Imagine if you could think about your business for the next hour with the focus and intent of a person deep in prayer. Think you’d come up with some great ideas? You bet you would!
Have a look at today’s newsletter, Strategic Kavanah, for thoughts on bringing direction and intention into your business thinking.
Please share your comments below.
(P.S. Happy birthday to Caroline!)
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Happy birthday Caroline! ~– (that’s a birthday candle for you)
Steve, I really like when you take a religious, philosophical or scientific concept and apply it to business. It reminds me that our business can be deeply meaningful and should be full of purpose.
Excellent post. I kept thinking about the distinction between human beings and human doings. I like your three-step approach and will quibble with one statement that we are short of resources. In my experience, we don’t generally lack resources but often lack resourcefulness. I have caught myself saying, “I have tried everything” after trying two things. The good news is that strategic kavanah can help us tap into that resourcefulness and reach a better outcome.
By the way Steve, in my experience asking a higher quality question gets us higher quality answers. You always ask good questions. Thanks for that.
Beautiful thoughtful applicable post, Steve. Just beautiful! I shall refer to it often. Thank you.
“In my experience, we don’t generally lack resources but often lack resourcefulness.”
David – This is great! Thanks!
I was just listening to Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide, this morning. He talks about when your “gut,” emotional thinking works best, and when focused, “frontal-lobe,” rational thinking is best. Each kind of thinking has its place, and each has its dangers.
When writing about productive focused thinking he was telling about the United DC-10, flight 232, that failed in 1989 and had to make an emergency landing in Sioux City … the pilot’s thinking process was a great example of intense kavanah. The pilot, Al Haynes, was able to shut out all extraneous thoughts, in a period of amazing pressure, and focus himself on only the things he could control. He, apparently, figured out new ways to fly the disabled plane that were counter-intuitive, and managed to bring the plane down and save about 2/3 of the passengers, who otherwise would all have died. When the conditions of Flight 232 were recreated in a flight simulator, no other pilot could bring the plane down with fewer than 57 crash landings.
Lerher writes about how our brains can associate different ideas in our working memory when we manage to have only the most relevant information in working memory. That’s why great focus on “the things that matter” is so productive, and why distracted multi-tasking and constant interuptions make us so unproductive.
The human mind is a tricky thing! Learning to apply it well, in the right ways at the right times, to our businesses can have a major impact on success.
Great post Steve,
What I find useful when coaching people around interruptions is to talk about choice. Outlook allows your to work offline. Messenger allows you to set I am busy. You can choose to answer the phone. Book a meeting room and hide if you have to!
Another area I explore is honesty about interruptions – many people like being interrupted -sure they moan about it but it’s the ultimate excuse for procrastination on things you should be doing.
One area that concerns me in office culture is the – “I get more emails than you” or “I am drowning in email” type conversation. It’s become a badge of honour. Why???
I am fascinated by the deliberate use of subconcious – I read an article about shamanism at work now I know that may raise a few eyebrows in an office but the deliberate changing of mental state is something we have not really explored in depth. Coaching uses relaxation and empathy to guide mood etc. That’s a start.
Music is another area – I sometimes work from home and often choose music to get into a certain groove.
There are many ways to change this – the choice is yours!
Great point, Paul. As the article I referenced in the newsletter said, 44% of interruptions are self-imposed, but how many of the other, external interruptions could we choose to ignore … but instead we choose to let them interrupt us?
If you want to define kavanah to mean intense focus, you still have to pair it with its non-identical twin, keva, the fixed routine of prayer.
Is it fair to say that Brand Harmony sets out the liturgy, the words that must be engrained and recited from habit,the keva, while WE adds the concentration, the intentionality, the recognition that you can’t be in the moment every moment, but you don’t have to be if your auto-pilot is functioning properly?
Very cool connection Larry! Thanks for the insight.