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SUMMARY Focus: The hidden driver of excellence
Daniel Goleman SUMMARY BY ARATA ACADEMY
SUMMARY Focus: The hidden driver of excellence Summary by Arata Academy
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This summary by Arata Academy can be read in 15 minutes and is oered as a practical guide to the original book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (2015) by Daniel Goleman.
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To be read in 15 minutes: Focus: The hidden driver of excellence, by Daniel Goleman. Summary Arata Academy. by Seiiti Arata, ArataAcademy.com - All rights reserved. Copyright © 2015 Terms of use of this work This work is provided with the understanding and acceptance that the author and publisher are not engaged in providing any legal, accounting or other professional services. If any professional service is r equired, the services of medical professionals licensed by the laws and regulations in their jurisdiction should be sought, and neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable for any derivations or direct or indirect damages. To continue the reading, you (the “User”) understand and agree that this book is not intended as a substitute for advice and counsel. Before starting any modication or implementation of lifestyle changes, diet or other routines, the User is responsible for rst consulting their licensed and qualied medical and healthcare professionals for approval and monitoring. If the User has any symptoms that require diagnosis or medical care, they should seek experts they trust. Because of scientic and technological progress, new experiences and changes in products available in the market and best practices, some of the data contained herein may become outdated, and it is the responsibility of the User to seek the latest information with their trusted professionals. Legal notice All rights reserved. Copyright © 2015 by Seiiti Arata. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form - electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording, lming, stored in database systems, etc., without the prior written consent of its author and publisher, except in cases of brief quotations in critical reviews and noncommercial uses permitted by law. Limits of liability: despite all precautions being been used in the production of this work, the author and publisher are not r esponsible for the accuracy of the materials or content to perform representations or warranties of any kind, including but not limited to, tness results. The ideas presented in this book may not be suitable for all individuals or situations. The author, publisher and employees are not responsible for any damages or losses resulting from the use of this book or the information contained in this work. This is a comprehensive limitation of liability that applies to damages of any kind, including, without limitation, indemnity, direct, indirect or consequential damages, loss of data, income or prot, loss of property or damage it caused, requests third-party indemnity or any resulting expenses. The fact that an individual or organization is cited as a source of information does not imply that the author or editor endorse the information provided by such a source, whether an individual or organization. When references to any links are displayed, the reader recognises that due to the dynamic nature of the Internet it is possible that the links are no longer active or updated at the time of reading this work; neither the author nor the publisher guarantee the maintenance of these links. This practical summary is not ocial, authorised, approved, licensed, or endorsed in any way associated with the original work of the author or editor. Published by
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Your continued improvement. ArataAcademy.com oers online courses for personal and professional development. Since you chose the download of this ebook, we recommend our fast course on FOCUS, which is specially produced to strengthen your ability to concentrate your focus and achieve selective attention. At the end of the FOCUS course, you can prioritize what is important and will know how to avoid distractions.
Overview Do you want to increase your focus and concentration? Will more focus help you accomplish more and live a personal and professional life more fully? Psychologist Daniel Goleman in the book Focus: The hidden driver of excellence believes that focus is much more than the attention we devote to activities. He supports the idea that more focus can help us live a life with mindfulness and better coexistence among our peers. We need to overcome the distractions of modern life, smartphones and the Internet that keeps us always connected. The dissipating attention impairs our ability to work in high performance. For leadership, it is necessary to strengthen our internal focus, the focus on the other and external focus: internal focus keeps us in tune with our intuitions and values, focus on the other facilitates our relationships and the external focus helps us deal with the context. How to increase the focus? We should treat the focus like a muscle that needs to be trained and also needs rest . In addition, we have to use our creativity to make the most valuable future problems.
