Attention – Page 5 – mardihumphreys.com

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

It’s Memorial Day weekend; the official start of summer recreation. School lets out, community pools open, and outdoor concerts shift into high gear. Does anyone else feel weird about kicking off summer fun with a holiday based on mourning the military personnel who died while serving in the United States armed forces? No? Just me? Okay. The sacrifices they made secured the freedom we enjoy. We pause, remember, and are grateful.

Speaking of weird, how is your adjustment to working in person going? We endeavor to discuss the evolution of work in dispassionate, detached, and practically Vulcan tones, but under the calm exteriors, all the feels are brewing.

Employees want more freedom over where and when work gets done. Employers are afraid to give up that much control. Changes like a four-day work week, WFH options, and bringing your dog to work are just the beginning. They lead to other debates like, What about unlimited PTO? How about healthcare insurance coverage from day one? Will the company offer stock options?

The attention both employers and employees have to pay to these emotionally charged topics is exhausting on top of the work that needs to get done. Often, when you’re weary, emotions, especially the negative ones, lead the conversations instead of interpret them. Under what circumstances is it okay to express strong emotions at work?

Emotions are contagious and can escalate an exchange into an argument. In the absence of communication, negative emotions are even more dangerous because where information is absent, your brain fills in the blanks.

For example, if your manager keeps putting off approving a time-sensitive decision, you don’t know why they aren’t giving you an answer. You can assume they are thoughtfully processing the possible implications of their decision. It’s more likely you’re going to assume they’re putting you off because they forgot about you or don’t respect you. These negative thoughts produce negative emotions that fabricate a story you believe is the truth. Then, you may get angry and make a decision without your manager’s sign-off. You tell yourself you will ask for forgiveness if it turns out they don’t approve.

But, what happens when you discover the story you told yourself is false? Now you’ve damaged the trust between you and your manager. How do you recover from that? What do you learn from it? How do you fix it? What triggers do you put in place to prevent it from happening again? (Recommended reading: Rising Strong, by Brene Brown)

During this transition from the way work was done to the way it will be done, it’s crucial that you manage your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. You must pay attention to what you give your attention to. Be an active listener. Summarize and repeat back what you think you heard. Presume everyone is on the same team and working toward what is best both for the organization and for each other.

When was the last time you had to stop your brain from filling in a communication gap at work? Please share in the comments.

Child-free by Choice

WARNINGS: In honor of Mother’s Day, this is a woman-centric conversation. Also, I have a lot of questions.

Why do people assume that women have a responsibility to reproduce? Men get questioned, but do they get shamed for not having children? Parenthood is a social convention not a natural condition. Raising children in America is arduous and, if you participate in the workforce, it’s difficult to be both a mother and an employee.

The Way It Is

From birth, society bombards females with the message that job, marriage, and kids are what make you successful and therefore, happy. Women who intentionally choose a child-free lifestyle inevitably deal with periods of powerful anxiety and self-doubt regarding their decision because culture warns women that they will eventually regret not becoming a mother. Those who choose not to have children get labeled selfish, self-absorbed, and shallow. They are accused of hating children, but child-free represents a lifestyle choice not animosity. For example, Betty White supported St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Dolly Parton founded Dolly’s Imagination Library, and Oprah Winfrey built The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.

Let’s Be Honest

Parenting is really hard – The United States does not have a national paid parental-leave program, childcare is expensive and hard to find, and mothers are expected to assume the bulk of the responsibility for raising children. The pandemic threw a spotlight on these barriers to mothers’ participation in the workforce challenging women to seriously reconsider what responsibilities they can realistically manage.

Motherhood does not make you content – Women are increasingly defying societal conventions en masse and thinking about their “why” in terms of motherhood. Research shows that in the 1970s one out of 10 women reached menopause without giving birth. In 2010, the rate was one out of five.

The biological clock is a myth – Not every woman has an innate desire to reproduce, but if your friends are having babies, you may feel left out. Ask yourself, “Do I really want to be a mother? Or do I just want to want to be a mother?”

