The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Give Your Attention | FF19

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Sharing a sentiment from Simon Sinek's 'Leader's Eat Last' about the importance of giving our attention and being present, not locked into the world of our smartphones.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in three, two, one. Welcome to Foundations Friday 19. Don't waste time by not providing your attention. The sentiment came to me on the road trip I'm on as I listened to Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last audiobook, and he's talking about how, you know, we can be somewhere, but not really be giving our attention, which in case means we're wasting both our and the other people around us time. And a couple of examples, unfortunate ones, and you all have seen them out there. I've seen it. I really try consciously not to do this is when you're at your child's event, whether it's a sporting event or a play

or something, and parents and folks are in the audience with their head down on their phone, and they don't look up until there's clapping and cheering. Then they look up, then their head's back down on their phone. Kids look over, kids see you not paying attention, and that is impactful, right? It's a time waster to not give your attention to be there for your kids. Same thing at work. If you're in a meeting, let's say you're in a board meeting

and someone's presenting and they work really hard to get this presentation together to pitch whatever they're going to pitch to say we should do or shouldn't do this kind of thing, spend this money or not spend this money. They're looking for engagement from everyone involved, particularly for us as project managers who often help facilitate that preparation and those meetings. We owe them our attention, not the attention to our phone or emails or our multitasking, which I was reminded this week

to focus on a one thing, right? One thing a day, a week, et cetera, or at a time. Because really we as humans technically can multitask but we're not really doing everything well right we take that 100 focus on one thing and slice percentages off it as we pay attention to other stuff another example of this i saw and for those out there in education or like you know brothers and sisters in public safety and incident management when i would teach into the command system and incident management, when you're doing the didactic academic stuff and you're teaching, you're going through things, you're trying to have back and forth discussion,

you're giving those between the slides scoop, a little flashback to the old school show there. And people are just sitting in the audience looking at their phones constantly or on their computer doing work the whole time, wasting my time, their time, not giving their attention. So I think as we close out this week, and I'm recording this a little bit before Friday, but it was a really good thought. Be where we're supposed to be, both with our attention and our time. So it's value added for us, for our team who's putting in the work to get information together that may be nervous about presenting in front of high level

people or, you know, whatever it is to their manager, to their manager's manager. We owe them our attention so they don't feel like they're wasting their time or that we give the impression that we feel they're wasting our time. It's not fair. And for the project managers out there, I would submit, let's make this a conscious thing at every meeting that we're doing. Right. And I've certainly clicked on something and something's popped up or you get messaged and need to be a little more proactive and saying, nope, I'm in the middle of something right now. I'm not going to pay attention to that. Cause we even on zoom, we can see people looking around or not looking right.

And it's a tough thing. So as we all put in our valuable time by giving our attention, I hope we're all paying attention to getting back out into the world, into the sunshine that we're staying safe, that we're washing our hands. And I wish you all Godspeed.