by Craig Weber
• First, you’re mindful of the purpose of the conversation or meeting. What is the goal of the encounter? What are you trying to accomplish? Is it to reach a decision? Is it to resolve a conflict? Is it to solve a problem? Is it to clear up a misunderstanding? Is it to improve a relationship?
• Second, you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the conversation—the patterns of behavior—and whether they support or subvert the purpose of the conversation. If the purpose of a meeting is to brainstorm, for example, but no one is sharing ideas, there’s a poor fit between the patterns and the purpose. If the goal of the conversation is to make a collaborative decision but everyone is arguing, there’s a bad fit. If the objective of the encounter is to provide useful feedback to a colleague, but people are watering down their points and withholding information to spare the colleague’s feelings, there’s another lousy fit.
With high situational awareness, you’re constantly monitoring the degree of fit between what’s happening in the moment and the goals for the moment. And the patterns matter. If Lt. Col Hughes had only seen one or two upset people in that big crowd in Najaf, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. But when he notices the entire town is angry, it’s a major problem.
This is important because the level of fit determines the health of the conversation. A lack of fit between patterns and purpose is unhealthy, unproductive, or even destructive, while a tight fit is healthy, productive, and constructive.* This is critical. It’s hard to close a gap between patterns and purpose if you don’t even see it. So, to assess the fitness of a conversation or meeting, ask yourself these two sets of questions:
1. What is the purpose of this conversation or meeting? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What is the learning that needs to occur if we’re to make meaningful progress?
2. Do the patterns of discourse line up with that purpose? Do the behaviors on display—mine and those of others—align with those objectives? Given what we’re up to, what is the smartest way we could all be working and communicating together? Is the way we’re conversing with one another in alignment with that way? And, if there’s a gap, how can I “play what’s missing”?
Why Awareness Is so Important
If an organization is a community of discourse, and leadership is about shaping the nature of the discourse, then conversational leadership is about increasing the fit between the patterns and purpose of the conversation. To do this well you must sharpen your abilities on three interrelated fronts: disciplined awareness, internal awareness, and awareness of the overall context:
1. High disciplined awareness. The ability to direct and hold your beam of attention at will.
2. High self-awareness. The ability to focus your beam internally, so you recognize both what you’re bringing to a conversation and how you’re reacting in the moment.
3. High situational awareness. A clear view of what other people are bringing to the conversation, and the fit between patterns and purpose.
The good news is that you have little reason to sit in a boring meeting again. If you’re mindfully aware, there’s a plethora of factors on which to focus. But remember, your motivation isn’t to be entertained, or to passively record what you’re seeing, like Jane Goodall documenting the behavior of the bonobos. Concerned about the conversational welfare of others, and the effectiveness of the encounter, you’re listening to what’s being played so you can play what’s missing. If there’s a lack of candor or curiosity in the meeting, you know what you can “play” to bring more balance to the discussion. (We’ll go into detail about how to do this in Part III: Skills.)
Smart Choices or Defensive Reactions?
The multifaceted awareness I’ve described in the last three chapters is an invaluable asset. With it, you’re far more focused, disciplined, and balanced, so that even when everyone else is thrashing about dysfunctionally on the dance floor of a meeting, you are up on the balcony, making more deliberate choices about how to contribute. This is a hallmark trait of social intelligence; this is the ability, as the psychologist Edward Thorndike put it, “to act wisely in human relations.”5 Without this ability, your beam of attention will bounce around like a small child on a candy binge.
Failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN
The problem is that the fiery, emotional part of your brain and the cool, rational part of your brain often conflict. And without the ability to see, label, and brake, your good intentions will be routinely hijacked by your defensive reactions. Unable to consistently align your actions with your intentions, at best, you’ll act like a well-intentioned but bumbling fool. At worst, you’ll come across as incompetent—a passive bystander, a backseat driver, an inert critic, an impotent whiner—droning on and on about the pitfalls of the status quo while never daring to do something about it. Or, perhaps worse still, you’ll come across as an aggressive, egocentric, my-way-or-the-highway asshole6 bent on getting your way at the expense of a good decision.
Strengthening your awareness is the first step to solving this problem. By building your awareness you’ll be less reactive and manipulatable. When triggered, you’ll respond in a smart and reflective way rather than a dumb, defensive one. You’ll be less likely to react this way: “Paul’s a jerk. It’s impossible to do good work when he’s in the room,” and more likely to react this way: “Wow, what is it about Paul’s behavior that triggered me so intensely?”
But here’s the conundrum: It’s extremely important to be able to do all this under pressure, but it’s also far harder to do under pressure. So, to build this ability, you’re going to need practice. The good news is that practice is the subject of the next chapter.