The Decision

There are plenty of reasons for remaining child-free:

You are a complete human without the experience of motherhood
You do not have adequate support and/or resources
You have trouble taking care of yourself
You’re considering motherhood because others expect it from you
270 more

If you like your life the way it is (you travel, value freedom and spontaneity, need lots of alone time), then it is better to not have kids and regret it later than to have kids and regret it later.

If you are a woman living in America and considering motherhood, take a listen to the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast Episode 6 OVERWHELM especially the beginning of the Hard Questions segment starting at 31:03. This is an honest conversation around what is considered normal regarding “the gig” of motherhood as it currently exists in American society.

What do you think of the state of motherhood in America? Please share in the comments.

Join the Resistance

When you give something your attention, you’re letting it rule your life for however long you think about it. This can be good, like visualizing what you want your slide deck to look like for next week’s presentation, or bad, like reliving last week’s argument with your supervisor. When it comes to deciding the best use of your time, energy, attention, and money, what you say no to is just as important as what you say yes to.

Attention Management

Attempts to increase productivity trace at least as far back as 1890 when William James wrote The Principles of Psychology. One of his statements is profound in its prophecy. He said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Managing your attention is key to maintaining your priorities. Sounds easy, right? Then what’s stopping you from achieving your goals?

I can resist anything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde

The brainpower necessary to make wise choices is exhausting. Should you eat the doughnut or the apple? Should you watch TikTok or go for a run? Should you proofread your report or text your friend? When you concentrate on trying not to do something, it captures your attention. You’re more likely to give in to the temptation and do the very thing that you’re trying to resist. Instead, distract yourself. Also, limit your proximity to the temptation. For example, if you want to resist the doughnut and eat the apple instead, then hide the doughnut and put the apple at your workstation. Go for a walk around the block before eating anything.

Recognize the Real Enemy

Setting boundaries is easy. Holding them is difficult. Attention is like a muscle. You have to build it. You strengthen and lengthen your attention span every time you identify who, what, when, where, why, and how you got distracted from your goal. Then, change one or more of those variables to produce your desired result. For example, I’m a process improver. I analyze undesired results and reverse engineer them to identify where the outcome began to veer off course. Then, I imagine different choices to envision how they each may produce more desirable results. In terms of self-control, this could look like:

Undesired Result – Your deliverable was late
Veered off course – You missed one deadline
Analyze –
- Were other projects with similar deadlines competing for your attention?
- Was the deadline not communicated?
- Was the deadline communicated but you forgot to calendar it?
- Were you waiting for someone to get back to you with key information?
- Were you interrupted by an emergency?
- Were you distracted by social media?

The answers will dictate the next iteration of the deliverable process. For example, if you missed the deadline because you couldn’t resist the temptation to scroll through social media for hours everyday, then locking your phone in a drawer until break times will be added to the process because it will help you control your technology, behavior, thoughts, and environment. All these are factors that can distract you from reaching your goal.

How do you manage your attention? Please share in the comments.

Fake It Till You Make It

I was really excited to listen to this episode of Adam Grant’s podcast, WorkLife because it featured comic Taylor Tomlinson. The topic of the conversation was imposter syndrome. You have to have a lot of confidence to be a stand-up comic so I was surprised to learn that Tomlinson struggles with it. Volumes have been written about imposter syndrome since the concept was introduced in the 1970’s. How is it still a thing?

Old Assumptions

From its inception as a theory, imposter syndrome had a negative connotation because it induces sabotaging emotions like mistrust and fear. It is a mindset of self-doubt that plagues high-achievers. You think you don’t deserve your current level of success and any minute now you’ll slip up and be exposed as a fraud. But is that belief always bad? Can that fear be employed as motivation to become as competent as you want to feel?

New Data

Basima Tewfik is an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In October 2021, she released her study on imposter syndrome. She hypothesized that people with imposter syndrome have a gap between the perception of their competence and how competent they actually are. She worked with three different test groups in three different situations. In all three groups she found that the imposter-syndrome sufferers performed their jobs just as well as, if not better than, the test subjects who did not experience imposter syndrome. She concluded that the imposter-syndrome sufferers put additional efforts into their interpersonal skills.

