Episode 157 – Giving Your Full Focus and Attention to Create Connection
Most people do not know how to give someone their full focus and attention. But, as David Augsburger says, “Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.”
Our fast-paced, instant gratification culture is shortening our attention spans and making it very difficult for us to know how to truly pay attention to someone or something long enough to create connections that are meaningful.
If you’re wanting to start giving your family more of your focus and attention, listen to this podcast for where to begin.
If you need help working on your focus and attention, or any other skill you’re learning about in this podcast, let’s connect. I’ll be releasing a new program to help parents heal the connections in their families later this year and those on my email list will be the first ones to know all the details. I send out emails each week that will help you get a new perspective on old problems.
Full Transcript
Tina Gosney 00:00
Tina, hey, I’m Tina Gosney, an advanced Family Relationship Coach, and you’re listening to the coaching your family relationships podcast. We’re going to talk about issues facing today’s families and how to move through them. I’m so glad you’re here with me on the podcast now. Let’s get into it.
Tina Gosney 00:21
I have a story for you today. As I usually do, try to give you at least one story in each podcast. This one is many, many, many years ago. My oldest and only child at the time was, I believe she was two. She was also a very advanced thinker and speaker. So when I tell you this story, it’ll make sense. Just I needed to throw that in.
Tina Gosney 00:46
At first, I was in the very typical pattern each day of getting up trying to do as much as I could during the day, trying to get as many things done during the day as I could. And I remember one time she asked me if I would play Barbies with her. And I said, hey, when I am done here, I don’t even remember what I was doing, but I told her, when I’m done here, I will play with you. And she looked me straight in the face, and she said, Mom, you are never done.
Tina Gosney 01:23
Well, that made me stop in my tracks. I had one child. I had a two year old, and she was not a super busy or difficult two year old. I would I could get a lot of things done in a day with her around, but that just caused me to stop and just reach down and give her a hug and and then also to evaluate what was I doing.
Tina Gosney 01:47
Was I doing the things that were important? I’m sure the thing, whatever it was that I was doing at the moment, was not nearly as important as it was to acknowledge what she was saying to me, and to reach down and give her a hug and let her know that I loved her.
Tina Gosney 02:02
But I wish I could say that it was the last time I had to do that kind of evaluation, where I had to see, how am I spending my time? What am I paying attention to? Am I giving my time and attention and energy to the people that matter to me the most? And it is not the last time that I’ve had to stop and reevaluate that, because being busy and getting a lot of things done is something that I struggle with.
Tina Gosney 02:32
It’s pretty common in coaching sessions to have a client that discovers they struggle with that same thing, because we are a society that measures our value and our worth so much depending on how much we get done in a day, or how busy we are, how many irons we have in the fire. You know, I’ve been a spectator in so many conversations over the past few years where I’ve just kind of watched people, usually two women, but not always women, but two women who are kind of having a contest to see who’s busier than the other one, how many things they have going on in their lives and wearing it like a badge of honor.
Tina Gosney 03:16
So when did busyness become a status symbol? Why is it a measure of our worth in the first place? Is being busy a virtue? Does anybody put that on their values list?
Tina Gosney 03:29
Why isn’t stillness and focused attention an equal measuring stick or a more important measuring stick?
Tina Gosney 03:38
Did you know that the average adult attention span in 2023 was 8.25 seconds. That is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, which is nine seconds, we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. That says something and it also, here’s another fact. In 2004 our average attention span was two and a half minutes. We’re going in the wrong direction.
Tina Gosney 04:12
Just look at how different our lives are now from 20 years ago, all these things that we have in our society that make things so easy and so convenient and so quick and quickly satisfying are creating an attention deficit disorder for us, and we’re trying to multitask. We’re trying to get as many things done as possible in a day in an hour, and our our attention is constantly divided, and it’s being pulled in different directions. We’re being pulled in so many different directions. What has all of this done for our ability to listen and to focus in a conversation? So that we pay attention with our whole selves and all of our attention, instead of a fractured self and just part of our attention.
Tina Gosney 05:08
How often do we give someone our complete and full attention? And I would say this is not just a problem with paying attention to someone else. This is also a problem with us not paying attention to ourselves. We don’t put focused attention on what our own brain is saying to us. We like to shut that off with busyness. In fact, I just spoke with someone a couple days ago who told me she wants to stay busy because she doesn’t like what her brain has to say to her.
Tina Gosney 05:44
We have a lot of thoughts running through our heads every single day. Scientists have said 60,000 70,000 every single day. Those are the amount of thoughts we have every single day we aren’t paying attention to most of them. A lot of them are just sub, you know, subconscious thoughts that our brain is running through.
Tina Gosney 06:06
But I’ve noticed as a coach that the ones that we are paying attention to are the ones that are negative. We pay attention far more to those ones that are negative and discouraging and unkind, mostly to ourselves, and we, when we give our attention to those and we focus on those, we actually create a pathway in our brain for that thought to occur again.
Tina Gosney 06:36
We say, what fires together, wires together. And when we give our focus and attention to something, it creates a firing of neurons, a connection of neurons in our brain that gives it a pathway to happen again. And as we do that over and over again, that pathway becomes very clear.
Tina Gosney 06:54
Think of a like going on a paved road versus a dirt road, you know, that has a lot of rocks and debris in it. Think how faster, how much faster you can go on a paved road than a dirt road. That’s what happens when we think the same thoughts and we give it attention over and over again. We’re paving a road that makes that thought easier in our brain to happen again. So we are reinforcing negative, unkind thoughts about ourselves in our brains.
Tina Gosney 07:23
It does not mean that those thoughts are true then it especially doesn’t mean that those thoughts are more true than positive thoughts that we’re not paying attention to. It just means that we have given them more attention, and they’re getting more air time and focus in our brain.
Tina Gosney 07:40
But here’s what happens when we give more air time to the negative thoughts about ourselves within our own brains, we will also have negative thoughts about others. We just transfer whatever’s going on inside of us to outside of us, and this is a bad combination. Think about what happens when we have this going on internally, and we get caught in a conversation.
Tina Gosney 08:04
Okay, lots of times when we are in conversations, especially conversations with people that are important to us, we want to make sure that we get our point across in a way that we feel understood.
Tina Gosney 08:19
So we might say something like, Hey, I just want you to listen to me. No, you’re not understanding. I need for you to understand where I’m coming from. Or, Nope, you’re wrong. You’re not seeing that correctly.
Tina Gosney 08:33
Have you ever been on the other side of somebody saying that to you? It feels really controlling. It feels like someone is trying to control the way that you are thinking, and that’s when we get angry, or we start moving, or we start pulling away. But we get caught in these conversations where we really need to control the way that that conversation is going and what that other person goes away thinking about us, or about the situation, or about the thing that we were discussing, we have a real aversion towards having a conversation go badly, and when we don’t like how it’s going, we will get aggressive or and start to try more to prove our own point and try to control that conversation.
Tina Gosney 09:18
Or we might just tune out. We might when we don’t like what somebody’s saying, we might just shut off and tune out and stop listening.
Tina Gosney 09:26
Or here’s another really common one, we start formulating our own response inside of our head. Instead of really listening to what that person is saying to us, we stop listening, and we only start paying attention to our own thoughts and not to theirs. So when you think about all the ways that we can derail conversations, that’s a lot of non listening that’s not giving someone your full attention and focus, and when we let ourselves get pulled in all these different directions in a conversation, it’s. So easy then to stop listening and to let our short attention span take over, where we can’t even focus for a short period of time.
Tina Gosney 10:11
There’s a man named Gregory Boyle who wrote a book called Tattoos on the Heart. He’s a Jesuit priest. He’s the director of the Homebody Industries, and it’s the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program in LA. He works in LA, in Los Angeles, the most violent parts of Los Angeles.
Tina Gosney 10:33
He’s created programs to help people, and he’s responsible for a lot of healing that has happened in that community.
Tina Gosney 10:41
And in his book Tattoos on the Heart, he tells a story of a morning where he was really busy and he had just completed a mass, and he had a baptism coming in just a few minutes, and he only had said about 10 minutes in between the two, and he went into his office trying to get a few little pieces of work done before the baptism began, and just a couple minutes after he went into his office, a woman named Carmen walked in and plopped herself down on this seat in his office.
Tina Gosney 11:12
Now, Carmen is a heroin addict. She’s a gang member, and occasionally she works as a prostitute, and she could often be seen storming down the street and yelling violently at people.
Tina Gosney 11:23
Well, she sat down in his office and immediately started talking. And he looks at his watch. At this point, he has about seven minutes left before the baptism was ready to begin, and this is what he says in his book. She said, I need help. I’ve been to like 50 rehabs. I’m known all over nationwide. She smiles. Her eyes wander around my office and she studies the photographs hanging there. Her multitasking and her inspection of the place doesn’t derail her stream of consciousness, rambling.
Tina Gosney 11:57
The family will arrive for the baptism in just a few minutes. I went to Catholic church and school all my life, she said, in fact, I graduated from high school even right after graduation was when I started using heroin. Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point, and her repeated speech slows to deliberate and halted. I have been trying to stop since the moment I began.
Tina Gosney 12:24
Then I watch as Carmen tilts her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling, and in an instant, her eyes become these two ponds rising to meet their edges, swollen banks spilling over. Then, for the first time, she really looks at me and straightens I am a disgrace. Suddenly her shame meets mine, for when Carmen walked through the door, I had mistaken her for an interruption.
Tina Gosney 12:57
Imagine if this man but his mission is to help people just like Carmen. If he had when she sat down, if he had asked her to leave, if he said, I don’t have time, or if he had not been paying attention, it had his attention fractured at that point, he would not have seen who Carmen really was and what she was really asking for.
Tina Gosney 13:27
I also think it’s interesting that he said her shame meets mine. Isn’t that interesting?
Tina Gosney 13:41
How do we start paying attention to how we are paying attention? Because that’s where we start. We need to pay attention to how we are paying attention.
Tina Gosney 13:54
First thing we can do is to listen to ourself. When you are in a conversation with someone. Are you giving them your full attention? Do you have defensiveness to what they’re saying? Are you telling yourself that you don’t have time to listen? Are you getting attached to a certain outcome from the conversation? Are you planning your response and shutting off your listening? What is your own internal system doing that is keeping you from listening?
Tina Gosney 14:28
If this is all that you did, if you spent some time just doing this, just paying attention to yourself and how you pay attention, and just gathering data for yourself about what you’ve done and how the habits that you’ve created around your own attention and how you give that to others or don’t that is a great place to start. That is a great place to put in effort.
Tina Gosney 14:58
And then when we do listen to someone. Yeah, are we really listening to what they’re saying, and are we listening to the words that they’re not saying?
Tina Gosney 15:09
There’s a quote that I like, and I think I know I’m not going to say his name, right? His name is David Augsburger. I probably didn’t say that correctly, but that’s what his name looks like, so that’s what I’m going with. And he said, being listened to is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference. Listening can exponentially increase connections, and it can create a closer, more intimate relationship.
Tina Gosney 15:40
But listening to someone is an art, and it’s a dying art. It’s a skill that can be developed over time, but it takes practice. It takes intentional practice to develop that skill.
Tina Gosney 15:54
One thing that people will say to me when I talk about listening better is, well, no one listens to me. Why? How can I be expected to listen to someone else? If no one ever listens to me, Why am I always the one that has to start that is such a common like first, usually, like a first question I get asked is, why do I have to be the one to change?
Tina Gosney 16:17
And there was a day where I would have asked that same question, and here’s my answer, because we don’t have control over anyone else, but you, you can’t control whether someone listens to you or not. You can’t control whether someone understands you the way you want them to, or whether they’re taking away from a conversation what you want them to take away.
