By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.
—Christopher Columbus
The word focus is bantered about our society these days as if it were something disposable: we have focus groups, we have clichés such as getting a clear focus on whatever, and we tell ourselves we have to focus. But do we really understand what we mean by that word?
For most of us, life is a series of interruptions. You can’t go into a grocery store without hearing music in the background—and it’s not the elevator soothing music of 20 years ago anymore; it’s the latest pop hit interspersed with ads for the store and for other products, and it’s a lot louder than it used to be. You also have in the background the myriad of conversations that people are having on their cell phones, that, try as you might, you can’t totally ignore; why did that woman have to tell her son not to come over for dinner even though she was in the grocery store and why did that man tell whomever he was talking to that he was about to do something drastic at his job and furthermore, just how drastic was it, and do you need to alert the authorities?
We may find that we can’t work in our offices; today’s communal cubicles, in which several desks are pointed at each other, all separated by a waist-high wall intended to make the employees feel like a team, in fact force the inhabitants to hear and in some way process each other’s work and conversations as well as our own. To combat that noise, we may wear headphones, which in themselves pipe music into our ears that may also distract us.
Add to that the instant messaging that shows up on our computers, the ping! that announces that we have at least 62 new emails, and all the coworkers who show up to stand behind you or in your office door and ask, “Got a minute?” when you clearly are working on something—you have recipe for Office ADD.
Remember the dogs in the Pixar movie Up? They were a lean, mean fighting machine of a pack—until a squirrel went by. Then all their attention went zooming to that squirrel, forgetting everything else. That’s us—a whole battalion of worker bees responding to a constant chorus of “squirrel!”
So no matter how much we talk about finding focus, we have very little of it in our lives—yet it is crucial for successful Zen communication.
What Is Focus?
Many of us do our daily jobs with only the information as to how what we do affects our immediate coworkers. If we work in a large, 5000 + employee company, we may not even work in the same city, much less the same facility, where people in other departments of our companies work. As a result, we know only what we see and what is close around us.
But the problem with this situation is that by being this small isolated cog in the giant corporate wheel we lose the bigger picture of where we are doing it. The great 19th century poet Thomas Hardy talked about “the hawk’s eye view,” which in essence meant being able to scan the entire landscape of what was before us, take in all the details, and go unerringly right to what needed to be done. That’s focus.
Focus means to be able to discern the distractions and discard them, seeing what is asked from us or what we are asking of ourselves. In Zen, it is known as mindfulness.
Mindfulness means being able to act, not react. What does that mean? When we have thought about all the aspects of a situation, all that it is calling on us to do, and all that we intend to do in and with situation, we act. But when we just start out, without consideration of whether it is the best direction to go in, that’s reaction. We react when we act out of emotion; while many people think of reacting as coming from anger, reacting can also come from being too overwhelmed to think through the situation.
Of course, one of the usual reactions to the previous statement is “What do you mean, reacting? I am just getting through my day. Time is of the essence, and part of my evaluation is based on my productivity.”
True. But merely being busy doesn’t mean being productive. Have you ever seen an old pinball machine? The kind where you pulled a lever and then watched a ball bounce off various roadblocks, flipping more levers to steer the ball back around more roadblocks, hoping that you could hit them all before the ball sank down into the bowels of the machine and you had to start over? That’s how most of us approach productivity: we are the ball in the pinball machine. We get up a huge head of steam and bounce from project to project, sometimes being sent back to hit the same project repeatedly until we sink and go home for the day—or quit working, because many of us take our work home with us once we’ve put in our eight or nine hours at the office.
Like the pinball, we react, rather than follow a strict direction. If you studied the pinball board, you could figure out that the best strategy for gaining the most points was in a certain pattern (each one varied depending on the machine and how it was set up) and hitting each roadblock in a certain sequence that would guarantee you the best points. Pinball wizards had the focus to be able to plan that strategy; they could see all the moves that would allow them to score.
