Watch out for that tree! or You get what you focus on

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending an intimate weekend with the American motivational guru Tony Robbins (I say intimate…… it was me and 10,000 others!)

One of the things that I recall from that weekend was Tony talking about where we place our focus.

Here is my take on it.

If you have ever watched any of the current spate of clip shows on TV (You’ve Been Framed, People do the Funniest Things, oops tv etc) you may remember seeing several clips of people hitting things like trees.

In these clips, people are happily skiing down a slope or cycling down a hill and they run into the only tree for miles around.

• How did that happen?
• Why, despite the vast areas of open space around them, did they end up colliding with the only stationary object available?

Great for TV clip shows but jolly painful and pretty embarrassing too. This demonstrates an important human factor – we get what we focus on.

These people were completely focused on the tree and how to avoid it and they got what they focused on.

What they should have done is focused all their attention on where the tree wasn’t.

This is a fine distinction but it’s an important one.

Have you ever driven into a corner too fast.

Perhaps you were listening to the radio or were looking elsewhere. Whatever the reason, you misjudged your speed going into the corner.

At this point where was your focus?

For most of us, our focus would be on the other side of the road and how to avoid it. Actually, what we should be focused on is the large expanse of empty road on our own side.

We should focus on where the problem isn’t.

And the same thing applies in the training room. If we go into the room concerned that people will be aggressive or that they will be bored – that’s what they will be. We will get what we focused on.

To some extent this is more on managing your state that we talked about in an earlier post.

Here is a real life example:

I recently received an e-mail from a participant on a “train the trainer” programme I ran a few weeks ago. The person concerned wrote to say how much they enjoyed the session and to say that they had tried out some new material and it worked really well.

But here is the thing.

They said that they had tried some brain friendly training techniques before but they hadn’t worked very well and before the course they didn’t expect them to work very well.

After the course their expectation was that it would work – and it did.

That shift in focus from “I don’t expect this to work” to “I do expect this to work” meant that it did work.

So here is this weeks call to action:

Notice what you focus on.

Aim at the open space around the tree (or problem or issue) and don’t try to avoid the tree.

Try and hit the open space where there is no tree.

It’s subtle but it works.

crowd image adapted from original by ian_ransley

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