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Attention and Performance: How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it

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Attention, State and Performance

In article 4 in the Attention series Jules the relationship between how we use our attention, our state and performance.

States

The set of specific values in a person’s physiology, neurology and biochemistry that gives rise to their behavioural expression and their subjective experience of themselves and the world in any given moment. Some states recur in each culture with sufficient frequency to have acquired labels in the appropriate language. Examples include joy, depression, happiness, angst, and joie de vivre. Naming states implies a commonality of experience, which is not necessarily the case. Naming states does not describe the differences in individual subjective experience which actually exist within any particular named state: I.e. one person’s generation and experience of elation, misery or anxiety will be different from someone else’s and two people deliberately generating the same conditions within their bodies may call the resulting state by different names.

Our states influence the quality and direction of our attention and our attention influences our states. States act as frames for how we use our attention, what we attend to and what we delete from our attention. States influence the perceptual filters we apply and simultaneously our more pervasive perceptual filters influence our access to different states.

“Our states influence the quality and direction of our attention and our attention influences our states.”

States give rise to mood frames such as happy, sad, optimistic and pessimistic. They also influence the likelihood or absence of choice and opinion based responses such as willingness, co-operation, participation and trust.

States are not fixed. They shift continually, sometimes imperceptibly in small increments, yet they can also shift radically. This may be in response to receiving new information or to a sudden recognition of a change of meaning of existing information, though it can also occur when an activity starts or ends. Receiving important exam results, making a large purchase and even having a meal often precipitates a change of state.

Some people experience states which are notably different from most of their other states. Certain frames and information which are normally accessible to them are not found while in these radically different states. If these states also require special circumstances to enter and leave, they are known as Dissociated States. Dissociated states often carry framing and meaning that is only accessible to a person when they are in that state. Examples include the sudden state changes associated with experiencing road accidents and chemically induced altered states such as exposure to mind altering drugs or alcohol. The alcoholic Black out is a case in point, where a person cannot remember what happened at a party until they are that drunk again, when it all comes back to them.

“There is anecdotal evidence that it is very hard to maintain a depressed state while doing a headstand.”

Chronically depressed states often have characteristics of dissociated states. When someone is experiencing depression, they are likely to express a belief that it is pervasive and continuous. In depression, they may not have access to the moments in their day when their attention has elicited a different state. They have difficulty imagining life being more rewarding, and often they cannot access their memories of pre-depression life or the moments, hours and days where their attention is on something other than being depressed.

Where You Place Your Attention Can Affect Your State

What we attend to and how we attend to it can elicit changes in our state. We can learn to enter and leave any state by shifting our attention. If the process we use to shift our attention is sufficiently compelling, even the most subjectively difficult states will shift for long enough to provide a reference experience, unless they are chemically induced. Yet most of us have heard anecdotes relating to people in chemical hazes who seem to snap out of it for a brief period to present a straight or sober countenance to the world.

There is anecdotal evidence that it is very hard to maintain a depressed state while doing a headstand. Certainly this is not a long term option, but giving someone live evidence of a state change, even for a minute or two, can shift a belief that feeling depressed is all-pervasive. If someone can change that belief enough to consider other options, they may be open to learning more user friendly attention shifting skills. Then they can discover, through live experience, that changing state by choice is a skill which they can learn.

John Grinder’s ‘Chain of Excellence’

For our purposes, learning to change state is predicated on a person’s natural and habitual states, more than those involving artificial aids. John Grinder, the co-originator of NLP, proposes a ‘Chain of Excellence’ leading to enhanced performance in any context:

Breathing

Physiology

State

Performance

The Chain of Excellence has three points of leverage to shift attention and create a better quality of action in the world. They are:

  1. Change your breathing pattern and your physiology (posture, movement, carriage) will change.
  2. Change your physiology and your state will change.
  3. Change your state and your performance will change. (Performance includes natural interactions, reading, sleeping and eating as well prepared activities and working).

If you act on any one of the three, the categories below will shift in response. To test this, consider an issue in your life and note your state. Then go for a ten minute brisk walk with an even, balanced posture and your head up comfortably. You will find your breathing will deepen, your physiology will be nicely shaken up and your thinking will become clearer.

You can attend to any matter on your agenda as you walk, or you can think about it before you walk, then shift your attention to enjoy the walk and return to the matter afterwards. Your take on it will be different. This is an example of a model known as ‘Personal Editing’, created by Judith DeLozier and is the simplest and most natural way to do it. You can see it unfolding in daily life if you attend gym, exercise or dance classes. The class members come in after work in a work state. They attend to class, move, exercise and perform routines. Then they leave in a different state.

