The modern world is robbing people of their innate ability for deep focus. But it's also taking away an innate ability that enhances our clarity, connections and creativity - our ability to Mind Wander. That's what I explore a little today.
Show Notes:
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[MUSIC] Hey there, my name is Shane Kraddock and this is The Interage Podcast where I share a different take on how to lead and live a sustainable high performance life. Over the course of different episodes, I'm going to challenge the belief that tension, stress, and struggle are essential to success and creativity. My experience is that there's an easier way, there's a better way, and indeed there's an essential way that we need to explore for the times that we live in. So let's go ahead, let's jump in and explore. [MUSIC] Hello there, welcome to The Interage with myself Shane Kraddock. Today we're going to be talking about a different aspect of attention that might surprise you. It's coming out of some research that I'm doing at the moment around attention. I shared some of that a little bit a couple of episodes ago where I was talking about the hacking of your attention. And so a lot of my research myself has been focused on focus and maybe narrow attention. But I want to talk about the opposite today and in a way it is attention, it's a different type of attention. It's definitely an attention that seemed to be, I don't know, declining, being killed off even though it's very, very useful. And it's that of mind wandering, mind wandering. And the point I want to make today is that we need to deliberately cultivate the art of mind wandering, in my view, more in the world because it seems to me that the world's trying to kill it. And there's so many benefits from mind wandering, believe it or not. Now I just wanted to give you a little picture in your mind. So can you imagine yourself sitting on a train, a pack train, a busy train, and all around you you're looking at people who are on devices, they're on phones, they're on tablets, they're on laptops, maybe they're doing a blend of work, some are working, some are learning, listening to podcasts or maybe an online video, and maybe some are just watching streaming services, they've been entertained. And then somewhere in that carriage, you can see one person with no earbuds, no technology in front of them, they're just looking at the window into the distance. And they look like the proverbial daydreamer. If you're looking at that person, do you think they're productive? Are they being productive? Might have surprised that maybe that person is perhaps doing the most valuable work in that train carriage. Now it's not guaranteed, but there's a good chance, I think, that they might be. Because they're probably in a mind wandering mode. I remember many years ago, and this has happened a few times over my work, I was asked by a client, and when we got to know each other, they said, "Listen, I've got this problem I'd love you to help me with." I said, "Yeah, what is it?" I just daydream and I mind wander all the time, and I'd love you to help me stop. Now knowing what I know about the mind, my first question was, "Why do you want to stop?" And they said that, "Well, ever since I've been a child in school and even my parents, I was always given that to because I was always daydreaming." Now this person, the first person to say this to me was an absolute genius in the tax area. And I suppose from my own experience, I had realized that there was a huge value to mind wandering. I just asked them, "Well, when you're mind wandering now as an adult, do you do it much in your business?" "Oh, I do it all the time." In fact, very often that's where I got my best ideas. I said, "Well, describe what you're doing." So they did, and I said, "Why in God's name would I get you to stop that?" Because that's the part that's making you the expert that you are. It's the part that's allowing you to charge quite a significant amount of money for your expertise. And she'd often say that, "Look, should we be driving or walking or even at sometimes just running or just sitting doing nothing?" And just her mind would wander and time would go, but those little breakthrough ideas will come in. And there is a reason for that, that we're now seeing a lot of it's coming through the experience of researchers of psychology, neurology, neuroscience. And what they're seeing is that by cultivating the art of mind wandering, the beauty of mind wandering, that you increase the opportunity for aha moments in your mind, in your brain, which will present solutions, ideas, join the dots, brings clarity. And those two particular researchers that I came across, I just thought I'd mentioned them in this context, they're mind wandering researchers. That's not what they call themselves, that's what I call them. One guy is Nathan Spring from McGill University. Another guy is a Jonathan Smallword, University of Oregon, England. Now they both found similar things to be true about mind wandering. And this is my summation of three key points that they found. The first is clarity, that by allowing yourself to wander mentally, your mind actually slowly makes sense of the world. And you create space, almost like a free space inside to roam mentally. And what they're finding is that if people do that, that they're generally better, this is bizarre as well, better at organizing their goals, better being creative, and actually better at making long term decisions. A kind of in a way what they're seeing is there brings a sense of clarity to life, to make sense of life, and actually to do things better, just by actually moving into this different gear. So the first thing is clarity. The second thing are connections that when you go into mind wandering mode, again, that's my phrase, your mind seems to make new connections. And those connections sometimes disparate connections that your mind will then present a solution to a problem. And actually many great breakthroughs don't necessarily happen during periods of focus they often don't at all. I know there's a famous story on the discovery of Ben Zinn, a counter in the name of the guy now, who actually discovered it, but he had a dream, and he imagined a snake moving in a base of the shape of became the Ben Zinn ring. Mathematical problems have been solved. I'm sure you can relate to this though. I know many entrepreneurs who I've worked with were very often, we can take them for a hike