Apply It

How could this new knowledge work for you? For example, you’ve probably heard that women apply for jobs when they meet 100% of the criteria in a job description, while men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the qualifications. If women saw jobs they wanted, decided to acquire more of the skills listed in the description, and applied for the job anyway, then they demonstrate curiosity, continuous improvement, and problem-solving skills. Hiring managers crave these characteristics.

Thought Experiment

Imagine someone exposes you as a fraud. Picture the scene in your head with as much detail as possible.

Who is it?
What expertise do they claim you don’t have?
When in the process do they call you out?
Where are you when they challenge you?
Why do they say that you don’t know what you’re talking about?
How do you respond?

Your answers empower you to acquire knowledge, learn new skills, and practice emotional intelligence. These enable you to bridge the gap between what you perceive and what is real. You can feel like you earned your success.

Imposter syndrome involves both how you see yourself and how you think others see you. Here’s something else you can try: Ask three people you trust what they think your strengths are. If their feedback does not match how you want to be perceived, you now have information to plan your next goal.

How will you use this new research to make imposter syndrome work for you? Please share in the comments.

Hidden Treasure

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Continuous improvement is my business, so I’m habitually looking for manual processes to automate. Some of my clients get nervous because automation could eliminate an employee’s job. But that employee has a big advantage over the automating software application: soft skills. Only human beings can combine wisdom, communication, leadership, and self-awareness to get work done. If the employee is valuable, then I suggest the client take this opportunity to advance them into leadership. That decision calls for careful consideration because individual contributors tend to get promoted for their technical skills. However, the promotion often comes with people to manage requiring soft skills the new manager may not have. Here are three characteristics to look for when identifying a potential leader.

Growth Mindset

Leaders are constantly learning, questioning their own assumptions, and seeking feedback. For example, leaders:

Take personal initiative to adopt the company’s mission. They decide to find their role in furthering it even if being an individual contributor is not their dream job
See the big picture and think strategically about how they can help the organization get from where it is to where it wants to be
Not only focus on what they can control during a crisis but also look for new opportunities the crisis may spawn
Realize the next step toward a goal may require two steps back
Develop confidence when they refuse to be victims of setbacks
Favor performing small experiments to get the team comfortable with failure. They frame these failures as necessary to eliminate what doesn’t work
Don’t wallow in regret when they make a mistake. Instead, they find out where they went wrong to prevent it from happening again
Recognize the importance of celebrating every baby step the team takes toward their goal

Inspires Collaboration

Bestselling business author Daniel Pink, says 70% of employees spend at least some of their workday “persuading or convincing others.” People who do this well and for the benefit of both the project and the people working on it, are leaders. They:

Positively build, cultivate, and engage a disparate team to promote a workplace culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
Give relentless respect to earn trust and strive for mutual understanding
Rally the team to buy in to the plan that will complete the mission
Manage conflict to foster debate instead of defense
Encourage everyone on the team to maintain an attitude of, “It’s us against the problem, not us against each other.” This bonds the team and makes everyone stronger for the next challenge

Chronic Curiosity

In his book, Play Nice But Win, Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies says, “Change, true transformation, is a race with no finish line.” Thanks to technology the rate of change is increasing and it’s not going to slow down. Leaders:

Champion transformation and look for what is coming next
Are more interested in relevant results than in looking the smartest person in the room
Apply the scientific method to business challenges. For example, COVID is forcing leaders to think critically about how work gets done because business “as usual” no longer exists. Solving that challenge begins with curiosity

What qualities do you look for in a potential leader? Please share in the comments.

You First

Photo by Christian Domingues from Pexels

The constant running around during the holidays keeps you so filled with adrenaline that it’s easy to ignore how exhausted you are. Now that the holidays are officially over, you may feel under the weather. The very events that are supposed to be joyful often cause the most stress because of our (sometimes unrealistic) expectations. Add to that the uncertainty of the various variants of COVID plus the impending menace of cold and flu season and you have the ingredients for a tasty overthink stew. If your mind, body, and/or spirit are telling you to stop, then pay attention. Give yourself the gift of self-care.