SUMMARY 1 - INTRODUCTION: FOCUS IS A MATTER OF CHOICE....................................... 8 2 - WHY IS IT DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN CONCENTRATION? ............................ 11 3 - AN UNUSUAL TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE FOCUS ......................................... 14 4 - ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER ... OR LACK OF FOCUS? ............................ 17 5 - SELECTIVE ATTENTION ........................................................................................ 21 6 -CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS ..................................................................... 24
This summary Arata Academy was created for you to read all the content in fteen minutes and have an overview of the original work. Accordingly, we do not intend to criticize the work of author Daniel Goleman but rather to bring you a practical guide.
1 - INTRODUCTION: FOCUS IS A MATTER OF CHOICE
9 The attention span is like a muscle. If left unused, it will weaken. With practice, it is strengthened. When we dedicate our attention to anything, we are making a choice that has consequences. This is a very valuable way to understand attention. Note that at any given moment we are in charge, making choices. And to choose properly, we have become aware of the consequences of our choices. We should accept the price we are paying. Let’s give an example to illustrate: When I choose to devote my attention for twenty minutes watching a television news programme, what do I expect to get as a result? What’s the price I’m paying? What other things could I have done and did not do because I chose these twenty minutes of television? What if instead I choose to work out for twenty minutes? What dierent results will I have? Or if I devote those twenty minutes to studying a foreign language or any other topic that is important to my career?
I choose where I focus my attention! Always. Whenever I remember that my attention is determined by my choice, it helps me to remember that I want to be conscious in my decisions. It increases the quality of choices, and it strengthens my decision-making power. Attention is a type of investment. Have you ever thought about it from this perspective? Attention is an investment. And investments are dierent options with dierent results.
10 To stay with this analogy, take a look at the dierent ways in which we use money and the dierent consequences: If you have an amount of money in the bank, you can withdraw it and spend it all in a night of partying.
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You can also buy a car that seems like a bargain but in the end will cost much more money on maintenance.
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You can invest in high-risk shares in a company that can go bankrupt.
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You can also use money to start a business and make prot.
You can leave the money in that savings account while ination destroys its purchasing power.
In a similar way, attention is also a valuable resource, and we have dierent options for its use. If we do not take control, life may lead us to undesired destinations because we were simply reacting to the demands of those around us, living the life others expected us to live ... ... Or we can decide to take charge of things, going after what we really want, resisting the temptation to get lost in distractions.
2 - WHY IS IT DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN CONCENTRATION?
12 When we use our attention intensely for a long time, it may cause fatigue. It is called cognitive exhaustion. How to identify this? What signs should we look for? If our attention span starts to decline, all mental activities begin to conk out: we get distracted, our irritability increases ... Well, there are the indications that we have mental capacity exhaustion. Attention is as an investment. A lack of focus means that my attention reserves are empty. And what did I get in return? In other words, the question is: How are we investing our attention? What brings us good results and enriches our quality of life? And what impoverishes our quality of life? When I say enriching or impoverishing, it is in the broadest sense possible and not just in the nancial dimension. Is money important? Yes, of course, it is the trading tool for the basic services and products that give us quality of life. But there is more than that: A full life is one in which we are where we want, with the people we want, doing what we want, with lots of joy to start a new day. And how do we achieve this fullness of life? We have to understand what our priorities are. We have to understand where we need to concentrate, where to focus. We need to understand what deserves our attention in the rst place. And attention is like a muscle. Remember? And like every other muscle, it can also suer fatigue.
13 We have to accept the fact that our attention has limits. Let’s take for example our study curve. When we are studying, at the beginning it takes a while to warm up. This is followed by a good performance level when we do very well ... and after a while our ideas start to become confused. This is the point of mental fatigue, when our performance drops and we become ineective. In other words, our work is no longer ecient. I have to read the same sentence twice or three times, and I still get it wrong or do not understand anything. I’m wasting my time. When we come to the point of exhaustion, it is possible to recover our focus. We must renew our attention.
exhaustion - renewal - attention The big mistake is using inappropriate activities to renew. For example, watching television or surng the Internet are generally not good ideas—they provide too much mental stimulation. What we want is to recharge with high-quality activities.
