she CAN knit and turn the
page of the book at the same time! 
The thing with clever Grandma is that
there’s a lot of knitting she can do via kinaesthetic attention, reading by
visual attention and listening via auditory attention!

We can get very, very clever in our artistry and seemingly turn what was once
multi-attentional into multi-tasking. Compare your own learning-to-drive experience with how it is once it has become an “unconscious competence.”

I had a client who wanted to learn to drive yet he
had an excessive anxiety, which he characterised as a phobia, about driving. He
constantly struggled to reach 100% absorbed attention when driving – and this inhibited
his ability to learn all the competences and advance his skills. His lack of absorbed
attention was replaced by a considerably large amount of tension.

Similarly, we can be doing one task, one action, and
have an awareness of other things – yet that awareness does not divert
our attention from the task … until the very
moment that it does. In that precise
moment our attention to the task drops from 100%.

And those precise here and now moments are pivotal
ones in terms of our choosing. 
We may seem powerless – yet we can be extremely
powerful and redirect our lives, our actions, our tasks, our attentions back to
where we want, simply by keeping tensions out of those pivotal moments.

The comparison between the performance of Brazil v Germany
at the 2014 FIFA World Cup and what happened here to Christian Zacharias in a concert
at Gothenburg may seem poles apart. However, what happened in both instances was
a loss of attention followed by the aforementioned pivotal moments.

Conclusion