* Assuming, of course, that the purpose is constructive to begin with—an issue we’ll explore in depth in a later chapter is about the “The Leadership Mindset.”
AWARENESS PRACTICES
Building Your Ability to Focus on Purpose
Attention works much like a muscle—use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN
Just like a muscle, your ability to control your beam of awareness can be strengthened with a specific kind of training. These exercises—strength-training workouts for your mind—are called mindfulness awareness practices (MAPs). Given the importance of disciplined awareness for building your ability to stay in the sweet spot, I’ll repeat the advice provided in Conversational Capacity: If you don’t have a MAP, start one; and if you do have one, ramp it up.
Meditation, the most common form of practice, is widely misunderstood. It’s best to think of the word meditation as you do the word exercise, as a broad term that encompasses a wide range of activities. Most exercises involve focusing your attention on a particular object, activity, or thought in order to strengthen your ability to control your monkey mind. The goal is to develop the ability to watch your mind at work so it’s easier to catch your reactions and choose how to respond.
Training your mind to be in the present moment is the #1 key to making healthier choices.
—SUSAN ALBERS
The mindful awareness that the practice of meditation strengthens enables you to monitor your emotional and cognitive reactions under pressure. It’s a way to train your mind to stay at the bottom rung of the Ladder of Inference, noticing when and how your mind is trying to go up the rungs. The more disciplined your awareness, the more you’re able to make conscious choices about how to make sense of the world around you. This gives you greater mental flexibility and more behavioral options because you’re not just blindly accepting the view of “reality”—and the emotional reactions that go with it—that your brain tries to hand you.
Single-Point Attention Practice
Single-point attention practice is perhaps the most common and straightforward MAP. In this exercise, you cent
er your focus on an object—your breath, a point on the wall, or the buzz of a fan—and when your mind inevitably wanders (because that’s what minds do), you calmly recognize the drift and return to your point of focus. With regular practice, you become more and more capable of “watching” or “monitoring” your mind in action, which increases your ability to remain focused on the activity of your choosing. The main exercise is catching your mind when it wanders and then bringing it back to focus.
Do the Dishes
I prefer active meditation. A conversation or meeting is a busy, chaotic thing. So, if all my meditative practice is in a quiet room, I find it doesn’t transfer as well to a louder, busier, context.
If your goal is to be more mindful in louder and busier places, then practice being mindful in louder and busier places. This means that even mundane activities—cooking a meal, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, or taking out the trash—provide superb opportunities for strengthening your focus. The practice is similar to single-point attention practice. When you’re doing the dishes, for example, stay focused on the act of doing the dishes. Then, when you notice your monkey mind taking over, merely notice it, label what’s happening (“There goes my monkey mind again.”) and refocus on the experience of doing the dishes.
Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.
—DANIEL GOLEMAN
Take Breathing Breaks
Take regular two-minute breaks to focus on your breathing. Breathe in and breathe out slowly and pay attention to the flow of the air. When your focus drifts, notice it and refocus on your breath. Do this several times a day.
“There are two reasons why taking just one mindful breath is so effective at calming the body and the mind,” says Chade-Meng Tan, the chairman of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. “The physiological reason is that breaths taken mindfully tend to be slow and deep, which stimulates the vagus nerve, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It lowers stress, reduces heart rate and blood pressure, and calms you down,” he says. “The psychological reason is that when you put your attention intensely on the breath, you are fully in the present for the duration of the breath. To feel regretful, you need to be in the past; to worry, you need to be in the future. Hence, when you are fully in the present, you are temporarily free from regret and worry. That’s like releasing a heavy burden for the duration of one breath, allowing the body and mind a precious opportunity for rest and recovery.”
He continues with this observation:
The ability to calm the body and mind on demand has profound implications for leadership. Imagine that you’re responding to a severe crisis with your peers and everybody but you is frazzled because you alone can calm down and think clearly. The ability to think calmly under fire is a hallmark of great leadership. The training and deployment of this skill involves paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. The more you bring this quality of attention to your breath, the more you strengthen the parts of your brain involved with attention and executive control, principally the prefrontal cortex.1
Mindful Listening
Just as I can run mindlessly on a trail and not remember long sections of my route, I can also “listen” mindlessly to a person (I use quotation marks here because is it really listening if it’s not mindful?) and not remember vast sections of the conversation.
Communicating is more than just expressing yourself clearly; it’s about listening clearly—paying attention and blocking out all the mental clutter and distractions.
