Are you being heard? Our innate need for Attention

The context for these videos

Each post in this short series is from Alec’s weekly livestream to the Facebook group Finding the Balance with Anxiety Freedom Cards. Each week I focus upon one of our innate resources or needs as depicted in the Anxiety Freedom Cards. And the reason I’m doing this is to show you how you too can live a life free from anxiety and stress.

Please let me know what you think by scrolling to the bottom and commenting below!

Below is a direct transcript from the video shown above.

Well, hello, it’s Alec back here again for another Tuesdays Two o’clock Topic. How are you doing today? This is a weekly live stream that I’m doing to the Finding the Balance with Anxiety Freedom Cards group, and this week the topic is attention, our innate need for attention. It’s one of the most interesting and one of the most important of our innate needs.

And I need to watch myself today because I can probably talk forever on this subject. I find it very fascinating, partly because in my own journey in life, I’ve, I’ve learned things about myself, about my own need for attention that I didn’t know before I studied this subject. And in fact, what I’m doing now is asking for your attention. And in particular, if you’re here watching this live, please let me know by just putting a comment below, it doesn’t have to be anything profound or deeply meaningful, but it lets me know that you’re watching this. And if you’re watching it on replay and there are any aspects of what I talk about that you agree with or disagree with, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, because it’s a, it’s a really rich topic and it’s one that’s I feel is not widely understood.

And so I just going to check, I think I saw something that said there was a post already, a comment already, so I’m just going to, Oh yes, here we go. Oh, that was quick. That was from CG: Hope you’re well. With a guitar and a skateboard. Yes, CG. I’m well, thank you and hope you are too. And I hope you’re surviving the cold weather. We had snow here two days ago. It’s interesting. It melted a lot of it melted the first day, but then the last 24 hours, it stuck around as well. So there’s still snow on the road outside, but we’re kind of holed partly of, partly to keep warm, but also partly because of lock down and this really changes the way that we get our need for attention met.

So how have your habits changed over the last year, during this last 10 months or whatever? How has lockdown affected your need for attention? Are you watching more screen stuff? We subscribed to Netflix when it first started. We’ve never had any kind of paid entertainment streaming service before. And as soon as we subscribed our television failed, so that’s been interested and we, you know, we have watched more TV, but also we’ve been, our whole life has changed in many ways. I suppose, obviously most of us have done more zoom calls, more video networking, whether it’s meetings or just chats with the family. We have a weekly family chat and obviously considerably less face-to-face exchange of attention.

So I’m interested to know how your own needs for attention have been affected. I’m I had a, a disagreement within the family at the weekend, which upset me quite a lot. And knowing this stuff about innate needs does not make you a saint. I’m not a saint. And there were some sharp words spoken. I was mostly on the receiving end and I’m very conscious about my need for attention.

So then I was able to reflect after this disagreement, how much of my energy and time I wanted to spend on reflecting about it, or how much I wanted to divert my attention and focus on something else and to get the balance right, because some of it needs to be processed and reflected upon. And some of it can drag you down. You know, I think the first night I, I lost a few hours sleep worrying and thinking about what had happened. But as you will know, by now, if you’ve been watching my videos I’m a generally fairly laid back and positive and optimistic person, and I refuse to let setbacks hold me back emotionally, it’s not always easy to do. But one of the things that we can do is control where we place our attention.

So that’s one of the things that I’ll be talking about today. Anyway, thank you for your comments, CG. I hope you are well, and it’s really nice to see you here this week. Thank you for joining me. And she says it was icy here. Literally put right foot out of door and fell. Oh, no fell hurting ankle and foot. So I felt sorry for myself. There’s no attention at all. Could have been worse. So okay with it, highlights of my aloneness, which triggers stuff, but quickly sorted myself out. Well, sending you healing vibes and anybody else who’s watching this. If they could direct those towards, I, I’m assuming that’s still CG. Who’s, who’s put that post. I really hope that whatever pain you’re in subsides and that if there’s any healing to be done that it happens quickly, that sounds, that’s quite a sad story. And I feel for you, I, I stepped out to empty the dustbin or something, and then w stepped onto our decking. And it was just a sheet of black ice and I very nearly came to grief, but luckily didn’t.