Chess masters have that same focus. So do great quarterbacks: they have to see the holes in the players on the field and be able to think three steps ahead. Yet while chess masters usually plan in a hushed room, think about the hoopla and noise that goes on at any college or NFL football game. Those quarterbacks have to be deaf and blind to outside distractions; they have to focus. And the pinball wizards? Well, the 1960s band The Who wrote a whole rock opera about one. Called Tommy, the main character, who happens to be that pinball wizard, is deaf, dumb, and blind, which is the reason he’s so good. Rather symbolic, isn’t it?
For communicators, focusing means to be aware of what the whole strategy behind a piece of communication, as well as aware of all the intentions and results one wants from it. Focus also means to shut out other things, such as the voices in our heads.
Most of us have running commentaries going on in our heads, much like having three different TVs on at once: finish this quickly you have a meeting in fifteen minutes and—oh, heavens, did I sign Julie up for basketball? And when is that list for Sam due again?—and let’s see, I was saying that the analysis of the data showed—what exactly did it show? I had a great way of summing that up a minute ago—James Joyce and William James called this running commentary stream of consciousness, and while it is a nifty literary technique, it is also the surest way to ensure that you are the ball in the pinball machine rather than the wizard.
Lewis Carroll, best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland, was a brilliant mathematician and commentator on the society he saw around him. He was undoubtedly referring to observed futility when he has the Red Queen—surely the prototype of an unreasonable executive—tell Alice, “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” Words from a woman crazy enough to have the white roses painted red are not words that we embrace in Zen.
You have probably heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” The problem then becomes that we don’t know how to be smarter. We’ve worked so hard just to stay in one place that we can’t focus. We think we are faced with either staying in the race to nowhere or what appears to be the only other choice, which is drop out completely. But that is a false assumption appearing real. No matter what it seems to be, it’s still false.
Why do we teach kids to “Stop, Drop, and Roll” when they see fire? Why do we tell people to think “ABC” (airway, breathing, and circulation) when teaching first aid? These are the first steps, yes, but they don’t handle the crisis. What they do is allow us to stop running as fast as we can and be able to think. Thinking isn’t allowing any old random thought to float through our heads. Good thinking involves focus. If we want to be productive, not have to redo our work to make it right, and make sure what we send out is the best representation of ourselves, we need to focus.
How Do I Focus?
The first step in gaining focus is the usual first step in anything Zen: breathe. Take 30 seconds—that’s all you need—and just breathe. Put yourself back in the present moment, not in projection of what will happen or needs to happen in the future. Just breathe.
Now take another 30 seconds to move your thoughts from a point in front of you to a horizontal view. You can actually tell physically if you are doing so; if you find yourself staring straight ahead, with almost no peripheral details in your mind, you are not focusing. You may think that you are looking at a point in front of you, but you aren’t; that point in front of you is the goal, not the focus. (We’ll discuss the goal and how it is different from the focus in the next chapter.)
Breathe and pull back your visual focus from the point in front of you so that you can see the details to the side. Think of a movie camera shot: when it opens up wide, you as the viewer suddenly see the context of the action. That’s what we are looking for in mindfulness: we see the context. And once you see the context, all sorts of things fall into place automatically. Your awareness of the details you wish to communicate deepens. Your point of view broadens, which allows you to perceive how other people may look or respond to your message (we’ll talk more about this aspect in a later section on audience analysis). Your tone changes. Through no additional conscious effort, you will go from sounding as if you are a panicked or irritated person who didn’t give all the details to someone who is calm and collected even under the pressure of the situation. In other words that image we keep talking about improves, just by taking that Zen minute to focus.
Why the Zen method? Think about the world we live in. Instead of making our lives simpler, technology and social media often make our lives more difficult. People around us become increasingly self-absorbed, and self-focused; it’s almost as if the focus and a picture narrows down to one point.
