The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 165 - Pay Attention

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Are you familiar with the musical Annie? "The sun will come out tomorrow," etc?

Pete: Familiar, to have heard of it, but not of what happens within it. So, yes and no?

Jen: Well, that's okay, because we'll be speaking about it on the periphery. The point is that when I was a youngster, the person who wrote that show, Martin Charnin, was my boss and I was his assistant. And from him, I learned one of life's most important lessons. It's so simple. He summed it up in two words. Are you ready?

Pete: I'm so ready. This is such a big buildup.

Jen: "Pay attention."

Pete: This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: I do have to say real quick, I feel like half of our listeners are still shaking their fist like, "How could he not have seen Annie? What is he talking about?" Apologies all of you that are shaking your fist right now.

Jen: So sorry, so sorry. Okay, so Martin Charnin (may he rest in peace) and I were walking down the street one day during a torrential downpour in Mystic, Connecticut. I have no memory of why the heck we were in Mystic, Connecticut on a day when it was torrentially downpouring but that is beside the point. We're walking down the street and all of a sudden he comes to a dead stop, does a slow pan to the left looking over his left shoulder, and marches into a stationary store, and blurts out, "Who is the set designer?" And this woman behind the counter was like, "I design sets." And he says, "I knew it. I saw that window display and I thought, 'Only a set designer could have come up with that.'"

Pete: Woah.

Jen: Okay?

Pete: Woah, woah, woah.

Jen: So anyway, there's more to that story but that's for another day. So I say to him, "Martin, how in the heck did that just happen?" And he said two words, "Jennifer, pay attention." So after that, I started paying attention to him a lot more to try to understand how he was seeing the world. And the truth is, he paid so much attention that he never missed anything. He never missed a beat. He was so hyper aware. I took that lesson in. I've been thinking about that a lot over the last couple of weeks, because I realized I hadn't been doing a very good job of paying attention to things that were right under my nose.

Pete: Mmm. So, as always, I have so many reactions to this. So I'll just throw them at you, and we can pick which threads to pull.

Jen: Sure.

Pete: The first one...I'll work backwards. What you just said right at the end there, I feel like is every aha moment I've ever had. Which is like, when you have that aha moment, you start to realize in having said aha moment that it was right there all along. Like, "How could I not have seen it? This is so obvious." Like a really simple example for the listeners, when you and I started this podcast. You were talking about creating a podcast, I was talking about creating a podcast, we were lamenting how hard it is, "We don't really know where to start, and how am I going to stay motivated to do it myself?" And then at some point, you were like, "Oh, we should just do it together." And it was like, "That's right, literally, right under my nose."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: As someone who's six-foot-seven, and you were just down there. Like, right there. And so I feel like that's really common with aha moments, so that was one thing I wrote down. Maybe we should start there. What do you think?

Jen: Well, it's making me think of a concept that we use in one of my movement classes, which is the concept of focus. And we talk about the difference between soft focus and sharp focus. Sharp focus meaning, I'm looking at one thing at the expense of all other things. Which in the podcast example, you were looking at making your podcast and I was looking at making my podcast, at the expense of what was right there in front of us, "Let's make a podcast together." Whereas soft focus is opening up your field of vision so that you are taking in all things at the expense of nothing. And that is what Martin Charnin was freaking brilliant at, opening up his peripheral vision so that he could see all of the things, so that he didn't miss something because he was so focused on the one thing.

Pete: Oh, that's brilliant. In that distinction, I actually was thinking the former, the first thing that you described was a form of paying attention. Like sharp focus is, "I'm so attentive to that one specific thing." So in some ways, you could argue that's paying attention. But what you're saying is he was actually paying attention to like the broader, softer, larger scope of what was happening. Oh, I'm obsessed. I want that skill. I really want that skill.

Jen: Well, come to one of my classes and we'll help you develop it. So I don't know if this pulls on the thread you were just mentioning, but I know the listeners have heard me talk about this a lot over the recent weeks. We just opened up a new studio space, and my focus has been very sharp. It has been very fixed on, "First, get the studio open. Second, get people to come and take classes at the studio." That has been my focus. And finally...I don't even know what the impetus was to expand my vision. But I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have become so hyper-focused, so sharply focused on, 'Get people to register for classes,' that I just wasn't paying attention to any of the other cues I was getting from people." A bunch of potential collaborators reaching out and saying, "Oh, I see you have the new studio space, we'd love to come by sometime." And my response was something like, "Well, I'm really busy with getting classes up, so let's talk a couple weeks." I was like, "No. What am I doing?" It just kind of hit me between the eyes eventually, that I had been paying so much focused attention that I wasn't actually paying attention to the cues that people, the universe, myself, were giving.

