A simple decision!

Which would gradually transform our world

At the very heart of the changes taking place in our societies is a shift from treating people as things to treating people as people.  That’s all, really.

If we treat people as things, we get one type of society, that may have served in the past but is unable to handle the complexity of the modern world.

If we treat people as people, we open a much greater range of possibilities and a capability for handling complex, iterative problems.

We have had two hundred years of systematically enshrining the treatment of people as things within our social and economic structures and our everyday behaviour so as we are seeing, this shift takes a long time to manifest itself.

Two quite different outcomes …

Focused attention is optimised for handling things we have done before, for things that are familiar - to know that we have seen them before and how to handle them we make a comparison against memory and then a judgement as to what to do.  This is really, really efficient when we are working on an activity and go into flow.  It is really, really poor when we use it with people.

Sustained attention is optimised to handle the new or different and when we want to treat people as people this is how we need to view them – as beings capable of bringing something fresh or unique to the interaction.  Not surprisingly, coaching uses this form of attention because our default tends to be focused attention, which is not helpful.

Why don’t we all just decide to re-acquire the capacity to use sustained attention with everyone we meet?  We used to do this when we were four years-old, we are all capable of doing this again.

That alone would transform our world and its institutions.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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