3 - AN UNUSUAL TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE FOCUS
15 Now we will discuss an unusual technique called “Making the invisible palpable”. This is a summary from the book by Daniel Goleman in chapter 13: If our emotional circuitry (especially the amygdala, the trigger for the ght or ight reactions) perceives an immediate threat, it will ood us with hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, which prepare us for ght or ight. But that does not happen in the case of potential dangers that are years or centuries ahead. In these cases, the amygdala does not react. The amygdala circuitry is concentrated in the midbrain, and it warns us about immediate dangers that need our urgent attention. Our amygdala deals with immediate, urgent problems. That’s how it happened in the evolutionary selection process. Unfortunately, we do not have a very good brain for planning future events, even when they are important plans. If they are far away, it’s all abstract; it’s dicult to predict and identify causal relationships. “If I do this, such a thing happens. If I fail to do that, then this thing will no longer happen.” This is not very obvious. It is not natural to be thinking like a computer that simulates the risks and possibilities of the future. That is why today the most advanced computers can defeat the world’s chess champions. The computer has the capability to perform millions of calculations per second on all possible variables and to calculate the probabilities. Despite not having the computing power that considers millions of variables, the human brain still has something unique: our creativity. And it is creativity that allows us to apply this unusual technique to increase our focus: We can use our creativity to imagine a future event happening now.
16 Imagine an abstract future event becoming an immediate threat. This is how we will enable the brain to stay fully alert, fully focused and ready to do what has to be done. Let me give an example. Imagine that I am studying for an important exam, but it’s hard to concentrate. The exam will only happen two months from now. In other words, my brain nds it dicult to make the exam tangible, to nd what is palpable in this situation. Everything is abstract. The exam is far in the future; why bother? I have a thousand little things to do in the meantime—I have to sweep the oor o f the house, I have to check my mail, have to pay the electric bill, I have to prepare dinner ... I have many immediate and tangible situations that will steal my f ocus. It’s easier to do these rst. It’s rewarding; it’s more inviting to devote attention to these little things just because they’re more visible, more tangible. Since I know the result of this exam will have an inuence on my future, I will now use my full attention. I will use my full attention and creativity to imagine the consequences of a bad performance in the exam. I imagine all the details—what consequences there may be in my bank account throughout my life. The way I will feel if I fail the exam. The way my family will feel about my failure. I’m making the invisible palpable. My diculty focusing was because of lack of clarity, and now I solved this problem.
4 - ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER ... OR LACK OF FOCUS?
18 Some disturbing news: a growing number of teenagers are pretending to have attention decit disorder to achieve stimulant prescriptions, or take medicine and increase attention through chemical drugs, according to the chapter “The Impoverishment of Attention.” The problem is not only aecting teenagers: A Mexican executive says that in the past she could do ve-minute video presentations, but nowadays she has to reduce the message to a one and a half minutes at most, otherwise her audience’s attention drifts, and people start to check their phones. Another indicator of the lack of attention is when a person is reading an interesting book but cannot read more than two pages at a time without feeling an irresistible urge to go check email or social media. In a way, this is a fear of losing out on what may be going on in another corner. It also conveys the notion that the here and now is not very interesting. Because of that, in our online course, FOCUS, we give you the exercises to practice mindfulness, i.e. being fully present and increasing your focus. Sometimes, a kind of mini-contract with other people is necessary. An example is the couple who agrees that as soon as they get home from work, they will leave the smartphones switched o and inside a drawer. Why something so extreme like that? Both the husband and wife feel frustrated when the other one picks up the phone and is no longer fully present. But at the same time, they both have that irresistible urge to “just check something quickly”. In such cases good, respectful and sincere communication can greatly help to identify what type of mini-contract can be useful to maintain the couple’s harmony.