Physical

Does stress have your neck tied up in knots? Get a massage. Do you feel jittery? Cut back on the caffeine. Do you feel sluggish? Cut back on the alcohol. Get up from your desk or couch and exercise. It doesn’t have to be strenuous. If it’s unseasonably warm, go for a walk. If it’s too cold outside to do that, then stretch or do some balance work. Be kind to your body by covering the basics: get eight hours of sleep, eat healthy foods, and drink plenty of water.

Mental

Not everyone’s holidays were happy. If you’re feeling more morose than merry, then try identifying your triggers. For example, does the thought of returning gifts in person at a big box store freak you out because of the close proximity of all the people and the possibilities of the presence of COVID? Then think about alternatives: go at a time when the store is least busy (Googling the store name will give you this data), wear a mask, and practice social distancing. Or, Is your mind overwhelmed by all the work others want your help with because they put projects on hold until after the holidays? Take a minute and ask yourself which of these projects require your unique expertise. Is there someone else you can delegate a project to? (Bonus points if that person is someone you sponsor.)

Spiritual

Routines can be calming. Beginning and ending your day the same way every day signals to your mind that everything is as it should be. Maybe you begin your day with prayer/meditation over coffee. Maybe you end it with box breathing as you lay in bed waiting for sleep. Practicing gratitude can be spiritual too. If you kept a gratitude journal for 2021, now is a good time to go back to the beginning and read it. If you didn’t, then to fill its pages for 2022, consider making it a priority to do one nice thing for one person everyday. It can be as simple as holding the door for someone behind you as you both enter the same building.

Resolve to pay attention to your mind, body, and spirit through regular self-care this year and do not feel guilty about it. If you want to pull out crayons and a Scooby Doo coloring book and spend an hour, then do it!

How do you practice self-care? Please share your tips in the comments.

Distracted December

The only thing I love more than making to-do lists is crossing items off them. But I feel something inside tugging on me to stop and pay attention to the holidays before they all pass by. If you feel the same, then here are some suggestions for reconciling work productivity and holiday celebrations.

Plan

What are the top three things you absolutely need to accomplish by January 1, 2022? Schedule them on your calendar and block that time. When you’re doing one of these tasks, concentrate on it until either it’s done, or you’ve gotten as far as you can in one sitting. Do not allow interruptions and distractions. Do not check your mobile or multi-task. Multi-tasking is like treading water. You work hard but don’t get very far. In this plan remember to schedule time for:

Checking with the people from whom you need information. Ask them when they are taking time off. This will prevent you from either interrupting their holidays or putting important projects on hold
Margin. If you think a task will take thirty minutes, schedule at least forty-five to complete it. If you’re done in forty minutes, take two of them and stare off into the distance to give your eyes a break before tackling the next project
Yourself. It’s the secret sauce of productivity. Even if it’s to spend the day in your PJs sipping coffee and reading a novel, take time to rest, recharge, and reboot
Buying gifts
Celebrating. Ask your co-workers what holidays they’re observing and invite them to share their traditions at the all-team party. BTW, leave your phone in another room so you aren’t tempted to check it
Attending a holiday networking event. The holiday season is a good opportunity to both make new acquaintances and deepen relationships with business associates you recently met
Adjusting the plan. In mid-December look at the bottom of your priority list and see what you can put off until after January 1st

Break

Take care of yourself. Get up from your desk and stretch after an hour’s work. Drink a glass of water instead of a caffeinated drink. Get enough sleep. Reward yourself with a break to do whatever you want to for fifteen minutes (power nap, check Facebook, watch a cute cat video) after finishing a task.

Analyze

At the beginning of January, analyze your data. Answering these questions will help you improve the end of 2022:

Did you accomplish everything you wanted to? If not, what stopped you?
What did you do well?
What could you improve?
What do you wish you’d done differently? How will you make that adjustment next time?

You’re juggling parties, shopping, traveling, children’s events, etc., and you’d rather be watching Elf than working on the end-of-the-year report. Set your boundaries, communicate them, and enforce them. The earlier in the process you do this, the more understanding your team and manager will be.

