I think that one of the most wonderful things about marketing is that you can create huge amounts of delight, memorability, and distraction with relatively small levels of expenditure. Organisations, businesses, and governments often seek grandiose solutions, overlooking the fact that small things can also have a profound impact human behaviour. Encouraging people to make better choices has a greater influence than using punishment as a deterrent. Most human actions deviate from physical laws, and are often disproportionate in nature, unlike the predictability of physics. The correlation between ‘Input A’ and ‘Output B’ is usually insignificant in human behaviour and can even be contradictory.
Does this sound familiar?
Distractions have no effect on the truly focused individual as winners focus on the goal, not the pain. There four types of distractions or should I call them, interruptions you will face in your work:
1. Meetings, office visitors and loud colleagues
2. E-mail, telephone notifications and meetings
3. Team lunches, calls from loved one, coffee machine conversations
4. Social media, news websites, instant messaging
According to Tim Ferris, we need to “…limit e-mail consumption and production. This is the greatest single interruption in the modern world.” What do you think?
We are very distracted
We are living in environments with all kinds of competing information and we often work and live-in places that are also overloaded with information. The ability to selectively focus on certain things and ignore other things is part of our capacity as humans. There are distractions everywhere and this is the first time in human history where almost every on the planet has a mobile device. These devices have all kinds of attractions, amusements, and diversions, so we are constantly being pulled away from that one thing we need to do, and I think mindfulness can help.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is where you use your strength of concentration to become a witness to your own thoughts and feelings. I think mindfulness is a mental work out, every time you bring your mind back into focus you are strengthening your concentration. Instead of being fused by our experience, we can step back and still participate in the experience fully and have more control over our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Your ability as a salesperson to fix your attention on what matters and ignore distractions is a valid predictor of positive financial outcomes. Mindfulness is a method of training your attention in bringing it where you want and keeping where you want it to be. Contact me via e-mail for 1:1 coaching cognitive control sessions.