When you engage the Chain of Excellence, your attention goes to the element you want to shift. When you follow through, your body function supports resourceful states that promote high quality attention. Personal editing can provide you with a generic resource state which you can take anywhere. Then, when you enter a specific context, the state will enable you to access appropriate resources for performing well in that context.

A ‘Four Step Change Process’

In the New Code of NLP, John Grinder has developed a ‘Four Step Change Process’. It applies leverage through the Chain of Excellence to create generic, content-free (go anywhere) resource states. Step 3 requires an activity that applies the leverage of the Chain of Excellence. In this case I recommend the Personal Editing brisk walk as you can do this by yourself and I have described it already.

  1. Identify a context where you want to perform with excellence and currently do not.
  2. Step briefly into the context and experience it.
  3. Step out of the context and start a Personal Editing brisk walk immediately, attending only to the sensory experience of walking and seeing and hearing your environment in real time.
  4. At the end of 10-15 minutes brisk walking, step into the context you chose in the state you are in now. Let the state blend into the context and enjoy the result. Now you experience the difference.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

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5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes

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The quality of attention we apply and the selection of filters we use to limit it can be enhanced with exposure to different frames of reference and more effective classification patterns.

Before we can enhance the quality of our attention deliberately, we need to become aware of how we are filtering and applying our attention currently. For most people, attending is something we do with reference to content; that is what we are attending to.

“We need to become aware of how we are filtering and applying our attention currently.”

Discovering Our Attention

If we want to identify and track how we attend at any time, a simple method uses common content as our medium. To give you a taste of this, take a composite memory of driving your regular vehicle, as if you are driving now, in the present. Driving your car is the frame for this experience and it queues your driving perceptual filters. Now consider the following questions:

  • As you are driving, are you aware of looking at the road ahead?
  • How far ahead do you look, normally?
  • Do you notice the presence of other vehicles?
  • Do you notice anything about the cars in front of you?
  • Are you aware of movement in your peripheral vision?
  • Are you aware of the sound of your engine routinely?
  • Are you aware of the sound of your engine when it sounds different?
  • If you have music playing, do you notice it?
  • Do you register the speed you are doing?
  • Are you aware of selecting the distance you drive behind other vehicles
  • in slow traffic?
  • in medium fast traffic?
  • when you stop at traffic lights?
  • Are you talking to yourself?
  • Are you seeing through internal images?
  • Do you feel speed, torque, acceleration?
  • Do you feel emotional responses to your thoughts?
  • Are you aware of the speed limit?
  • Are you aware of the sequence of traffic lights?
  • Are you aware of when to signal at a roundabout?
  • Are you aware of the route you are taking to your destination?
  • Are you aware of finding the appropriate pedal with the appropriate pressure?
  • Are you aware of steering the car?

Your answers will provide you with valuable insight into your process for attending while driving. The next question in response to each answer you gave is:

How do you know that?

The elements of attention can be classified and punctuated in different ways. The driving questions invite answers related to use of our senses and internal representations of remembered and imagined sensory experience. We use our senses and internal representations to think and attend. The quality of any experience we have is related to the combination of senses and representations we select to process it. Most selection occurs outside conscious awareness. So another classification for attention is what are we aware of consciously and what are we responding to outside conscious awareness? We took a common scenario like driving and asked the questions above to bring some of our process to conscious awareness.

“The elements of attention can be classified and punctuated in different ways.”

Now you have more conscious awareness of what you do while driving, you can enhance your experience and possibly your skill as well. For example, the further ahead you look, the more time you have to respond to changes on the road in front of you. If you detect and respond to movement in your peripheral vision, you can avoid potential obstacles more smoothly. If your attention is on the road instead of on your internal experience, (be it dialogue, images, sounds or sensation), you are likely to detect and respond to more external activity and drive more safely. If the rearview mirror is in your peripheral vision, you will detect flashing blue lights at the earliest opportunity. Once you have updated any parts of your driving experience, you can allow the changes to automate once more, so they function seamlessly while your conscious attention is where you want it.

This exercise can be applied to any activity, experience or context you choose. It is a useful method for refining skill development, enabling us to identify the elements of a skill set that could benefit from enhancement. We can pick and apply the enhancements, practice them deliberately and allow them to integrate into automation.

Using attention includes (but is not limited to) the following components:

  • The frame, context or situation for attending.
  • The combination of senses and representations used in attending.
  • Conscious awareness of parts or elements of the experience.
  • Conscious awareness of prior knowledge and related future outcomes.
  • Unconscious awareness of prior knowledge and related future outcomes.
  • Unconsciously included parts of the experience.
  • Unconsciously applied frames and perceptual filters surrounding the experience.

