Paying Attention. With So Many Things ‘Wrong’ Where Do You Start?

Remember this?

“Right class 4b in order to find the right answer, you must stop fooling around and pay attention.”

Sitting in rows facing the authority figure towering above us, we were instructed not to drift off, zone out or spend time day dreaming (or doodle!) If we shut up, stay quiet, ignore distractions and use laser focus, then we will be able to work out all the problems in front of us.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Now that you’re an adult, what if paying attention to the problems scares you half to death?

Huh?

Let’s assume you find it easy to write and list all the parts of your life you’re struggling with.

From the career you hate to your relationships, no social life to feeling miserable, from your lack of finances to unacceptable living environment.

It feels like every single area of your life is on the list, all parts on a downward spiral and slipping out of your control.

Pay attention?!!

Where do you start?

When you attend to the list, you observe your life as an Inbox of problems: concerns, pains and a current reality that you don’t even remember creating.

“It seems our brain was designed to pay attention to sudden, dramatic changes and to simply ignore or monitor subtle differences, steady states, and gradual changes.” Robert Sylwester, author of How to Explain a Brain.

There are thousands of messages and subjects headings that haven’t been opened and read.

They’ve crept up on you.

Life wasn’t always like this!

The Inbox piles up, you ignore it, zone out and think, “I’ll get round to it, one day.”

One day becomes one week, one week becomes a month, one month becomes one year, one year becomes two.

Your Inbox happily piles up in your absence of attention.

You want to take back control.

So, in a moment of slight insanity, you open everything up in the Inbox.

You view every single area of your life, you flag a few areas that are really important, you put a mental star beside those that are urgent, you shuffle and rearrange trying to collate what you see into neat little boxes so you make sense of it.

“How, when, why did it all get this bad?”, you think. “I’ll never be able to sort this out.”

When you view the big picture, you’re scared. What if you never get a handle on it again?

Fear creeps in, so you close your Inbox down (again) and choose to leave it for yet another day: when the moment is right, when you feel stronger, when this and that has settled then you will have the courage to start properly.

More clock time passes, for the most part you’re able to ignore the Inbox.

If you refuse to look, it might just go away, right?

But it niggles you, wherever you go it’s hitching a ride.

The content of the Inbox is there when you wake, before you go to sleep, when you eat, when you work, leisure time, time with friends and family.

But still you refuse to pay attention.

You think, “What if you begin and are left feeling wide open, vulnerable, or have more questions than you have answers, or worse, what if you don’t have any answers?”

You find you get upset easily, some days you think you are going insane: one minute you can’t get out of bed and the next you explode at the slightest annoyance that in the past would not have phased you.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” you say to yourself.

You move from one intense emotion to the next in a matter of seconds.

You want some time, some breathing space, a mental break: a little respite so you can take the Inbox, go through it and deal with the messages: delete, save or action.

You’re not stupid, you know there is more to come, that box will never be empty, there will just be new information coming your way as clock time continues to move forward.

The fact that you have observed the Inbox at all, is fantastic news.

Might not feel like it. But it is.

The fact that you tried to tackle everything at once, is a great endeavour, very brave.

But in all my years working with people I don’t think I have ever met someone who successfully changed all areas of their life, all at the same time.

They worked to the premise, “When I change one small thing, everything changes.”

They stopped trying so hard to:

Fix it

Sort it

Mend it.

Tackle it

Repair it.

They stopped looking at the Inbox with the same thought that created it.

Or, as Einstein said “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

They taught themselves not to pay attention to the Inbox at all.

May I make a suggestion?

Start with paying attention to the outbox it doesn’t contain habits, perceptions and illusions.