Attention Must Be Paid

The last few weeks have been interesting to me. With the exception of August 1999, when I was in-between jobs, I worked on college campuses during the busy back-to-school rush for all of my adult life. So it was weird to not be getting ready for new staff, RA training, and welcome week.

I expected this August to be different, in terms of how busy I would be, but that hasn’t been true. I’ve had a lot of client appointments lately, as some finally found themselves full-swing back into searches that had stalled for a while, and realizations that the grad school applications they’d been thinking about in theory need to find their way to paper (or electronic) form sooner than later. All the sudden, following up on a site redesign, some emerging partnerships, the development of some e-books, seminars and workshops moved from my “get to that soon” list to “Oh, crap, I really have to get in gear with that” list. And I realize that I wasn’t paying attention.

It reminded me a lot of my time on campus, and all that goes into getting ready for a successful year. I wonder now why I expected it to be different. There are so many things that pull at our attention and all too often, we drop the ball, and miss the important details of what is going on around us. Today, I was catching up on Twitter (something that often distracts me, but that oddly, during this time, I have been able to tune out) and I saw this tweet from my friend and coaching buddy Monica Moody.

The link she mentions in her tweet goes to a YouTube video of an interesting psychology experiment about attention. And a reminder that, as Linda Loman pleads in her famous monologue to son Biff in Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid.” (Video embedded below.)

As you get into full swing of the back-to-college season, and all the stresses that come with it, how are you paying attention? What will you be missing? And how can you keep yourself from missing the “invisible gorilla?”

Please share your thoughts in the comment section.