or they just completely relax, let's say my animal retreat, and all of a sudden boom, they get a breakthrough. As Herbert Benson in Harvard calls it a break out, which is the same thing, your mind makes a connection, it joins the dots. I personally think it's because your unconscious mind is more engaged, because the conscious mind is relaxed, so the unconscious mind is more engaged, and that works thousands of times faster than your conscious mind. So it just kind of makes sense. And then the third one, so we've got clarity connections or connectivity, and the third and then is creativity. That your mind, when it's freed up tends to roam between the past, the present and the future, and in a way it kind of allows us to predict the future perhaps better, to get a better sense of what's going on from the past and into the present, and then maybe get a better sense of predicting the future. And I think it's just a really, really interesting aspect of the research that's coming out of the moment. And I think it's important to clarify maybe what the right type of mind wandering is. I mean, I think this seems to be an innate trait of everyone, everybody who's a human. So I think it's in building to you, because you can get caught up here now with the mind thinking, well, how do I do it? I think it's there all the time. I think you see it with kids, I think as adults, maybe as knocked out of us. I think what mind wandering is not is being on social media, being on Netflix, or being entertained, on streaming services, it's not scrolling on your phone, it's not looking at X. It's more that picture of the person looking at the train window, where they're kind of contemplating loosely, I almost kind of imagine my mind kind of grazing on the grass gently, like a cow. You know, it's just, it's loose, can't force it, it's relaxed, it's free flow. If you think about that train and the majority that trains me focus on being productive. And I think for me, we need to kind of rethink perhaps what is productivity, because certainly from my experience working with leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and their teams, that there is a prevailing culture, which is unconscious, which is built around productivity being about high focus attention. So high focus attention, people think that leads to output. And in the way, I think that's why a lot of bosses want to see people sitting at desks are at a laptop, even if they're working remotely, working. So we now have software measuring people sitting at a desk. And I think that's the opposite of what we should be doing, because ultimately we should be focused on outcomes, like are we achieving our outcomes, it's not about sitting at desk, pretending that I'm busy. And even for a high performer, that's not a recipe for sustainable high performers, because you will get burnt out, you're going to get tired. And so one of the sweeteners that researchers I mentioned earlier on, Nathan Spring, who's actually the professor of neurology and neurosurgery in McGill University, one of the things he has done because of the research is that he now goes for a walk every day, deliberately just let his mind sort things out. And he lets it go into what he calls loose drift mode, as the mind wondering mode that I'm talking about. So he's suggesting that it really helps him to stand back without any efforts, stand back from the external world, to allow his mind to digest what's going on. Now in my book The Inner CEO, I talk about that as well, in a specific chapter where I talk about the free flow mode, it's the same thing. So again, if you think back to that train carriage, think about the person sitting on the train looking at the window versus a somebody sitting beside them working on a laptop, which one of them is being more productive. I think most people would say the person I've flapped up, but I don't think that that's true. And I think what's really interesting about today, going back to what I mentioned about your attention getting hacked, is that what's scary about today is that most of the time we're actually not really focusing, we're in a distracted mode, we're kind of skimming across the surface of our work, we're not really getting to do deep work, but also we're skimming across the surface of our life. So we're not really focusing, but then actually increasingly we're not mind wandering either. So we're kind of getting the worst of both types of mode. And bizarrely, the business world is trying to, like leaders are trying to get more out of people, not realizing that actually, I think we're getting less, because if you're in an environment that's continuously stimulus driven, or stimulus bound, and people moving from one distraction to the next, that is not a recipe for high performance. So what about you? You know, where in your day do you allow mind wandering mode? Where can you maybe more deliberately build it in? For example, maybe today or every day, could you go for a mind wandering walk, an MWW? Just trademarked that mind wandering walk, maybe for half an hour or an hour, maybe more. And when you go for the walk, you're not listening to a podcast, dare I say, you're not listening to anything other than just walking, taking in the environment around you through your five senses. It'd be like a tool to help. You could do shifts. I use shifts myself, and I've given that link in a previous podcast, I'll put it in the show notes here anyway to explain it, as you can check that out, but shifts me as a way to start my mind moving into a more grazing neutral mode, and then I kind of drop it because it'll move into that zone by itself, then once I just give it a start, give it a push. And I came across a quote recently that maybe I think is relevant here by J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, Superbook. And the quote is, "Not all those who wander are lost." And what's pretty clear looking at the research is that the research is proving this, that not all those who wander mentally are lost, that in actual fact, perhaps those who deliberately wander look at that window, metaphorically speaking, like that person on the train, that increasingly it's a key aspect of better leadership. So I close with that on that point that maybe today you can take inspiration to take your mind for a wander, because it's turning out that it's really, really, really good for you. That's it for this week. Ciao for now. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] (upbeat music)
