Following a brief word in my previous blog on this series on the Thinking Environment, I share my thoughts and experiences on the component on Attention in this one.
Definition
From Nancy Kline’s explanation: Listening without interruption and with interest in where the person will go next in their thinking. Attention is an act of creation.The quality of our attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking.
What does this definition mean to me?
While I’ve been a subscriber of the value of attention for many years, it has largely been in the context of one pointedness towards one’s endeavours. The ability to focus without interruption on the task at hand has facilitated great results for me in my work and I’d considered it one of my biggest strengths.
Attention in the context of the thinking environment though, resonated more with the spiritual teachings of Eckhart Tolle and those of Buddhist teachers like Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron and Tara Brach. Nancy’s definition of attention, for me, rings quite close to what these teachers describe as “presence”.
I quite like Eckhart Tolle's quote - “Presence is a state of inner spaciousness”. I think Nancy’s definition and my own experience of this component resonates deeply with this. When I have truly paid attention to people in my thinking sessions, I have felt this sense of inner spaciousness - where my own voices of fear, judgement and cynicism have been suspended outside the container where the thinker and I are sitting. And all it has really taken, is intention and practice - the intention to offer my being to another person in as much purity as I can, the intention to listen with curiosity and the intention to provide a space for the thinker to just be, sans any agenda of my own. And this sense of attentive presence has then almost effortlessly arisen. Almost as though it has always existed, but I have not accessed it as much before.
I don’t mean to imply that it did not require honing of skill though - in my thinking initial sessions, my own stream of thoughts took up quite a bit of space and energy. As I practised more, it took less space. The more I have done thinking sessions and Thinking Environment based group work, the more effortless and natural this quality of attention is beginning to feel. The time I take to enter this state seems shorter now. And the quality of how I show up for the thinker is seeming more refined, quieter somehow.
In a gathering I facilitated for my team leads when I was at Thoughtworks, we were doing the check in after a brief relaxation exercise, which I always begin with to help people slow down and centre in their bodies. I often give guidance for the exercise but the group is to free to follow or ignore it depending on what their body actually needs in the moment. During these check-ins I am often depending on my “gut feeling” to figure what to say next and what the group needs. In this meeting, as the check in opening round began, one of my leads said that he used to find these types of “meditations” quite awkward. Every time he sits down for one of my sessions, he said he starts with this nagging thought in his head that “this stuff is weird”. And yet somehow, as my instructions come, he gets surprised that they contain exactly what he seems to need at that moment! Hearing this was surreal for me. This is what I mean when I talk about the quality of my attention being more honed now - it is beginning to come through a seemingly visceral connection that gets created between me and the group or the thinker. And more than trying to “read the room”, I begin to sense into the needs of the group (or the individual thinker). I don’t mean to imply that my perception is completely accurate every single time, perhaps far from it. But it is so more often than not and my hypothesis is that it can be refined. That being said, in the context of thinking sessions, I realise that keeping a balance between “sensing” and the Time to Think considerations is crucial.
What I found most surprising in my discoveries regarding attention so far, is the generative nature of it. I have repeatedly seen thinkers who have been stuck in circular thinking, peel away the layers of superficiality and confusion, until they unearth such profound truths for themselves that an inner shift is bound to happen. All in a matter of 90 minutes! And with their own independent thinking. Thinkers have shared feedback with me frequently about how just uninterrupted attention and the fact that someone was present to hear them think, generated new and fresh ideas they had never considered before.
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”
~Jalaluddin Rumi
Last year I attended a thinking circle that Sophie Stephenson was hosting. In my thinking pair time, I was trying to do a pros and cons analysis of a significant decision I had taken. I was doing this because even though I had spent a lot of time thinking deeply about the decision, a part of me was still holding a bit of doubt about whether I had done the right thing. As I did the analysis for myself, I had complete clarity about why I made the decision and the cost I would have to pay for it. Had I been journaling or doing this in my head, I would’ve stopped right here and gone about my business. But I sat in silence for some time, trying to get in touch with the doubt. My partner’s gentle attention held me and gave me encouragement to keep going deeper. And then came the “what more question.” And suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I found myself face to face with this thought: “A small dose of doubt is a healthy thing to have, because it keeps you humble and flexible. It’s called maturity :P. " I was stunned! I was sitting on an assumption that feeling doubtful meant something was wrong, that I had done something I would come to regret. I had been doing all my previous thinking with this faulty assumption. It was only because of my partner’s attention and encouragement that I was able to peel back enough to get to this point of liberation. We discussed this afterwards in the group as an example of the generative nature of attention. That was the day I really internalised what that means.
It is revolutionary in my opinion; the discovery that “Attention is an act of creation.The quality of our attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking”. I think our culture still views things like listening and being with another as passive phenomena. But the idea that as I promise to sit still with, and for another - it is only my body that appears passive but if someone could clairvoyantly see my inner world - they would see me walking just behind the thinker in the meandering pathways of their inner forest - exploring, wondering, unearthing, discovering and renewing! Oh the magic of it all - which the thinker and the partner are co creating!
And so I sit with this paradox about Attention at this time - Attention is hard work but also effortless.
In my next blog, I share my thoughts on the component of Ease.