—ERIC J. HALL
This is all too common. Consider this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article on the lack of listening in the workplace:
Even before the age of digital distractions, people could remember only about 10% of what was said in a face-to-face conversation after a brief distraction, according to a 1987 study that remains a key gauge of conversational recall. Researchers believe listening skills have since fallen amid more multitasking and interruptions. Most people can think more than twice as fast as the average person talks, allowing the mind to wander.2
Listening mindfully, therefore, presents a useful way to practice controlling your beam of attention. You do this by placing your focus fully on someone as they talk with you, zeroing in on both what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. This is one of the most useful practices because the opportunities are endless. Meeting at work? Dinner with colleagues? Home with the family? On a plane with a single-serving friend? Negotiating with a client? All present opportunities for practice.
Mindful listening gets you out of your own experience and into the experience of others. It cultivates empathy, opens you up to more learning, and forces you to kick your ego to the curb and to be open to the other person or persons with whom you’re talking.
As you listen, don’t just focus on the intellectual content of the conversation, but to their words, their facial expressions, their tone of voice, and their sentiments: Are they excited? Nervous? Scared? Worried? Sad? Overjoyed? Melancholy? Intimidated? Angry?
But it doesn’t just have to be people. You can practice mindful listening as you listen to music, the sounds of a city street, of rain hitting the roof of the house, the birds chirping outside your window, or to the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves of a tree. The key is to really listen, to keep your mind focused on the sound, and to let other thoughts go as they try and intrude on your focus.
Learn to Notice Your Beam
Today I pulled up to a red light in my Jeep. After a few seconds I realized I wasn’t paying any attention to the intersection, the cars next to me, or anything at all in the world around me because my mind had drifted to thoughts about a meeting that I was facilitating the next day. Physically I was sitting at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. Mentally, however, I was someplace else. I took control of my beam of focus by consciously asking myself: “Where is my beam right now?”
Another way to build your mindful awareness, therefore, is to cultivate the habit of noticing where your beam is focused. It’s surprising, a little disturbing even, when you first realize just how often you’re not even conscious when your focus starts to drift. The question, “Where is my beam right now?” is a useful way to build the habit of paying attention to how you’re paying attention, so ask it throughout day.
Here are two ways to strengthen this ability:
1. Once an hour take one minute and deliberately move your beam to one external object for 30 seconds, and to one internal object for 30 seconds.
2. Every so often throughout the day—perhaps even setting an alarm as a reminder—stop and ask yourself the question: “Where is my beam right now?”
Notice New Things
Mindfulness is “the simple process of noticing new things,” according to Ellen Langer, the renowned mindfulness expert at Harvard.3 To increase your mindful awareness, therefore, she suggests starting each day with the goal of noticing five new things—about yourself, your trip to work, your workplace, an issue, or a friend or colleague—anything at all. In this simple exercise, you’re establishing the habit of looking for objects or events in your day that usually go unnoticed or unappreciated.
Get Outside
Get outside and into nature. Why does this matter? Getting outside, it turns out, is good for your brain. Consider the research of Gregory Bratman and his colleagues at Stanford University. They found that “volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier afterward than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic.”4 Compared to strolling on a city street, walking in a natural environment does a better job of decreasing anxiety, worry, and other negative emotions, and increasing both a positive mental state and working memory.5
Marc Berman, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, discovered a similar benefit. “Berman conducted
a study in which he sent volunteers on a fifty-minute walk through either an arboretum or city streets, then gave his subjects a cognitive assessment. Those who had taken the nature walk performed about twenty percent better than their counterparts on tests of memory and attention.”6
Yoga
Start yoga and use it to deliberately hone your ability to remain focused and present in the moment. Done properly, yoga is a fantastic vehicle for expanding your awareness. Rather than describe this myself, I’ll share a bit from Nora Isaacs and her article, “Bring More Mindfulness onto the Mat.”7 Notice the similarity between her description of mindful yoga and my take on mindful trail running:
You’re standing in Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I Pose). You actively reach through your back foot and allow your tailbone to descend away from your lower back as your arms reach up toward the ceiling. As you hold the pose you start to notice your front thigh burning, your shoulders holding tension, and your breath becoming labored. Still holding. Soon you get agitated and start to anticipate the joy you’ll feel when the pose is over. Your breath becomes shallow while you await the teacher’s instruction to come out of the pose. But she doesn’t say anything. You label her a sadist. Still holding. You decide that you are never coming back to yoga. As your thigh starts to shake, you mentally check out. Frustrated, you drop your arms and look around the room.
Now imagine this: You’re standing in Virabhadrasana I, noticing the same sensations, having the same thoughts and feelings—anger, boredom, impatience, tension. But instead of reacting, you simply observe your thoughts. You remember that this pose, like everything else in life, will eventually end. You remind yourself not to get caught up in your own story line. And, in the midst of feeling irritated while your thighs burn, you appreciate the sweetness of the moment. You may even feel a wash of gratitude that you have the time and privilege to do a hatha yoga practice. Then you bring your awareness back to your breath and witness the ongoing sensations and thoughts until the teacher guides you out of the pose.
