Feeling, looking and perceiving to high attention performance.
Attention Performance
The physical always translates to the mental.
Your physical environment leads your mental environment.
Your physical fitness translates to your mental fitness, agility and focus.
Your physical appearance (dress and grooming) translates to your mental level of thinking.
Getting your physical environment right leads to high mental performance.
How your physical environment interacts with your mental environment
We all know that cloudy and rainy days have a way of making us a little bit gloomier and lazier. Conversely, a bright, beautiful sunny day has a way of cheering us—motivating us to get some things done or just bask in the warmth of the sun.
If you are sick, it is a struggle to concentrate and do work. Sometimes the best we can do when battling an illness is to lay on the couch and watch TV (often, that is probably what we should do when sick).
A good night’s sleep generally leads to a good day, where a poor night’s sleep leads to a mediocre day.
These are just a few examples of how your physical environment interacts—or leads—your mental environment.
So here is the question: how can we incrementally optimize our physical environment to produce a high-performing mental environment?
Let’s take a look at a few ways to purposefully orient our physical lives with the goal of maximizing our mental performance. How you feel, look, and perceive (see/hear) plays the biggest role in how the physical leads the mental.
How you feel
Think of the last time you were sick. Even if you didn’t have to stay home from work or school, the sickness played a role in your effectiveness throughout the day. It was harder to concentrate, it was harder to think, it was harder to move around.
Now contrast that with a time in the last few weeks where you felt great! You felt on top of the world. Nothing could stop you. At work you sat down and just crushed it. Your focus was a laser.
Those are fairly typical scenarios. When you feel bad, you struggle. When you feel great, you crush it. It is rare to have a great day at work when you feel sick or physically weak. Similarly, it is rare to have an unproductive day despite feeling awesome all day.
These are two examples of how your physical environment, with relation to how you feel, leads to your mental performance. But these examples are a discrete look at what any one day could look like.
What if you could increase the number of awesome days when you feel great and decrease the number of bad days when you feel awful?
This will look different for everyone, but for me it begins with physical exercise. If I could pin-point one determining factor that leads to a productive day or an unproductive day, it is physical exercise that morning.
Here is why this works for me (and I’m betting it will work for you too):
- I wake up with intention (this keeps me from feeling lazy off the bat)
- I do my pre-determined workout (this gets the blood flowing, and afterwards I have a sense of accomplishment)
- I take a shower and get ready for work (now I feel good internally because I’ve had a great workout, and I feel good externally because I am clean and ready to go)
- I have a good breakfast (I worked my body, now I am fueling my body)
- I walk into work feeling great, which is the start to a focused and productive day (I feel great because my morning was physically intentional)
For you these steps may look different. The key to remember is how you feel physically always leads to mental performance.
World-class athletes usually have a pre-game routine. These routines are a set of physical steps that engage their bodies and engage their minds. Performing the routine leads to physical feelings that guide their body and their minds to peak performance.
Your morning is your pre-game routine.
How you look
An extension of getting your environment right by ensuring you feel good, is making sure you look good. When I wear something that doesn’t quite look right (to me), or doesn’t quite fit well, a portion of my mind is constantly thinking about it.
Even just the other day, I was hiking with my family, and the pants that I chose don’t quite look right on me. Instead of enjoying Creation and the walk with my family, all throughout the hike I periodically thought about those dumb pants.
Similarly with grooming, when you spend a couple minutes to satisfy yourself on your grooming, you’ll pay dividends throughout the day with respect to your attention and focus.
You could call it the Appearance Tax. Dressing down or grooming down takes an Appearance Tax on your mind. When you look sharp, you’ll get an Appearance Dividend. Not only do you feel good because you look good, but others may comment on how you look, giving you a mental boost, which will drive up your attention and focus.
Here’s a tip: the night before a workday, choose the clothes you will wear.
I wear a uniform every day, so for me the choice is easy. But even still, I set out my clothes in a neat stack so all I have to do in the morning is grab the top one.
When you decide the evening before, you won’t waste any time and decision power in the morning, you’ll guarantee you like what you wear and you look/feel good in it. You will be taking Appearance Dividends instead of paying Appearance Tax all day.
Make sure you look good, so that you feel good. Set your environment up to maximize your attention throughout the day.
How you perceive
This is one of the most important aspects of ensuring your environment leads to attention performance, and not mental exhaustion.
I’ve written about the power of Lowering the Threshold—trimming the excess stimulation you are exposed to. Each of us takes in a colossal amount of information each day. The average American today sees and hears 5,000 advertisements every day. We’re watching TV, listening to junk on the radio, reading magazine covers in the grocery store…it is an onslaught.
Each of these (and many more) are physical stimulations that have mental implications.
I challenge you to determine what information and entertainment intake is critical to the advancement of your career and learning. Then ruthlessly slash everything else.
When your mind is swimming in a myriad of information from countless sources, you have no time to think and process. From the time you rise out of bed to the time you rest your head, information is flowing, even surging.
Our human mind was designed to process. We need time to think about meaningful pieces of information and discover how they are connected, and what implications they have on our lives and work.
The news cycle is constant because they don’t want you to think. The news media wants you to hear and emotionally react.
When we don’t have the space to think, to pay attention to what is important and meaningful, we exhaust our energy without expending it productively.
So…what can be done?
Accept the mission
There are three things to think about and act upon that will radically improve your attention and focus. Find one actionable change to make in each category.
- Do one thing every day that will make you feel better next year.
- Eat slightly less and slightly healthier
- Double down on your fitness regime
- Take some time every day to be present and to think
- Do one thing every day that will make you look better today.
- Dress nicely, but don’t sacrifice comfort.
- Commit to a more regular haircut
- Lower the noise threshold today—cut out a single form of unnecessary information intake
- Turn off the radio in the car
- Turn off the TV during meals
- Stop listening to stale podcasts or reading stale books. Determine something you are curious about and focus your information intake only on that
Lead yourself. Lead your family. Lead your team.
Get after it. Live on purpose.
If this interests you, I’d love to hear from you! Schedule a phone call or send me an email.
