In our commercial world commodities that are high in demand and low in supply command great value. Internally, we have a resource that is the basis for engagement, learning, respect, felt empathy and even love. This resource is also under huge demand, internally and externally - we are bombarded minute by waking minute with opportunities to spend this resource, often without our conscious awareness. Yet the high-demand and low-supply ‘rule’ does not apply to this resource, for it remains massively undervalued.

Can you guess what this resource is? Most people say time' when I ask this question in workshops, but use of time is really an artefact of this resource. It’s attention.

If you know my work, you will recognise attentions as one of my ‘themes’ (see my other posts on attention below). Attention the ‘currency’ of success, yet it remains under-recognised and undervalued.

When it comes to attention, we have the supply-demand formula around the wrong way: we think that we have ample supply, more than enough to cope with attentional demands. This is probably the key reason why we don’t value our attention in the way that we should. And yet, it is where our attention falls that determines so much of our current reality and our future.

Given this, attention is wildly complex in its own right, and neuroscience has yet to understand fully how attention works. Even defining attention is difficult. We can easily come to a common understanding for other cognitive terms such as memory and perception, yet there is no standard definition of ‘attention’.  The book How Attention Works, by Stefan Van Der Stigchel, has a more than decent working definition for attention:

“Attention is the mechanism we use to make a selection from all of the ... information available to us and then to process only that information.”

— Stefan Van Der Stigchel, How Attention Works

Van Der Stigchel’s definition is insightful because it exposes the inherent limitation of attention: attention is selective, and in selecting an information source, we filter out most everything else. Think of the party phenomenon of someone calling your name from across the room. Your attention zooms in on your name, at the cost of your current conversation, which you now no longer hear.

We can only attend to a fraction of the inputs into our brain, and we can only remember a fraction of what we attend to. We operate with a double reducing filter system in play every waking moment. It is why our brains can be tricked by magic so easily, why we miss important information and why we lose our keys.

So why tell you this?

Attention given to the things you want to change and improve is the only way that you can actually meet your aspirations. The adults in your family have the most amount of available attention, though this too is scarce enough. Kids have much lower capacity to use and manage attention. 

All of the the rest of From Calamity To Sanity is about harnessing attention - yours and your kids’ - towards building a happy and productive family culture. In life generally we employ systems, processes and tools that help us focus attention on ‘the right thing’, and the coming book is no different. I have designed and tailored a series of resources for parents to help direct the attention of kids (and parents themselves) to the most helpful actions.

There is a load more that I could write about attention - it is without doubt the most under-valued and under-utilised asset we have. The quantity and quality of the attention given underpins how strong a relationship is. Moreover, it determines the depth and robustness of learning. It’s pretty important.

My other posts on attention:

Attention - the currency of change

This brain resource is your most valuable and most scarce

How to stop distractions when you are meant to be listening