Did you hear that?
What's the most distant sound you can hear right now?
What in your current view is red?
Would you prefer if this message were recorded for you?
If so, would you be in motion while you listened?
My first choice would be to have a personal conversation with you right now. I'm excited about meeting a long-term client for lunch today.
At the same time, I'm not offended that many of you prefer me from a distance.
Like you, my news feeds are full of distress right now. The distress I have the authority to address involves the distress of people's struggle with attention. I hear an epidemic of ADHD. I recently heard losing track of time is described as "time blindness." People are much more widely feeling they have a disorder or a disability.
I was a classroom teacher for the first half of my career. I concluded that, for the most part, children didn't have learning disabilities, we teachers had teaching disabilities, and much of this could be resolved with correct instruction of teachers, leading to correct instruction of students.
Which leads to our current epidemic of distress. For the most part, people don't have ADHD or time blindness. Yes, your attentional systems are under tremendous stress, which leads to distress. What appears as ADHD is, most likely, an Attentional Assault Condition, which itself is an extreme way of saying Too Much Information (TMI).
TMI is a treatable condition that comes from information you can't use. Try dialing it back to the world in front of you.
Did you hear that?
What's the most distant sound you can hear right now?
What in your current view is red?
What else can you notice about the place you're in right now?
What's the very next thing you can do to make your life or another's life better?
Cycle through your seven attentions.
Associative: what has my attention right now -- either out in the world or on my mind?
Sequential: What is one thing I can do right now?
Listener: Is what I'm hearing energizing or distracting?
Observer: Is what I'm seeing energizing or distracting?
Mover: Do I need rest or need to get my blood flowing?
Reader: Is this text holding my attention?
Talker: What words are on the tip of my tongue?
Catch people doing good.
One of the best lessons I learned in my teacher training was to catch students doing good and to let them know you saw them. This was especially important with our most challenging students. Yes, they needed correction and redirection. And they needed us to recognize the good they possessed.
And learning the mindset to search for the good in others and situations, benefits us. The poet Charles Bukowsky wrote, "I've learned to feel good when I feel good." It's not as easy as it sounds. It requires me to be aware right now of the sun coming in the window; the cat purring in a pool of the sunshine; that the bricks on the hearth are red. It requires me to rejoice that I can be writing this and that I will experience friendship right after.
Take a break once in a while and catch the world doing good.
Warmly,
Francis Sopper