Do you have a plan for finishing 2021 strong? Please share in the comments.

Purposeful Procrastination

Here in the Digital Age where business moves at the speed of data traveling through fiber, if I’m not productive every minute I’m at work, I fear that I’m being lazy. Since emails are tasks someone wants us to do and they arrive 24/7/365, it seems I’m not the only one with boundary issues. In terms of time management, we put off completing a task because we have other tasks that are either more urgent or more important. Or, we put it off because we don’t want to do it. But what if we use procrastination as a tool to preserve our boundaries?

If/Then

If we restrain ourselves from replying all to a group email asking for volunteers to organize the office holiday party, then are we lazy or are we allowing someone else to step into leadership?
If we proofread the slide deck for tomorrow’s weekly team meeting because the team member assigned to do so hasn’t done it yet, then are we being helpful or are we doing their job for them?
If we accomplish a last-minute errand for a co-worker, do we then set ourselves up for accomplishing more last-minute tasks for this co-worker in the future?

This is Not the Admin You’re Looking For

For example, sixty-three minutes before my team was scheduled for a video conference with a client, the account manager emailed me saying that the client needed to reschedule. He tasked me with:

Notifying the other team members that the meeting was postponed
Checking their availability for the new meeting time the client proposed
Rescheduling the meeting on our video conferencing platform
Updating the meeting calendar invitation

When this task arrived in my inbox, I was preparing for a different video conference huddle that was only fifteen minutes away. I had time to send a quick group email, but I chose to ignore the account manager’s request and prepare for my imminent meeting.

Sixty-eight minutes later, the emails from my teammates flew, reply-all style. The account manager ended up completing all the tasks he attempted to assign to me.

Confession: I intentionally procrastinated.

Sorry (Not Sorry)

It was hard to restrain myself. I felt bad for not preventing my teammates’ confusion and for using them to force the account manager to do his own administration. But apparently, I did not feel bad enough to go ahead and do the account manager’s administration. I prioritized my boundary above everyone else’s convenience.

Proceed With Caution

Having said (and done) that, please remember that we should exercise good judgement when evaluating such situations. Using restraint to enforce boundaries can look like procrastination and can be detrimental to our brand. We need to examine who may be impacted and how negatively before we intentionally delay action. In the above example, three people were inconvenienced for a relatively short period of time and my brand was positively impacted because I’m not the team’s administrator. I used the passage of time to help me hold that boundary. Hours after the incident, I replied to the account manager’s original email. I suggested that it’s probably not a best practice to rely on me to complete last-minute tasks as evidenced by this incident. I have not received another last-minute task from him since.

Have you ever intentionally put off work? Why? Please share in the comments.

Going off the Rails

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

How do you know when the axe is sharp enough? Overthinking is a pattern of behavior where your thoughts swirl in an endless negative loop. These thoughts produce fear that clouds your judgement. Instead of preparing you for positive next steps, you get stuck. How thin is the line between preparation and overthinking?

Why It’s Bad

Your brain is trying to reduce the anxiety caused by your situation’s uncertainty, but overthinking typically just produces more questions to worry about.
It may deter you from making rash decisions, but as a habit, overthinking is a gateway to excessive worry which can lead to stress, anxiety, depression, OCD, and/or PTSD.
Pondering all the possible outcomes to a decision is fine, but when it prevents you from choosing one of them, that’s a problem.
Do not confuse overthinking with self-reflection. Self-reflection results in learning, insight, and gaining perspective. Overthinking results in dwelling on everything you don’t have control over and feeling bad about it.
Overthinking projects that are on a deadline gives you less time to complete the project. For example: taking so much time deciding what you’re going to wear to your client presentation that you run out of time to adequately rehearse the presentation.
If you are busy overthinking a situation, then you are too distracted to notice new opportunities.

What It Feels Like

You lose sleep because of the repeated negative thoughts of how you feel about the problem instead of how you’re going to solve it.
You have trouble making easy decisions (e.g., where to go for lunch).
You second guess your decisions (e.g., I should have known in the interview that Joe Sixpack was a bad hire).

