Day 6 of Mental Excellence – Distraction Control
A link to the complete 7-day series on mental excellence is here …
Mental Excellence 101: Develop the Mental Skills of Elite Performers
‘‘My thoughts before a big race are usually pretty simple. I tell myself: Get out of the blocks, run your race, stay relaxed. If you run your race, you’ll win… channel your energy. Focus.”
- Carl Lewis
In the last blog we discussed the value of being able to fully focus on the tasks and activities we are engaged in, in order to maximise the experience and perform at our best. Today’s aspect of mental excellence is concerned with being able to deal effectively with distractions.
Elite performers can maintain their focus despite the challenges that may come from the *external* environment – whether these distractions take the form of colleagues, negative feedback or technological failure. They can also manage their focus despite *internal* distractions ,which may come in the form of feelings of stress, emotion or frustration.
Once you have developed your ability to focus you also need to develop strategies for refocusing if (and when) you become distracted. For example, if you face a setback or receive negative feedback whilst working on a task, how quickly are you able to re-establish your focus? Do you have a strategy that quickly gets you back on task? Do you use positive self-talk? Do you change tasks regularly to maintain your focus? Does it take you too much time to get back to focused activity?
Five Key Steps to Managing Distraction
- Identify
Identity the factors that distract you. How many of these are controllable ? How many of these do you create? - Environment
Create a working environment that maximises your focus. Only you will know what this is, and what kind of external environment works for you. - Colleagues
Consider interaction with colleagues. For example, do you use assertive language when dealing with individuals that try and disturb your focus. There may be other eways of doing this, such as closing your door or wearing headphones. When Archie Norman was CEO of Asda, he suggested that his senior executives to wear baseball caps to signal to their staff that they were having some ‘thinking’ time. - Time
Do you carefully plan your time in order to complete tasks? Do you waste time on non-urgent and unimportant tasks in order to put off difficult work which actually requires you to dedicate time and full focus? Spend a day monitoring how much time you spend in productive and necessary work to identify how frequently you are distracted. - Refocus
Elite performers use effective refocusing strategies to reset their focus. The first step is to recognise when you have been distracted. You should then identify a cue word; image or prompt (e.g. an object on your desk or a motivating quote) that you can use to help you refocus. In order for this to work you need to practice this refocusing cue so that it becomes an automatic process.
Developing the ability to fully focus and manage distractions are core aspects of mental excellence. Recent research by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK suggests that even a five second interruption can break our cognitive focus, requiring us to figure out what stage we were up to before we are able to return to, and recommence, the task in hand.
Following the above key steps will enable you to perform better under pressure, increase your productivity, whilst gaining more fulfilment from the work that you do.
Tags: Archie Norman, colleagues, distraction control, emotion, environment, refocus, stress, time
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