19 Regarding treatment and therapy, it is obvious that we should never do self-medication. This excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s book is very worrying: “Patients are telling a known doctor of mine who are ‘self-medicating’ with drugs for attention decit disorder or narcolepsy to continue working.” A lawyer said he took no drugs, could not work, could not read contracts. A lawyer said if he took no drugs, he was not able to work and could not read contracts. This is crazy. This type of medicine is not candy: these drugs can bring dependence, various side eects, and they need to have very serious professional monitoring. Previously, these prescription drugs were only used in severe cases, but today they’ve become some kind of ‘performance enhancing pills’ If you are wondering whether you have attention decit disorder or whether it is merely a lack of focus, get a professional clinical examination. And here is a special tip: we are now living in an age with a much larger amount of information than a few years ago. Because of that, it is normal to feel that it’s harder to process everything. We need special focus techniques. Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate, said that information consumes attention. Now that we have a wealth of information on the Internet, we live in a world of poverty of attention.
Information consumes attention. As I always repeat: it’s crucial that you get good information and work together with licensed professionals you trust, taking medication only under their supervision. The
20 good professional will know how to make the diagnosis in cases of illness and most important, will know how to advise you when no remedy is required. Always remember the value of good communication and self-knowledge and the benet of practicing focusing techniques.
5 - SELECTIVE ATTENTION
22 You know those situations when you are trying to concentrate, and any tiny noise bothers you? Maybe it’s the people talking nearby, or a street noise. Even a l ibrary, with all the rules for maintaining silence, may have some sort of distraction that takes our focus. We idealise a situation where we are isolated from everyone, so we can stay within our silent cave and have no interruption. Is that the solution to be able to focus? The answer is NO. Complete isolation is not necessary for those who develop selective attention. Neurologist Richard Davidson says that when we have a selective focus, the prefrontal cortex circuit is synchronized with the object in a phase lock. And when we are unfocused, there are several neural circuits being simultaneously activated in areas that are unrelated to what we wish to focus upon. Let me illustrate: When I am at a street market or in a popular bar where there are a lot of people making all types of noise and with loud music playing in the background, it’s still possible to talk to people around me, because my brain can identify the specic sound stimuli that interest me. This is selective attention. A policeman on the chase in the middle of a crowd can also keep the selective attention. He is focused. We need to be clear about our purpose and learn to ignore all other stimuli that are not in line with that goal.
23 There are two types of distractions: sensory and emotional. Sensory distraction is, for example, anything else that is not this video you are watching now. Maybe some smell in the environment, or even the room temperature. Of all the senses, we separate those that are relevant, and then we decide to ignore the rest. When something is dicult to ignore, we call it sensory distraction. But emotional distraction can be even more dicult to face. If the phone rings in the middle of the night, and it is a family member bringing sad news, this situation can leave us shaken for days and days. It totally takes our focus. The loss of a loved one. Chronic disease. The breakup of a relationship. Treachery. Humiliation. All these situations can leave us obsessed, unable to think of anything else. In some situations, we may even need professional help so the mind can nd ways to preserve its integrity. Otherwise there is the risk of depression, panic, obsessivecompulsive disorder or total collapse. Chronic anxiety starts here: the inability to change focus. You want to do a certain activity, but you cannot because you’re mentally stuck, thinking about something else. In less acute situations, you’re dealing with a mild type of concern that is repeatedly haunting your head and hindering your concentration. The FOCUS course will be useful here to do the internal strengthening work, so you can become able to withstand both the emotional and sensory distractions.
6 -CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS
25 Achieving focus is the decision of greatest impact on your performance and on results that will be harvested for life. Just like a muscle, your focus can be trained. And without training, it will become increasingly weakened. We need to understand the risks of a lack of focus to our future risk and use our creativity to make the invisible palpable. Congratulations for completing this ebook! As a next step, we invite now to receive more practical tips and videos on focus here. I wish you a better focus! Cheers! Seiiti Arata Arata Academy
