Attention and Focus
Training Exercises and Resources

One of the biggest and perhaps saddest trends in our era is that attention spans are shrinking. It is primarily fuelled by the explosion of online content, rise of social media and the ever-increasing range of things to obtain and experience. It is great to be living is such a rich world, the like of which we have never had in the entire history of mankind. However, there is a price to pay for anything good and in this case, it seems to be our shrinking attention spans, increased stress and the feeling that there is so much to do in so little time.

To learn how to manage attention, there are several exercises you can go through to reverse the trend and gain more control. In this article, you will be introduced to a series of attention management and concentration exercises that will help you achieve this.

There is a fundamental difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Most people focus on efficiency. How to get something done faster? How to get somewhere quick? How to achieve more in a given time? How to finish the day’s tasks and go home early? How to do little and get the most from it? How to do only 20% of the effort to get 80% of the results?

This is all good and important. However, it should not be at the expense of something much more important; effectiveness. This captures the idea that what you are doing is going to help you get closer to your goals. Effectiveness is purely personal since it is entirely based on your specific personal goals. In contrast, efficiency is universal—there is a way to do something faster and you can learn to do it too. Effectiveness is about how far you are from your goal and if what you are doing now is going to get you closer to that goal. Efficiency is about how fast you get there.

When it comes to time management, goal setting and productivity, most people tend to focus mainly on efficiency. What is an ideal time management system? What is a good calendar app? How can you do something faster? Where can you get training for it? In contrast, there seems to be very little focus on effectiveness; why are you doing what you are doing? Why should you be doing this rather than something else?

What is the point of getting somewhere faster when where you get to is not where you want to be? How important is it that you check where you are and where you are heading periodically rather than just constantly obsessing about how to get there faster?

If you look around, you will notice that many people are suffering from this misunderstanding and lack of awareness. People spend a huge amount of time getting a degree on a given topic only to realise it is not for them. In a big city, people rush back and forth to work day after day not thinking what this is all about and why they are in the rat race? People get into a job thinking that it is only temporary and end up staying there at pretty much the same level for thirty years and then feel unhappy that no one wants to employ them for anything else.

Hence, a reflection in this area can be quite an eye opener. It is important to learn how to be constantly aware of the distinction so that you don’t get carried away with efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.

It is just after lunch and you are about to teach a new theory to your delegates. Ideally you should not cover this after lunch but you have had no choice. You notice that delegates are falling sleep. Energy is low, concentration is gone and people are getting bored. What do you do? You need to energise them. Other than opening up the windows or calling for a break you can also use the energiser described here to awake the mind and the body. This exercise is particularly useful for younger delegates. For more senior delegates, you will need to make a judgment to see if this is a suitable activity.

In Chapter 14 of Focused Determination, a motivational technique is presented which we call “Weekly Slogans”. These are inspiring quotes or “Slogans” that you choose for personal motivation. As described in the book, you need a collection of them so that you can use a different one each week. A list is provided in the book (in Appendix B) which is included below.

As indicated in the book, this page is where you can submit your favourite weekly slogans so that other readers can get inspired by them while preparing and extending their own personal lists.

Imagine a person who talks about himself all the time. The conversation is full of “I”, “me”, “my” and they constantly talk about what happens in their lives. Such people don’t tend to last long as friends. Usually, the people we most like are those who are caring and selfless rather than those who are self-centred. To such people nothing seems to be as important or interesting as themselves.

Unfortunately, we all might suffer from a degree of self-centred view from time to time and would need to keep an eye on it. This exercise helps delegates see what it means to shift focus to others even when you want to talk about your own views. It is a clever and subtle way to shift attention to others without overtly forcing them to change.

This exercise also helps delegates see how important it is to let events speak for themselves. It focuses the mind to cover facts more than subjective emotions and let a listener decide for himself on what to interpret. The exercise is ideal for creative writing as it provides a structured approach to storytelling.

This is a creative design exercise, allowing participants to work together as a team in achieving an objective. As part of this exercise, delegates will get to choose a number of political cartoons and have an attempt at designing one. The design is just a pretext to get people talk to each other and share what they like or dislike. The cartoons provide an opportunity to laugh about serious stuff so the exercise is light hearted but can have significant value as people can easily end up discussing values, current affairs, ethical and political issues and of course politics.

Note that the emphasis of this exercise is in the descriptive design of a cartoon as opposed to the actual drawing or art. Most people are not skilled in drawing and forcing them to draw in this exercise might make them feel uncomfortable. This is why the drawing part is ignored (though of course you can optionally add it if it suits your training needs). However, there is no reason why people cannot come up with an idea for a political cartoon which this exercise captures.

This is a simple but fun team building exercise most suitable for outdoors. This exercise can also be a fun activity for kids. You can run competitively and give a prize to the winner. It helps to train people to stay focused while being totally aware of their environment as the dynamic changes. The winner must be good at predicting what others are going to do while keeping them guessing on he would do.

This exercise can be used as an icebreaker but can also to see how delegates approach problem solving. The problems considered can also be customised to make the exercise even more useful when an ideal answer is found. As a result, it is a power template to use when you need to make people focus and make important decisions.

This is an elaborate memory exercise that can be used for several purposes.

• You can use it to teach specific memory techniques in memorising pictures, names and words.
• You can use it to teach the associations of images with words.
• You can use it to help delegates memorise the characteristics of famous paintings in history. This is ideal for art students.
• You can use it to test delegates on memory recall.

You can easily adjust the difficulty level of this exercise by manipulating the timing and the amount of memorisation the delegates need to go through. You should decide this upfront based on your training needs and the capability of your delegates.