Goleman’s Focus

Daniel Goleman decided to include 'other focus', which seems like should either be a subcase of outer focus or not be included at all. Empathy looks like a fundamentally different system from self awareness and attention/concentration.

Focus and attention are tied to myriad measures of reading comprehension, athletic performance and general capacity. Goleman popped a quiz 6 pages into his first chapter to see if I was paying attention. I got ⅓ and reread the entire chapter. The result of that focus was a disappointment with the nature of his abstractions - a dichotomy between general types of distraction (sensory and emotional) seems like an inaccurate model of distraction space. Perhaps external and internal, looking at distracting thoughts (including emotional) as different from distracting surrounding experiences. That said, it’s likely that most distractions are just of these two types, and emotional distractions are particularly pernicious.

The sensitivity to emotional distraction that comes from being particularly empathetic can easily be seen as damaging.

The iron cage (sense of purposelessness) can be seen as a problem of attention and focus. The absense of flow states makes for a depressing work environment, where people never feel engaged with whatever it is that they’re doing. Many live life in this dazed state, daydreaming, attention flitting from one distraction to the next, hours poured into surfing the web or between activities. The absence of core productive time means that little to no progress is made for ages. They do the minimum to continue being part of their organization to keep their job or stay in school.

Habits as as system 1 process - what we’re doing in those weeks where we instill a habit is teaching system 1 how to behave.

Activities that take extreme deliberate focus can become automatic through extensive training.

The certain way to mess up is to start to rely on system 2 thinking in an environment where you’re well trained. The key in these environments is not to think slowly at all, to enter a flow state and just perform optimally. Any thinking needs to be abstract - don’t find yourself pondering details about your technique.

The reason that making changes to your game or coaching mid game or mid tournament can be hard (or even detrimental) is that those changes, when they require changes to automatic system 1 thinking, will actually detract from performance by altering the mechanisms that people are running on.

The real tragedy is the disconnectedness between system 2 and system 1 - researchers who spend their time obsessed with particular biases see no ability to avoid them themselves, for example. The training process for system 1 is profoundly different than intellectual understanding. Self awareness is insufficient to actually solve the problems that you’re now aware of.

Source: Original Google Doc