Think about Google Earth: we can see the big picture of the town and then through the manipulation of a scale bar, we can narrow down so that we suddenly see nothing but our own house and our own environment. That same sort of a narrowing of perspective and thought is pervasive in the modern working world. It creates anxiety. No matter what, modern business life can leave us feeling as if we’re trying to juggle many plates in the air, certain we are dropping some, working frantically to make sure we catch at least a few. Even if we catch them all today, we’re left with the feeling that we should have done better, could have caught more, and that there is something somewhere we didn’t catch.
That nagging feeling increases the anxiety and we become more constricted, more focused on ourselves and our inabilities, and more looking into the future instead of dealing with what’s in front of us today. My first mentor used to say that we needed to keep our heads where our feet are. She said that if we have one foot in yesterday, either by recalling what we were supposed to do yesterday and did not get done, or by regretting or reliving incidents and words and lack of perfect performance in the past, we diminished our abilities to perform well in the present.
By putting the other foot in the future, anxiety ridden and worried about what was going to come our way, the what ifs, the what abouts, and all the other doubts that plague us, we diminished our abilities to perform in the present even further. We diminish ourselves, we constrict ourselves, and we fail to see the bigger picture.
You’ll know when you’re in that spot. Your body will feel it. You will feel it tightening somewhere around your chest, with a buzz somewhere in your head, a lack of focus in your eyes, and a feeling that you need something. That feeling will keep pushing you to do more, be more, try more. But the body knows we can’t.
That’s why so many workers are addicted to doubleshot espressos and high-cost coffee: they feel their bodies need that boost. Yet Zen and its approach to life as well as its approach to business communication will tell you that the need for coffee, or sugar, or anything else is truly an illusion. Much like the people in Plato’s cave, we see only the reflection of reality, not the reality of the present moment.
Emphasis on being in the present allows us to see perspective. It also allows us to see depth.
When we look at that Google Earth image of our house, we can still manipulate the screen to see bits and pieces of the house around us. But what we see is the snapshot that the Google Earth car took of our house when it went by. My college-student daughter and her friends were comparing notes and describing their houses when one of them got the bright idea to pull up pictures of their houses on Google Earth so they could know what they were talking about. Much to my daughter’s surprise, the picture of our house showed an interesting feature: a back view of her dad painting the lawn furniture.
Now since he had painted the lawn furniture approximately eight months before she pulled up that picture, the view that Google Earth showed her was faulty. It was a memory, an illusion. Since then, the furniture has moved, the bushes have been trimmed, we’ve put in some flowers, and her dad has long since gone on to another project. But when we focus just on ourselves and one little incident, tinging it with one foot in yesterday and the other foot in tomorrow’s anxiety, we don’t see layers of depth.
Ever watch a computer move from a standard two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional one? What appears to be a clear line suddenly expands, showing gaps and connections and an entirely different model of how the items on the two-dimensional picture are related. Being able to see that depth makes communicators great. It’s what makes Peyton Manning and Tom Brady great quarterbacks; they don’t just see the end zone and the guys running to catch the ball once they throw it; they see possibilities of movement. They see not just what is in front of them but what will be in front of them in a matter of seconds. How? They see the depth and connections of the now.
Perspective is far more than the big picture. It encompasses the many layers and nuances and fluidity and change that occur with every action and every moment.
Without being aware of this perspective and depth, we usually will not communicate to our best, continuing that plate juggling act, still wondering if we can continue to pull off the act day by day.
Enter Zen. Zen is all about the moment. While Zen acknowledges yesterday, it is aware of that tomorrow may never come. And if it does come, it will bring things that most likely we cannot anticipate. We can anticipate only based on the information we have now, which may or may not be an illusion come tomorrow.
By focusing on the now, we lose anxiety. And we find ourselves truly focused on catching each spinning plate, and doing it well. The Dalai Lama has written extensively about the pleasures that one finds in every day at work and tasks by focusing on the moment. One example he uses is pleasure he finds in washing dishes. By focusing on the moment, he can truly feel the warmth of the water on his hands, the rainbows reflected in the bubbles of the soap, and the gratitude that he has had food to eat to put on the dishes. That’s Zen focus.