Mindfulness Skills are Attention Skills.
When you train (practise) those skills you are strengthening your ability to concentrate – to pay attention to what you want, when you want.
As Jim Kwik, the author of the excellent book Limitless and the man who is often described as the world’s Number #1 Brain Coach says, “attention is the key to learning anything.”
If we practise the opposite ie. being distracted then we become great at that too!
In Nir Eyal’s book ‘Indistractable’ he suggests that every one of our actions is either traction (moving us in the direction of what we want) or distraction (moving us away from what we want). Further he suggests that these days with technology added into the mix it’s harder than ever to avoid temptation/distraction. To keep moving in the right direction takes a conscious choice. We need to practise to head towards the skill we want to develop. Nir’s describes this as needing to become indistractable in order to understand/avoid distractions and move in the direction of traction.
When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s it wasn’t uncommon to hear a teacher say we ‘just needed to concentrate’. They clearly understood that there was a relationship between focus and learning but concentration was never described as a trainable skill. We were just supposed to know how to do it and if we didn’t then we when just….should. Similarly those students prone to being distracted were never shown how they could work effectively with distractions to improve their concentration.
As a young musician starting out in the early 1980s I decided I would do a daily practice routine which I started at around age 13. I practiced for 1.5 hours every night after school with a really focused intensity. I’d heard that slow progress meant fast progress and I took that to heart. Slowing things down to super slow tempos I then very gradually increased the speed. I made sure I was just as conscious of every small muscle movement as I had been at the tempo immediately before. It was a slow process and it was effective. An interesting thing I noticed was that people mistakenly began to call me talented. I recognised even at a young age that the reason for my progress wasn’t talent – it was focus.
The book ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin supports this by suggesting that contrary to popular belief, neither inborn talent nor experience alone determine achievement. Rather it is deliberate practice that is the key to achievement. Deliberate practice is focused.
As I got older sometimes the concentration came easily but not always. Many things could distract me. Thoughts, emotions, tiredness, stuff going on in the house, planning and fantasies about the future. A frequent distraction that often hijacked my practice was frustration. My usual way of dealing with that was to attempt to push it down but that would usually end in it escalating. I’d get more worked up, lose my focus and end up kicking the music stand around the room to amuse myself.
My attempts to push down my frustration/distractions also grew out of an assumption I’d never questioned. I equated progress with effort and struggle. Artists suffer for their art, right? So I fought with my distractions. If I was emotional that was almost a badge of honour in the process. This piece of metal (my flute) would not be the boss of me, I would be the boss of it!
The real battle was between me and me. My distractions and my reaction to them locked in battle. Meanwhile I was using emotional energy, wasting time, losing focus and making my practice more inefficient. It was also exhausting.
I never considered the possibility that concentrating on one thing is not the same thing as trying to push (fight) everything else away.
The ability to be able to focus on one thing in the foreground while allowing distractions to come and go in the background without trying to force them down is an example of one of the trainable attention skills of Mindfulness – Equanimity.
A Mindfulness Technique trains 3 attentional skills.
The first of these is Concentration Power. With systematic training via mindfulness you can drastically improve your ability to concentrate.
Some distractions may come to us as thoughts or emotions. Others might come for our immediate environment – a loud noise or a smell from the kitchen. Every distraction comes to us via our sensory experience. It is how we work with our sensory experience that will determines how well we are able to remain focused. Mindfulness trains our concentration at the same time as it develops our ability to skillfully work with distraction in a particular way. This ‘way’ is by the using the skill mentioned above – Equanimity.
Equanimity means to not fight with sensory experience. Rather we let it come and go without struggle – near pushing sensory experience away or clinging to it. When we are practicing Mindfulness Meditation and a distraction appears (something not part of our chosen range of focus) we don’t push it down, get annoyed etc. Instead of battling the distraction, amplifying its impact and allowing it to absorb our attention (like I did) we welcome it. Allowing it do its thing in the background while we return (if we were momentarily distracted) to our focus range. Equanimity allows it space to be there but just not the focus of the technique.
This skill has enormous value. When we practise Equanimity we’re able to remain open to our sensory experience without compulsively reacting to it. We’re not pushing things down that are uncomfortable nor clinging on to those things that feel good. Instead we learn a third option – being able to stay present with our sensory experience in a way that doesn’t result in compulsive behaviour. We become better able to make decisions from a focused and calm place without reactivity steering the ship. We enjoy our successes without clinging to them and deal with challenges without the distorting effect of emotional reactivity.
The final skill of Mindfulness Awareness is Sensory Clarity which is the ability to track and explore Sensory Experience in real time.
Sensory Clarity supports both Concentration and Equanimity (and vice versa) in various ways. For example exploring the details of your experience also requires and trains concentration. Sensory Clarity also elevates the quality of whatever work you are doing because you are training yourself to notice subtle experiences with discernment and detail.
Sensory Clarity supports Equanimity too. If a distraction is overwhelming Sensory Clarity is the Mindfulness skill allows you to work with experience to reduce its impact. Learning how to consciously take apart the sensory components of an experience is an important Mindfulness Strategy you can learn to help with challenging experiences like anxiety and stress. This is a big topic for another day. Learn about it this works and how to do it in one of our Courses.
Mindfulness will help your ability to concentrate and this dramatically helps our learning. Ultimately though, that’s just the beginning of the transformative benefits of Mindfulness.
Join us and learn how.