Goleman Daniel - Focus

HBR Emotional Intelligence Series

How to be human at work

The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review.

Authentic Leadership

Confidence

Dealing with Difficult People

Empathy

Focus

Happiness

Influence and Persuasion

Leadership Presence

Mindful Listening

Mindfulness

Purpose, Meaning, and Passion

Resilience

Self-Awareness

Other books on emotional intelligence from Harvard Business Review:

HBR Everyday Emotional Intelligence

HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence

HBRs 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

Harvard Business Review Press

Boston, Massachusetts

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Title: Focus.

Other titles: HBR emotional intelligence series.

Description: Boston, Massachusetts : Harvard Business Review Press, [2018] Series: HBR emotional intelligence series

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022310 | ISBN 9781633696587 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Attention. | Interest (Psychology) | ExecutivesPsychology. | Leadership. | Emotional intelligence.

Classification: LCC BF323.I52 F63 2018 | DDC 658.4/094--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022310

ISBN: 978-1-63369-658-7

eISBN: 978-1-63369-659-4

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.

Focus inward, outward, and on others.

By Daniel Goleman

Use self-awareness to counter the roots of your stress.

By Kandi Wiens

The four phases of attention and distraction.

By Michael Lipson

Eight practices to live by.

By Amy Gallo

Imagine the outcome that frightens you most.

By Heidi Grant

When the conventional solutions are just as frustrating as your problem.

By Monique Valcour

Start caring for yourself.

By Amy Jen Su

Eliminate their stressors, then watch them thrive.

By Maura Thomas

Release distractions as they arise.

By Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter

Unfocus your mind and let creativity flourish.

By Srini Pillay

A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathwayssome of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.

Grouping these modes of attention into three broad bucketsfocusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider worldsheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller under standing of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.

Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.

Emotional intelligence begins with self-awarenessgetting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves. But what does that entail? A look at how people focus inward can make this abstract concept more concrete.

Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. Attention given to any part of the body amps up the insulas sensitivity to that part. Tune in to your heartbeat, and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeats has, in fact, become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.

Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala, which neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, calls somatic markers. Those messages are sensations that something feels right or wrong. Somatic markers simplify decision making by guiding our attention toward better options. Theyre hardly foolproof (how )

Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most-successful traders (whose annual income averaged 500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts. They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautious, and took fewer risks. The least-successful traders (whose income averaged only 100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their gut. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled.

Zeroing in on sensory impressions of ourselves in the moment is one major element of self-awareness. But another is critical to leadership: combining our experiences across time into a coherent view of our authentic selves.

To be authentic is to be the same person to others as you are to yourself. In part that entails paying attention to what others think of you, particularly people whose opinions you esteem and who will be candid in their feedback. A variety of focus that is useful here is open awareness, in which we broadly notice whats going on around us without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode we dont judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive.