US drivers navigated 3.28 trillion miles in 2024.
There was a nonetheless horrific, but surprisingly low number of approximately 40,000 fatalities in those trillions of miles. Take out that 40% of those deaths involved drug or alcohol impaired drivers and many of the rest weren't the driver and not responsible, nearly all of us have sufficient attention to do something as challenging as safely driving an automobile in traffic.
When someone identifies as attention-deficit, the first question is: which attention? At Kairos, we measure seven attentions: Associative, Sequential, Listener, Observer, Mover, Reader, and Talker.
When people tell me they're attention deficit, what they are experiencing most commonly is a shorter attention span for sequential processing.
Last week's post featured the anesthesiologist with an exceptionally long attention span for sequential processing. In the context of her role in an operating room, this condition is a boon. However, what's a boon in one context can be maladaptive for another. What makes it easier to access one category of attention, makes it harder to access another.
For example, teaching Fourth Grade.
Many of you know, I began my career teaching third grade. I got many lifelong gifts from that experience, but I have to count the greatest as having taught adjacent to Mary Sheehan. Miss Sheehan, as the children knew her, taught fourth grade. When I joined the faculty, fresh out of graduate school and a one-year internship, I was twenty-five. Mary was in her thirty-sixth year of teaching. Mary had a B.A. from Radcliff, and an M.A. from Brown, both in classics. She could read Latin and Greek as well as interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs.
What made me watch her with an awe that never diminished over seven years, was her ability to hold her attention and focus on twenty-five ten-year-olds, individually and collectively, all day. I never saw her tired. I never saw her lose her equanimity. I would say she orchestrated that classroom every single day according to what she was bringing to the curriculum to whatever combination of attention and energy showed in front of her. However, orchestrated is too narrow a word. An orchestra conductor has a score. Mary was jazz. She took whatever music was coming out of those children that day, sharps or flats, and brought together a composition.
I know now, Mary had a highly active associative, highly active symbolic observer, active listener and talker. She would have been the mirror image of last week's anesthesiologist. She was fully present in the moment to all that noise, bewilderment, and wonder inherent in those children, and created a spell over them with her attention, energy, and magic words, that was just right for that moment.
She erased her chalkboard with a feather duster. Who couldn't pay attention to that?
Because Mary could hold her attention on each one of those children and evoke curiosity and wonder minute by minute, she had no children with attention deficit. Her attention surfeit (no doubt a word I learned from Mary) filled the potholes of any potential deficit in those children.
Our cognitive preferences give us different gifts. Lean into your gifts not your deficits. You can revisit your Kairos Assessment at any time to review your cognitive preferences and share the assessment with those you wish to compare with.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
3.28 trillion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion-miles-2024-setting-new-record-2025-03-05/
40,000: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-estimates-39345-traffic-fatalities-2024