How To Stop

Distract Yourself: Your brain will come up with possible solutions when you leave it alone for a while. Take a break and listen to a few minutes of your favorite podcast.
Journal: Stop and write down what triggered the overthink. After a week, read what you wrote. Do you see any patterns? Make a plan to deactivate the trigger the next time it happens.
The Practical Test: When you are spiraling, ask yourself, “What evidence are these thoughts based on? Is it legitimate? Is there someone I trust that I can ask?” If your thoughts are illogical, unreasonable or impractical, they are overthink.
Change Your Environment: Enlist your endorphins in the battle. Get outside and go for a run or walk the dog or ride your bike.
Worry Time: Schedule a recurring weekly appointment on your calendar for worrying and limit it to fifteen minutes. This accomplishes three things: you control when you allow the worried thoughts, you limit the time you allow yourself to worry, and by the time the appointment comes, you may no longer have anything to worry about. Begin your worry time with this question, “Can I do anything to change this situation in the next twenty-four hours?” If yes, then stop thinking and take action. If no, then put the thought on the agenda for the next scheduled worry appointment.

If you can’t stop ruminating on your own, it can damage your mental health. A trained therapist can give you exercises and accountability to pull yourself out of the overthinking doom loop. Learning how to flip your negative, repetitive thoughts into positive ones is a skill worth developing.

What do you do to pull yourself out of overthinking? Please share in the comments.

My Way or the Highway

I keep stumbling over the word agency because it’s a contributing factor to The Great Resignation. It’s trending in the context of one of its lesser meanings (check out #9). As I struggled to visualize it, I received an unexpected email of encouragement from my manager. In reassuring me that I am achieving our goals, his email helped me label how I achieve them. It also woke me to the fact that not everyone has this freedom in their work. Employers had to give up a certain amount of control over their workforces at the height of COVID-19 when they weren’t allowed to have employees work under their watchful eyes. An employer who has issues with employees working remotely is not a logistics problem, it’s a trust problem.

Control

If it’s not enough to complete the task correctly and on time, but it also has to be done the way the manager prefers, then you have a lack of agency. For example: toward the end of her life, our grandmother was not physically strong enough to wash the windows on her house herself. During a visit, my husband offered to do it. She immediately pointed out what equipment to pull from where, gave him a recipe for the cleaner, dictated while he mixed it, and window by window instructed him on how to clean them. Kudos to him for his patience. There were 13 windows on that house. It was a long afternoon. Haven’t we all had a micromanager? Or one who insisted we be available to them 24/7/365 like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada? If this is your current situation, can you set boundaries on when you’re available to your manager? Can you transfer to another department that allows you more freedom? Is having agency important enough to you to find a different job? Whatever you decide, take time to think about how you got into this situation. Are you habitually involved with people (managers, people you date, etc.) who want to control you? If you determine that you’re the common denominator in these relationship equations, talk about them with a trusted friend, therapist, or coach to help you identify red flags in both your behavior and your manager’s. Otherwise, the lack of agency is likely to follow you to your next role.

Trust

Your lack of agency means your manager doesn’t entirely trust you. Some things to consider:

Have you done something to lose their trust?
Are they micromanaging everyone, or just you?
Is your relationship strong enough that you can ask them what they are afraid of?
Is there a way you can reduce their insecurities?
If you do what you’re told the way you’re told to do it every single time, there’s no learning. Would your manager let you experiment, fail, then learn from the result? For example: Can you do a project how, where, and when you want to, successfully complete it, deliver a report of the results to your manager, then ask for this process to become your standard operating procedure?
Have you had success on your own initiative that you can remind them of to prove your credibility?
Would more communication (e.g., weekly status reports) on projects give them more confidence in you?

You train people how to treat you. You cannot change other people’s behavior, you can only change what behavior you will accept from them. If you can’t achieve the autonomy you need at your current position, then your decision is whether to stay or go.

What do you do when you experience a lack of agency at work? Please share in the comments.