So attention. It’s one of, it’s a very powerful form of nutrition. It, when we get more than we want, it can be very uncomfortable. And when we get less than we need, it can be very uncomfortable as well. And anyone who’s had the exposure of being on stage, whether it’s a talk that you’re giving or whether it’s a performance. And if there are hundreds of people in an audience, it’s a very palpable energy that you feel, because if things go well, it’s hugely rewarding. And if things go badly, it’s you want the world to open the hole, the ground to open up and swallow you. And I’ve had both, but people are often unaware that what they’re doing is, that the motivation behind it is the need for attention.

It’s often wrapped up in other guises. Kids, young kids, particularly who’ve not yet learnt to regulate their emotional state. Will often kick off because it gets them that essential nutrition of no, of being noticed of, of getting attention needs. So I really encourage you to think, not in terms of good quality attention, and poor quality attention, you know, good and bad which sort of attention is it? But the third option of how much attention or how little. Sometimes it’s the amount of attention that’s much more significant than the quality of the attention. And yet we tend not to think in those terms very often. I often call it the third way or the third option. You know, rather than how good or bad something is, is how much attention do I give it in the first place, because that’s much more important to how you experience life. Attention, I sometimes think is like a, a torch, you know, imagine that you’ve got a miner’s helmet with a torch on the front and your choosing where to focus in. So if you focus it over there and you notice the things over there, if you focus it over there, you notice the things that are over there.

And we don’t often talk in terms of being in control of our attention. You know, stuff happens in life. People ring us up, things affect us, and we respond. But when you start to think about how much attention you give to the different things in life, you can become much more able to, it’s, I don’t want to sound too controlling. It does sound a bit controlling, but you can lead you to a better life. If you take conscious awareness of where you place your attention. So there’s not only where do you point it, you know, what do you illuminate with this torch that’s on your head?

Because there are always things that we’re unaware of, you know, what’s going on behind our back. The things that we’re not paying attention to, we’re completely unaware of. So knowing whether we’re placing our attention on EastEnders or reading a book or on phoning a family friend or something, these things make a difference to our experience. And a lot of the time we’re reacting and responding in preprogrammed patterns.

You know, so I get tired in the day and if I’m a bit knackered come the evening, I’m happy to watch Netflix in a meaningless kind of way. Sometimes I do need that rest and recuperation time, but I’m also aware that there are better ways sometimes of me getting that. If I’ve got the energy to go for a walk or to read a book, then that’s often time better spent, but I don’t want to be dictatorial about how we should or shouldn’t pay, where we should or shouldn’t place our attention. But I just think it’s interesting to step back a bit into our observing self and just doing an audit on where we are actually placing our attention. And obviously I’m grateful for those of you who are watching this right now, that, that I have your intention, that’s a rich form of nutrition for me and allows me to share some ideas, get some feedback. And it’s through that interaction that I learn who I am. And hopefully you learn who you are a little bit where we both enrich each other from the attention interchange.

So not only is there, where are we pointing our miner’s lamp? What are we giving our attention to? There’s also how wide or narrow is our attention.

So for instance when I, I had a job to do, I had a bit of a problem with the email list for the membership over the last couple of days, it’s a novice, it’s because I don’t know the system as well as I should. And I made a bit of a mistake and some of the newer members weren’t getting some of the regular email updates, which I only discovered, and I’ve had to fix it, but the job of fixing it involved doing an operation about 30 times on the computer, and each time took about two minutes, which was about 30 seconds of activity and about a minute and a half of waiting and then doing the next one. So it sort of turns you into a machine. And I don’t like being turned into a machine by the requirements of my computer. And it was a very repetitive, fairly boring job, but it needed my complete focus to get it right, because I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes because that would have meant the email sequences didn’t work. Right. So I had to spend at least an hour and I think it was an hour and a half in the end, really focused, narrow focus of attention, shut out all distractions, not responding to pings on my phone, not responding to the phone ringing, not responding to anything that was, unless it was really essential, just getting the job done. So I have the ability to focus my attention narrowly and to get the job done. We all do. I’ve had jobs in the past where that has been the major requirement of the job.

