PAYING ATTENTION IS CRUCIAL FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

A two step process for life and work

Awareness/attention is about noticing

Breath

Body sensations

Thoughts

Feelings

Sounds

Tastes

Smell

Touch

Slowly, the noticing becomes more acute

You are more certain about textures and touch, about nuances in words and meanings

You start attaching words to what you noticed – making you more sure that you actually noticed them

You notice also how the words make you feel

As your perception improves, so does your

vocabulary to describe it

This texture was described as cracked, or

jagged, rough, three dimensional, knobbly,

bitty, slapped on paint, twigs and house-

paint, informal, accidental, an idea slapped

on in anger, painfully rough. . .

It went on like this for a few minutes. It was

many things, to many people, we found.

Tastes become sharperYou start to define what each taste feels

like in the mouth

The world inside of yourself, where you

feel things, becomes a more conscious

part of a map of who you are – and how

you react to certain inputs

So, knowing this, your interactions with

these inputs becomes more deliberate –

more of what I like . . . And then more of

what others like too .

As you learn to observe, the chaos inside starts to organise itself into patterns that make sense.

And when that happens, the statistics outside start to be translated into intelligible things about yourself – ‘out there’ makes sense.

How you fit in becomes clearer.

The story you tell yourself about who you are begins to connect with the stories being told out there in the world – it doesn’t scare you anymore

And that is what employers are saying they wantLike the lily pads, individual, calm, and present, covering the surface of the water with ease, filling gaps with smaller leaves, always growing

But also like the lily pads – connected underneath, which is why they are this dynamic entity, adapting themselves to the water in which they find themselves planted.