Another aspect of attention is how we apply each of our senses to the content we are seeing, hearing or feeling, be it internally represented or externally sensed.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice

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‘Pay attention. You won’t find the answer on the ceiling’

‘Pay attention. You won’t find the answer on the ceiling’. The teacher’s admonition cut across a child visualising the answer to a maths problem. The child was attending, working out the problem using implicitly learned rules and making mental images in the most natural place. The teacher expected the students to be bent over their desks, calculating into an exercise book or a screen. Unfortunately, relatively few people appreciate that visualisation is most accessible when looking upwards and teachers want to see recognisable evidence of compliance.

Visualising to do calculations is a very effective way of using our attention for calculating. It is faster than using writing and saves paper. Most people rarely notice how they use their attention, so there is little awareness in the general population that attention can be subject to deliberate application.

“There is little awareness in the general population that attention can be subject to deliberate application.”

Consider the child in the example. She had no idea that she was making calculations using rules and images outside conscious awareness, only that they worked. Her teacher had no knowledge of how the child did it, only that she wanted to see the child’s workings written on a page. The child could not present her workings and eventually stopped presenting answers. No-one thought to give the child an explicit description of the rules she had discovered implicitly and subsequently stopped applying. If they taught these, she and others would be able to derive the workings for any problem in the set governed by those rules. Then they could generalise and use their attention to discover the principles governing other sets of facts and figures.

If people learned to attend to the process of how something works, they would be able to produce multiple examples from first principles. Currently, most formal learning at school level focuses on knowing facts and figures. Only a few students manage to infer the underlying principles from exposure to a collection of related facts and figures. Yet many of the facts and figures can be inferred from the principles. They make sense in light of the principles, thereby becoming inherently more memorable.

What is attention?

Attention is awareness of activity occurring in the world around us and or in our internal experience. We use our senses to detect movement in the world and then process what we detect via neural pathways. This experience is as if we have direct contact with the world. This is sensory input and is our first access to incoming data. It is a common experience for small children and a rare experience for most adults.

The author, Carlos Castaneda alluded to first access experiences when referring to a ‘Stop the World State’ as part of shamanic training. You can have a similar experience by extending your peripheral vision to its extremes on both sides and up and down, while focusing on the far distance. This will reduce your internal dialogue (verbal thoughts) and allow you to experience the world with minimal categorical filtering. It is a delightful and absorbing experience. If you go for a walk in a Stop the World state, take someone with you, so you do not have to attend to safety and traffic while in the state.

We filter incoming data routinely, to avoid overloading our attention and to reduce mental effort. For example, we expect a chair to take our weight when we sit on it and we know to sit on it because it is ‘chair’. Linguistic filters name and categorise everything we have encountered before, that otherwise would have been experienced at first access. Our knowledge, beliefs and values frame what we attend to and how much attention is given to any concept or object. The generic name for the filters we use to order our world is: ‘Perceptual Filters’. They are used to classify the raw, incoming data, to attribute meaning, relationships and other groupings of inclusion, exclusion and value.

Any form of perceptual filtering reduces the amount of information we accept into our systems and its function is to protect us from too much simultaneous input and enable efficient mental processing. When it is done automatically, using low grade classification systems and without deliberate periodic review, we can become inflexible or at worst, stereotyped utterers of platitude. At its best, perceptual filtering allows us to learn new and interesting material, classify existing knowledge in flexible and accessible sets (including sets of sets) and to use patterns of excellence as the frames in which we operate.

The quality of attention we apply and the selection of filters we use to limit it can be enhanced with exposure to different frames of reference and more effective classification patterns.

By Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer at INSPIRITIVE Pty Ltd.

Attention Training Articles

  1. Apply leverage to your attention for productivity by choice
    by Jules Collingwood
  2. 5 elements to enhance the quality of your attention and further your outcomes
    by Jules Collingwood
  3. Creating meaningful change and altering the way you represent the world
    by Jules Collingwood
  4. How you attend to the world can transform your performance in it
    by Jules Collingwood
  5. How using your attention can change the quality of your states (and vice versa)
    by Jules Collingwood

(Note: If you would like to learn more about the New Code of NLP you can get a copy of  our latest Kindle book ‘AEGIS: Patterns for extending your reach in life, work & leisure’ by Jules Collingwood, NLP Trainer. For only $4.99 here).

Related articles

Learn more about NLP, read our Ultimate NLP Compendium of NLP

If you found this article useful share it with your network.