But it’s equally important to know that when we finished that job, we have to stand back. We have to widen the beam. We have to stand back and see well, what else is there? What else needs doing? You know, what else do I need to re, interact with? And so sometimes we narrow the focus when we’re doing, usually when we’re doing some specific activity and other times we have to learn to de-focus and stand back and see the bigger picture.

And I think it’s very interesting that we teach our children to practice the first one. We don’t often teach them how to practice the second one and how to disengage, how to stand back and yet to live a life, which is rich, and which is full we need both skills. We need to be able to focus our attention narrowly to, to shut things out, to get on with a job. And there are times when we need to do the exact opposite and stand back and see the bigger picture, go for a walk, reflect, meditate on whatever floats your boat, yoga, and see the bigger picture. And that is all part of how we approach where our attention is placed and how it’s focused.

So I’m interested to know how much do you take control of your attention? How much are you aware of what you deliberately choose to bring into your life and what you maybe deliberately choose to ignore? So there are things that I generally ignore. I don’t get involved in, in emotional debates about the merits, or what’s the opposite of the merits, demerits of Brexit, for instance. I just don’t find it nutritional. People have opinions. That’s fine. I have opinions that I don’t need to, to share views or to learn other people’s views about that stuff, because there’s just so much emotional arousal associated with it. Politics in general, I’m not, I’m not very good at, to be honest with you. And I like to play to my strengths. I also filter out what I consider to be needlessly, violent, aggressive forms of entertainment. So I don’t watch, I don’t like the godfather film. I think I watched the first one and I thought, I don’t know why people make, I know it’s regarded as a, as a world-class film, but it’s not my cup of tea. I don’t like to normalise violence.

I’m a pacifist at heart. So I, I deliberately filter out certain things. We all do. Sometimes consciously, sometimes less consciously. How much control do you take and where do you deliberately, what do you deliberately choose to ignore. Whatever we focus on tends to become bigger in our lives. And I’ll be talking about this a little bit more later on.

Last week, I talked about emotions and I showed this scale with positive emotions. So-called like joy and love and all of the good things in life at the top, and with depression and anger and, and more of the negative things at the bottom with the idea that perhaps we ought to be judgmental about this scale and choosing to place our emotions towards the top, rather than towards the bottom of that scale. I don’t mean not to, I don’t mean to ignore the emotions. I think it’s really important that we notice them, but not to place undue attention on to things like, you know, revenge feelings of revenge or feelings of anger. They only bring us down and they only cause damage. But the same thing was with attention.

Do you place your attention on the things that work for you, or are you automatically dragged into reacting by placing your attention on things that bring you down? For instance, if you’re worried about money and many people are at this moment in time with, you know, all of the, all of the differences that are happening to people’s employment. If you’re worried about money, do you focus on what you’re grateful for? You know, I’ve still got a roof over my head. I’ve still got a room to be comfortable in. I’m very lucky like that. And I’m incredibly grateful for what’s working in my life. Or do you choose to focus about worrying about the future? It’s a delicate balance, sometimes. This thing about, well, I need to pay attention to what might matter, but I don’t want to spend my nights awake in anxiety because I know that, you know, waking up refreshed from a good night’s sleep is more important than the worries of tomorrow.

And in fact, that brings me onto the next subject, which is, or the next aspect of attention, which is whether you’re really focused on the past, the present or the future when you place, when you’re, let’s say, when you’re not busy doing a task, when you’re getting on with day-to-day life, when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, where is your attention focused? Because these three areas of attention the past, the present and the future, and they have different qualities. If you’re focused on the present, then that really means you’re in tune with your emotions and your senses. You know, you’re sensing the world, you’re, you’re in the world. You’re aware, you’re mindful, you’re aware of what’s going on and what’s around you. And that’s a very present way of being. If your attention is focused on the past, then you might be, it’s interesting to know, is it the negative past or the positive past, or are you remembering good times? Good holidays, good times with families. Are you rejoicing in a positive past, or are you thinking about how it was the good old days? And now everything’s terrible, you know, there’s, there’s different ways of doing this, but is your attention on the past or is it in the present. Or are you worrying about the future, or are you full of anticipation and excitement about what the future might bring? Because you’ve put some things in place that, you know, are going, likely to bring good things into your life.

