A few weeks ago I wrote about a CEO who filled every empty minute in his week and wondered why his best thinking had gone quiet. Then a leader named Marcus, who learned the hard way that the speed of a decision and the quality of a decision are not the same thing. I wrote about my own week without a phone in my hand, and what showed up in the space that used to belong to a screen. Three different stories, but underneath them, one question I keep circling back to: where is your attention actually going, and do you know?
It’s easy to think of attention as something that’s less in your control – it’s dependent on what’s going on around you. A meeting pulls you one way, a text pulls you another, and by five o’clock you’ve been present for none of it and busy with all of it. There’s truth to that, AND, attention isn’t passive. It’s the resource you spend before you spend anything else, and it goes wherever you point it, on purpose or by accident. It’s like this giant firehose, it can either flail around focusing on whatever is in front of it, or you can choose to pick it up and aim it willfully. Leadership doesn’t happen in the decisions you announce. It happens in the thousand smaller choices about what gets your focus and what doesn’t, most of which you never consciously make at all.
That’s the thread running through this month. Spaciousness is what happens when you protect a block of your calendar for nothing in particular, so your attention has somewhere to land besides the next task. Stillness is what happens when you give your attention a chance to sort the signal from the noise before you hand someone an answer. Self-forgetfulness is what happens when your attention stops circling back to how you’re being perceived and turns toward what’s actually in front of you. Different names, same underlying move. There’s this intention for each about where we put our attention. It’s about deciding where your attention goes instead of letting the day decide for you.
There are tiny leadership papercuts that add up when we’re not diligent with our attention. For those of us that are coaches, maybe a member or client tells you about a decision they’re stuck on, and part of your brain is already three moves ahead, thinking about what to say next instead of what they’re actually saying. Maybe a quiet week arrives (yay – kids are back in school) and instead of noticing it, you fill it with scrolling because the itch to be doing something never got interrupted long enough for you to ask what you’d rather be doing. A client issue lands and you answer at the speed the room demands, because nothing in your week has trained you to pause before you talk. All of these things are these tiny papercuts in our attention and while they won’t kill us, they will quietly decide what your leadership and your life actually consist of.
We tend to measure our lives by the big things, the decisions we announce, the milestones we hit. But a life is mostly made of where your attention went on an average Tuesday. If you added up every place your focus has gone this year, would it point back to the person you’re trying to be, or would it point somewhere else entirely?
That’s not a rhetorical question, and it’s not only a leadership one either. It’s personal in the plainest sense. The people in the room with you notice whether you’re actually there. The idea you almost had noticed whether you gave it room to surface. The version of you that shows up when you’re not rushing, not performing, not half-present, is still in there. It only shows up when you make space for it, when you let the pause do its work before you speak, when you stop watching yourself long enough to actually listen.
So here’s where I’ll leave this series (I promise, it’s not with a new framework, and not with another thing to add to your week.) I’ll leave you with the question underneath all three of these posts. What are you paying attention to right now, this week, this season of your life, and is it building the thing you actually want to be building? You don’t need a full audit to answer that. You probably already know. The harder part is being honest about what you find, and being willing to point your attention somewhere else if it isn’t.
Where your attention goes, your leadership follows. So does everything else.