566: Ways to Pay Attention Better, with Amishi Jha

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Education, Business, Management, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2022

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Amishi Jha: Peak Mind Amishi Jha is Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. With grants from the Department of Defense and several private foundations, she leads research on the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion, resilience, and performance in education, corporate, elite sports, first-responder, and military contexts. She launched the first-ever study to offer mindfulness training to active duty military service members as they prepared for deployment. Her work has been featured in many outlets including TED, NPR, and Mindful Magazine. In addition, she has been invited to present her work to NATO, the UK Parliament, the Pentagon, and at the World Economic Forum. She is the author of Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day*. In this conversation, Amishi and I explore the importance of our attention and why harnessing it is essential for leaders. We dive into the neuroscience and how our brain is similar to a computer in how much we can hold at one time. Plus, Amishi provides us several practical starting points if we wish to do a better job of placing our attention in the most useful places. Key Points Attention is powerful, fragile, and trainable. Our working memory is like the RAM inside a computer — there’s only so much we can hold at a time. You experience what’s in your working memory, even if that doesn’t correlate to what’s right in front of you. If your working memory is full, it blocks the ability to encode or whatever you are trying to learn. A key tactic is to be aware of what’s in your working memory — and what you choose not to rewrite. Mindfulness practice can provide the white space for the space in our working memory that we need. Resources Mentioned Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day* by Amishi Jha Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes How to Know What You Don’t Know, with Art Markman (episode 437) How to Be Present, with Dave Crenshaw (episode 511) Help Your Brain Learn, with Lisa Feldman Barrett (episode 513) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On any given day, leaders have a lot coming at them.
0:04.0	Paying attention is a continual challenge for most of us.
0:07.6	In this episode, what the science says about how we can all do just a little bit better.
0:13.4	This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 566.
0:18.3	Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.
0:27.3	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:30.1	This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahovjak.
0:34.8	Leaders aren't born, they're made.
0:37.1	In this weekly show, helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.
0:43.2	Just yesterday, I was having a conversation with one of our Academy members and talking
0:47.6	about their schedule and what it looks like.
0:50.9	And as we went through her day, and we looked at hour by hour by hour by hour of all
0:57.0	the meetings that she's involved with, not only yesterday, but almost every day.
1:01.4	I realized how easy it is for us as leaders to get caught up in the busyness and in the
1:08.9	conversations, and not to be able to pay attention as much as we'd like to.
1:14.7	It's a theme I've been seeing for years, not only in my own work, but of course with
1:18.4	so many of the people I work with, and I bet it's a theme for you too as a busy leader.
1:23.0	Today, I'm so glad to welcome an expert that's going to really help us to look at some
1:28.1	of the realities, some of the neuroscience, and also perhaps most importantly, what are
1:32.3	some of the practical things we can do to do a better job at paying attention to what's
1:36.7	happening around us and the important conversations we're having each day.
1:41.0	I'm so glad to welcome Amishi Jha to the show today.
	...

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