Ask-a-Career-Coach: How to Get Focused on Your Future

Contributed by executive coach Ann Daly

There’s no way around it. Career advancement requires strategy: intentional, ongoing, long-term thinking and action. But today’s “on-demand” workplace conspires against full presence and total attention. It’s a challenge these days for anyone to look away from the current client crisis to focus on her own future.

But look away we must.

If you’re serious about giving your career the sustained attention it requires, here are three strategies for developing the habit of deep focus:

First, give up the myth of multitasking. It’s not a productivity tool. It’s an excuse for perpetual distraction. Our brain does not conduct its activities simultaneously. It works sequentially. When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually zigzagging and backtracking between different tasks. This constant “switching,” it turns out, is terribly inefficient and even detrimental to higher-level activities such as strategic thinking. Your career strategy isn’t going to appear in the cracks between phone calls and text messages.

Second, write it down. Writing—and I mean handwriting—is a form of thinking, and it is a highly effective way to shut out the noise and slow down the rat race. There’s something about the physicality of the moving hand and the pressure on paper that helps us drop down into a kind of concentrated state that’s conducive to complexity and ambiguity. Keep a career strategy notebook where you regularly go to review goals, record research, document experiences, play out scenarios, draft plans, reflect on results, and make revisions. The act of writing will clarify intentions and invite fresh ideas.

Third, train your attention. Attention is the earnest direction of your mind. It is, metaphorically speaking, how and when you “turn” your mind. It has three functional components:

• Alerting is the low-level awareness that helps us sense our environment by registering stimuli. (As in “email alert.”)
• Orienting is the focus that helps us respond to our environment by selecting information. (Just because a phone rings, it doesn’t mean you have to answer it; you choose to respond.)
• The executive network directs judgment, planning, and big-picture thinking. (What Stephen Covey categorizes as “important” rather than “urgent.”)

In general, we are too adept at alerting, too timid at orienting, and too remote from the executive network. It’s very easy to squander our most precious commodity, our “undivided attention.” Think of your attentional training as pilates for the brain. Your goals are to:

• filter out more stimuli
• respond more selectively
• spend more time in big-picture thinking

Once you get in the habit of focusing on your future, you’ll be able to take more control of your career. Chances are, you won’t be the one in the office who gets blindsided, left out, or passed over.

Ann Daly, PhD, is an executive coach, speaker, and author devoted to the success and advancement of women. Before reinventing herself as a coach, she was a journalist and then women’s studies professor. Dr. Daly is the award-winning author of six books, including Clarity: How to Accomplish What Matters Most and Do-Over! How Women Are Reinventing Their Lives. She has been featured in ForbesWoman.com, WomenEntrepreneur.com, Houston Woman magazine, Australian Financial Review, and Oprah & Friends’ “Peter Walsh Show.” Do you have a career question you’d like Dr. Daly to answer? Click here to email your career question to Dr. Daly.