These are all important things for living a good life free of stress and anxiety. And at the core of these ideas is the idea that we have choice over where we place our attention. We have choice over what we become aware of and what we ignore. And we’re doing it all the time, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. They say that, you know, psychologists will say that you tend to see more of what you place your attention on.

So you may have heard this story of, you know, if you’re thinking about buying a car and then eventually you do some research and you buy a particular car, whether it’s secondhand or new or whatever. And then suddenly when you’ve got this new car, you notice other cars of the same type on the, on the street and when you’re passing them in traffic and you never used to notice them before. So the fact that you’ve had your attention placed on this model of car means that they are now sensitised to it and you pattern match to it and you see it everywhere.

And that goes for everything that we place our attention on. I don’t know whether you’re a fan of the teachings of Jerry and Esther Hicks that come under the banner, Abraham Hicks, it’s associated with Law of Attraction stuff. Some people find it woo woo, and a bit kind of crazy. Some people find it very meaningful. Their work is connected with the Seth books. Came out of the books that were written. I think it’s seventies and eighties, there are several books called the Seth books. And the, you may have seen the DVD or the film called The Secret, which is again, another variation of Law of Attraction work that Esther Hicks currently teaches. And I think there’s some really interesting and useful ideas in that work. But again, I’d love to know where, where do you sit with it? Is it, is it sort of gobbledy goop, hocus pocus stuff for you, or is it real in your life? I think she doesn’t specifically talk about attention. She does, but she doesn’t use that word. And I, I’m a great believer that logic will take you from A to B and imagination will take you anywhere. And that actually, if we place our imagination into positive expectation of what we want to bring into our lives in the future, it makes a real difference. It’s a tangible thing. And yet it’s very difficult to prove that in a traditional scientific manner.

There are people who take this idea further. There are a couple of books that I’ve, I like one I haven’t read recently, but I read a year or two ago. I don’t know if you remember, if you’re old enough to remember the Jonathan Livingston Seagull book that was published, I think it was probably in the seventies or the eighties. It was quite a hit, it was a small book. And it was a sort of, I suppose it was a book on the subject of spirit, spirituality. And it was written by a guy called Richard Bach. And he also wrote a book called illusions, which is a very interesting book. I love it. It was a book that influenced Jerry Hicks and he actually phoned Esther and read the entire book over the telephone to her when they first met, I believe. And in that book, there is the suggestion that actually, whatever you’re experiencing in life is actually a mirror back of your belief systems, whether they’re unconscious or conscious, or actually both of them. So if we have unconscious limiting beliefs, then they tend to manifest in the physical world. So this is taking it to another level.

And there’s a book by Bruce Doyle III called How to Think Your Way to the Life you Want. Again, I find these things interesting, and there are people I know would just dismiss them out of hand, but I try to be open-minded. Bruce Doyle’s book is a little bit like the Napoleon Hill book, Think and Grow Rich. And the, the theme in both of these is that actually where you place your attention, the thoughts that you have is absolutely key in determining the experiences that come to you and the, the opportunities that you can take in life.

So I’d love to know, do you think these ideas, Law of Attraction ideas are, are sound, or are they too far on the fringe for you? So let’s, I’ve got some notes here, which I’ve written out first, what to do next. So, because attention is one of our innate needs when it’s missing, when we’re living in isolation, when nobody knows that we exist almost, it’s very, it’s very stressful. It causes anxiety. You know, we call it loneliness, but it’s actually a lack of attention interchange in some, you could say. It’s that. You might say, Oh, I don’t need much attention. I’m happy with my own company. But if a neighbour passes you in the street and they deliberately don’t look at you, we all get that twinge of, Oh, it’s a bit odd. You know, I like to smile at people and say hello, because if you smile, you tend to get a smile back. And yet some people go through life with their eyes cast down. And if they’ve previously been friendly and then one day you pass them and they, they, sort of avert their eyes, we notice that lack of attention. We notice that they’re ignoring us of it and not giving, they’re not engaging with us in some way. So too little can be painful. It’s like we don’t exist, but also too much attention. You know, when people get bullied on social media or they suddenly become well-known in social media, for something they didn’t mean to do or didn’t want to do, or, you know, are ashamed of or embarrassed at, that happens so much in our culture, particularly with digital media as well, these days, that attention can be very painful either by having too little or too much.

