I recently came across an oddly, fascinating article in the New Yorker, “A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins.” Apart from the entertainment, Apollo Robbins provides wealth of wisdom about human behavior as he describes the way in which he separates people from their possessions. Amongst all the terrific insight in the article, one statement really stood out and resonated with me as a particular important statement of professional advice for anyone who works with people and ideas.
“It’s all about choreography of people’s attention… attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it and you hope that it flows the right way.”
In my opinion, this is a not some esoteric perspective, but a provocative revelation on interpersonal activity, full of macro- and micro-implications that can positively affect our lives and goals. I am concerned that it is easy to confuse this notion with what we understand as convincing people. It’s different. As Apollo points out that it’s sophisticated choreography using verbal and physical tactics to capture and shift people’s conscious focus away from some things and towards other. Ultimately, this choreography moves people minds to an open position where they can be convinced and influenced. Just, in the same fashion that you can channel people’s attention away from your efforts to remove their wallet or watch, you can also use the force to channel their attention towards your efforts, ideas and initiatives.
Ironically, I suspect, attention is one of those obvious, yet commonly overlooked areas of life in spite of its crosscutting influence on success. Whatever the case, the ability to choreograph people’s attention appears to be an exceptionally powerful skillset, perhaps one of a number of things that separates the good from the very great and the influenced from the influential.
I’ve often marveled at a lone person emerge above a group and exercise Jedi-like powers that move an entire room of people towards their point, until they have full command of the forum. Accordingly, the mastery of directing attention may be one of the X factors on why some people seem to disproportionately win the support of others, even though they may not possess the better idea. In fact, I have witnessed many excellent ideas fail or go relatively unnoticed, despite their superior merit …just ask the makers of “the Zune.” Therefore, one’s market share of attention stems from far more than strength of ideas. Clearly, some people are just naturally gifted at directing attention of people, but history is also well populated by rich line of people who were not naturally compelling forces, but hone this skill to rise to the stature of titans in their own respect and performance. Moses, Lincoln, Wilberforce, and Skywalker are a few names that immediately come to mind for me.
Unfortunately, in my experience, too many people fall into one of two extremes in their practice of this skill. Either, they are just passive and let the flow of others carry them out to sea or they are overly aggressive and splash around, making them ineffective and somewhat annoying. In other words, both approaches fail. Channeling attention doesn’t mean that one dominates meetings, conversation or calls; quite the opposite, I believe that it means that guiding people at the right time with the right verbal and physical moves. It might just be leaning towards the conference table and making an acute point. It might be leaning away from the table and using an extended pause. It might be putting your hand on someone’s shoulder and starting a sentence with their first name. It might be looking straight at someone and slowing your speech. It might be looking away and cracking a witty joke. It might be a whole host of situation appropriate and experience driven combinations. However, If done truly masterfully, you don’t necessaril need to speak or do much at all, but what little you do do has to be targeted and powerful enough to tilt the balance to your intended direction. In fact, if you think about people who are highly influential, each practice this invisible art in their own personal way, but all seem to share a number of common traits.
While far from exhaustive or complete, I have outlined what I believe are seven of the very basic trace elements in the skill of channeling attention:
1. It's well-informed;
2. It's goal-oriented ;
3. It's incremental;
4. It's deliberate;
5. It’s precise;
6. It's subtle;
7. It's honed.
While I am confident that I am not doing this topic its full justice, I do hope that I have at least raised your awareness to the flow of attention. Hopefully, if you have not seen the flow before, you will begin to see it now; and if you did see it before, you’ll hopefully start practicing how to channel it , If you practice it, you’ll improve at it and if you improve at it and make positive impacts on things bigger than yourself. Something, I think it is a very good thing.
kdk
No comments:
Post a Comment