Tina Gosney 16:41
So we always start with you, because you don’t have the power to force anyone else to do anything. Now, if your family is a family that is consistently not listened to each other, it’s not just you that does this for sure. It’s a cycle. It’s a system that your family all participates in if you have a family of non listeners, you have a that’s way more common than to have a family that actually listens to each other. So you have a pattern of non listening. It takes one person to break a pattern. Takes one person to say, I am not going to do this anymore, and I’m going to do something different. And you can be that one person. If you want someone to listen to you, you start listening to them first.
Tina Gosney 17:33
Another thing we get hung up on is, well, if I listen to something that somebody rant about, something that I’m so tired of hearing heard it over and over again, and they just keep saying the same thing over and over again to me. If I actually sit down and listen to them, they’re going to think that I agree with them, and they’re just going to get so much further entrenched in that story and in whatever they are saying and I don’t agree with them.
Tina Gosney 17:59
Well, just because you are listening does not mean you are agreeing. You can listen and validate that that experience was difficult, that must have been so hard for you, is a great line you can use. You can say that, and you can still not agree that you see things the same way that they do. Now, this is a really hard thing to do, especially when they are telling you something that they don’t like about you, something that you don’t want to hear, especially when that thing is about you. But people will hold on to their stories until they feel like someone heard and understood them.
Tina Gosney 18:47
We hold on very tightly, with a very tight grip onto our stories until we feel heard and understood. And just because you are hearing and understanding does not mean that you are agreeing with their reality. It just means it’s you’re seeing, yes, I see this is real for you, and that must be so difficult. Now this seems so counterintuitive, but listening and validating that someone else feels the way that they do actually helps them to start seeing a different perspective. It opens the door to let them let go of that story and to see something bigger than what they saw before. You think it’s going to reinforce their story and even make it stronger, but research has shown that it actually has the opposite effect.
Tina Gosney 19:38
If you’re one of those people that’s trying to listen, and you have a really a short attention span, like the 8.25 second attention span, you’re like, Tina, I am trying to listen, and as soon as I’m focused, then my mind goes off somewhere else, then you’re totally normal, because that is an average attention span. Listening is a skill that takes time to get better at and this is one of the ways that you can practice, even when you’re not in a conversation with someone, is just to practice focusing your attention.
Tina Gosney 20:10
Take a couple minutes out of your day listen to the world around you, put your attention on one or two things for a couple of minutes, start even move that skill into a short conversation with someone like talking to the checker at the grocery store or a waitress at a restaurant, or ask your neighbor one question and listen to their answer and then ask a follow up question. When you ask a follow up question that shows that you were listening to their answer shows you are really listening. These are just some ways that you can start increasing your own focus.
Tina Gosney 20:50
Here’s my takeaway today, there’s nothing more important than true connected relationships with people that you love and the people who love you. So slow down and give your full attention. And using Stephen R Covey’s Habit number five, listen to understand, not to be understood.
Tina Gosney 21:11
What’s your takeaway today? Go share your takeaway with someone. Write it down. Just do something, because learning takes place in an input and then an output. If you want to really remember today’s podcast, then you will take what you learned and you will do something with it in the next five minutes. You’ll write it down, you’ll share it with someone, you’ll teach it to somebody else. You’ll do something with it within five minutes, and that will help you to remember it.
Tina Gosney 21:41
Now, if you want to start working on your listening skills, and you know some of the other relationship skills that I teach on this podcast, then you’ll want to join me for a program that I’m creating that will help connect you to your family. And that program will be released later this year, and if you’re on my email list, you’ll be the first one to hear about it. So I want you to go to the link in the show notes and sign up for my email list, because not only will you hear about that program, but I’ll send you lots of tips and tricks that I don’t put on this podcast. I look forward to connecting with you through that email, and until next week, let’s just listen better. See you next time you.