But I’d like to ask you wherever you are on the spectrum of attention, whether you have enough or too little, what’s one thing, just one step that you could do over the next week, that might make a difference. So what’s one person you could phone up. If you’re, if you’re lacking attention. What’s one action that you could take to withdraw if you’re getting too much attention. It’s a very powerful thing that we have, this attention. And I think that it helps to be consciously aware of what we’re doing with it.

Those of you who are watching this, who are in the innate membership and it’s not everybody. And I’m aware of that. How much attention do you want to give to the membership? You know, do you give it an hour a week by reading the weekly email that I send out and maybe watching this 20 minute, 30 minute talk, or do you only tend to interact when the topic is relevant to what you’re doing that week? Is it something that you spend more than that time? You know, you spend an hour every day and watching my videos and doing things like that. I don’t think anybody does that, but how much attention in your weekly life do you want to allocate to hearing my views on these kinds of things? It’s under your control. And my aim in the membership is to match what I provide to what the people who are engaging need, because that’s when everybody wins. Is it a regular thing or is it sporadic? Let me know, drop me a comment.

As you will know, I often share a story in these talks. This one is less of a story and more of a poem, and I was searching through our folder for something that was relevant and for the subject of attention today. And I didn’t really find a story, but I found a nice, I don’t know whether it’s poetry or not. And unfortunately I can’t tell you who wrote it, but I’m going to share it with you. It’s called One Day at a Time. And it relates to what I was saying about attention being placed on the past, the present and the future.

I remember when I was a teenager. Sorry, I’m going off on a little tangent here, but I remember when I was a teenager, becoming quite aware that my family’s habit of taking photographs and particularly staged photographs. When on holiday, I didn’t like it. I don’t know why I didn’t like it. It was like “Live in the present more!” And because what they would do is they would take photographs. And then my dad, when he passed last year, he left 4222, 35 millimeter color slides, all boxed and indexed. And they’re in my shed at the moment. I need to go through them, figuring out which ones we want to keep for the sake of the family and which ones we don’t need to keep because they’re pictures of churches or hills or mountains or lakes or whatever from holidays.

But I realised that there was a lot of time invested in nostalgia. It’s like, you know, they’d draw, the curtains, put the slide projector on and have an evening of watching photos from the previous summer holiday, previous year’s summer holiday. And although there’s a time and a place to share those memories, I’m not knocking it. I didn’t like the feeling of nostalgia. It seemed to drag me backwards. I’d much rather either be in the present or looking planning for an optimistic future. I just felt the balance wasn’t right. That’s all it was.

Anyway, back to this poem called One Day at a Time. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

There are two days in every week about which we should not worry. Two days which we, which should be kept from fear and apprehension. One of these days is yesterday with its mistakes and cares, it’s fault and blunders, it’s aches and pains. Yesterday has passed forever beyond our control. All the money in the world cannot bring back yesterday. We cannot undo a single act we performed. We cannot erase a single word we said. Yesterday is gone beyond recall.

The other day, we should not worry about is tomorrow. With its possible adversities, its burdens, its large promise and perhaps its poor performance. Tomorrow is also beyond our immediate control. Tomorrow’s sun will rise, either in splendor or behind a mask of clouds, but it will rise. Until it does, we have no stake in tomorrow for it is yet unborn.

This leaves only one day – today. Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It’s only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It’s the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live one day at a time.

So I’m sorry. I can’t credit who wrote that, but I certainly resonate with that idea and about where we place our attention. You will have heard me say perhaps before, that the only way we access both yesterday and tomorrow is through the stories we tell ourselves, through the narrative. Yesterday isn’t about what happened. History is not about what happened. It’s about what somebody thought was important about what happened because what happened yesterday was beyond comprehension. It was huge. So many things happened just even in my garden yesterday that I could never even list them all. And yet we summarise it, we break it down and we tell the story of what happened. Oh, it snowed in the garden yesterday. It’s like, no, that’s not what happened. All those shoots that are just under the soil that are just about to burst through in the spring. You know, there’s so many things happening and yet we just choose a thread. We tell the story and then we say that’s the past, that’s yesterday.

So yeah, yesterday. So what does tomorrow bring? Well, tomorrow is the last Wednesday of the month. It’s the 27th of January. And on the last Wednesday of the month Bindi and I run a group zoom call to which the members are invited, the members of the in8 membership community. Actually, no, everyone’s invited, I’m sorry. I get that wrong. It’s open to all and you don’t need to register. The topic is “Needs Led Parenting”. In other words, how do you approach the task of parenting or bringing up children from a needs based perspective? And it’s something that Bindi and I feel passionately about. We both have children and we both have stepchildren and we both have grandchildren.

And so Bindi will be giving a short presentation and then there’ll be opportunity for questions and hopefully an interactive open discussion on that subject tomorrow. And if you want to know more about it, there is the post a little below this one, in this Facebook group, it was a couple of days ago, but it’s not very far down the feed. If you just scroll down and look for the needs led parenting event. It’s seven o’clock tomorrow night, Wednesday the 27th, and there’s no need to register. There’s no fee. It’s free and it’s open to all. And we’d really love for you to join us on that if it’s interesting to you. It’s probably also an event in the Facebook group. I suspect Bindi, would’ve made it an event.

So I’m just looking at a comment for here from CG. See if I can share this. She’s, she’s brilliant at putting these emoticons and icons in. So we have a clock and the timer and the sunshine, some claps. Thank you. And I like remembering now is the present and it is a present a gift. Yes, yesterday’s history. Tomorrow’s a mystery and today is a gift and that’s why it’s called the present.

Thank you, CG. That’s wonderful. I wish I had remembered that. I’ve seen it before, but I didn’t think to bring it into this talk, but you’ve said it and that’s absolutely perfect. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift and that’s why it’s called the present. And today is the only day that we can actually make any changes to anything in our lives.

So if we’re interested in living a life free from stress and anxiety, we have to take some action today. So what are you going to do? I don’t mean you specifically CG. I mean, anyone who’s watching this, what will you do in terms of moderating or changing where you place your attention over the next week? If you have any thoughts or any ideas, please share them below. I always like to hear from you. And I also have a question here. Is tomorrow’s, tomorrow’s session recorded. So those who miss and watch later. That’s a good question. Yes, we haven’t actually said that, but we’re doing it via zoom. So we certainly can record it and thank you for the prompt and the reminder. We will record it and we will make it available for people to watch later. So I don’t know. I’m sorry. I can’t, I can’t see who that’s from, but I’ve been talking for long enough today.

So keep warm, keep safe. And I look forward to speaking with you again and the pattern for these talks, for those who are not too familiar with is that I talk about the same topic next week. I’ll be talking about attention again with a slightly different focus and hopefully informed by some of the feedback and some of the comments that happen on today.

And then so every two weeks it’s a topic that relates to one of the cards. I should have shown the card. And I don’t know why I didn’t do that. I actually prepared the card here to show you. So this is the illuminate tool, which is the set of Anxiety Freedom Cards on your phone. And if I just go to this. I can’t believe I forgot to share this earlier. And show the needs, find the attention card, double click it. And then we see this as. This is the card that represents our need for attention. And I think of the cards as catalysts, ways of stimulating conversations, about attention, about what it means to people, whether they get enough or too much. When they get that need for interchange with other people met.

And yeah, so I meant to share that on, share that earlier on and I forgot. So there’s a thank you there. Thank you for attending. Thank you for commenting. I look forward to being with you again, live stream in this group at Tuesday next week at two o’clock for another Tuesday, Two o’clock Topic. Thank you very much and bye. Don’t forget to keep breathing.

Please let me know what you think by commenting below!
Thanks, Alec