Pete: Yeah. You raise such an interesting and tricky point, though, which is, "How do we get clear in what to pay attention to?" Because, my goodness, there is no shortage of possible things to pay attention to, and I feel like it's so much easier to pay attention to what you would call low-frequency bullshit. I've heard you say that before, like a social media blurb.

Jen: I borrowed that term. I cannot claim coining that term, but I really like it.

Pete: Yeah, like there's certain things that are easy to pay attention to than others. And so I'm like trying to grapple with, yes, I am totally onboard with this idea of two words, "pay attention" as a superpower, especially in the way you've described it. Like, "Pay attention to the macro of what is happening so that you can see things that you can't see if you're super laser focused." And I'm like, "How do I know the difference between that and just paying attention too...how do I know if it's low-frequency?" Like, I don't know. I'm trying to unpack that in this moment.

Jen: Well, for me, it has come back to (surprise, surprise), "What is my Why?" Because, "Teach classes," is my What.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And I had become so What focused that ultimately...my Why is, "To unleash the creative genius within all of us," and one of the ways I do that is by teaching classes. But another way is by connecting people from different industries to each other, to see what happens when their ideas cross pollinate. And that was the thing that I was completely missing. Like, people from outside my industry saying like, "Hey, I see what's going on over there. I'd love to get in on that." And me being like, "I'm a little busy right now." No!

Pete: "I'm teaching class."

Jen: And the other thing is something my friend Jasper Grant always says, and I can hear his voice right now echoing in my ears, "Leave room for serendipity."

Pete: It's kind of wild that you say that. I've literally...I'm going to hold it up to the Zoom screen. Listeners can't see this, but I have-

Jen: Ah, you wrote "serendipity", and you circled it.

Pete: I have the word "serendipity", and I've been circling it for like two minutes like, "Don't forget to bring up serendipity." Because I feel like what I'm super interested in is, in the opening example that you gave, was paying attention and leaving space for serendipity. How can we leave space to pay attention to serendipity? Or leave space for serendipity, so that we can pay attention within that? I don't know which comes first. But yeah, it's just wild that you bring up that from Jasper when I was sitting here underlining, "I don't want to schedule and pay attention to every single moment of every single day. I want to leave room for serendipity." Huh.

Jen: Well, we talked about this in an episode that we did about writing, which is the idea of seeing the world through project-colored glasses, something that I learned from Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen...apparently I'm just dropping names today. Hope you can catch those as they fall.

Pete: The Box O' Goodies will be full. It'll be a full Box O' Goodies.

Jen: And that's one of the things I was not doing, I was not seeing the world through studio-colored glasses. I wasn't looking at these emails that were coming in, or these texts, or these random run-ins on the street as, "Huh. How might these things intersect with each other?" Instead, I went back to a very old habit, which you were one of the first people to try to break me of, which is, "I can't let my peas touch my carrots. They've got to be separate on the plate." And you were basically like, "Can you mix it up?" But I think because I was functioning in such a high-stress and very finite timeline scenario, I reverted to, "I'm compartmentalizing. I'm not looking at how other things might inform what I'm working on." So I really was not paying attention, at all, to anything other than what I had told myself was important to pay attention to.

Pete: Mmm. Mmm. This is really juicy. So I mentioned earlier that I wrote down like four different threads, and one of them was the aha moment thread. The other three...I don't know if we need to go into all three of them. But one in particular, I think is so relevant. Is, I've wrote down "mindfulness". Because any form of mindfulness training, meditation training, is an exercise in paying attention to either your breath, or to a mantra, or to the things that are going through your head. There is a myth that meditation is about quieting the mind, which it's not. It's actually about noticing and paying attention to what's going through the mind. And I think that is very specific to meditation or mindfulness, but it's like that micro skill as it relates to that specific practice, being meditation, is actually a macro skill of, "Can you pay attention to the things surrounding you," like Martin did in the example that you raised, like spotting the set design in the window. Like that is a form of, in my mind, mindfulness. He like created space in his brain and room for serendipity to then pay attention to things that he is noticing and that are coming into his brain, and then thinking, "Oh, wait. That thought just came into my brain. I just observed that. I'm paying attention as a result. And now I'm going to go over there and talk about it, or ask about it." Does that make sense?

Jen: Yes. And I'm having the weirdest nostalgic aha moment...

Pete: Ooh, what a combo.

Jen: ...in realizing that the only reason I ended up working with Martin Charnin is because of his ability to notice and pay attention to things that other people would miss. He came to observe a rehearsal for something I was in, and he stayed after to talk to me. And he said, "You have very interesting ideas about this play, don't you?" And I was like, "I guess." I think I was twenty-three, maybe. And so we started talking about the play, and then he was like, "I think you would may be be useful as a part of this organization I'm on the board of. You want to come to a board meeting and see if there's a spot for you?" And I'm like, "Okay." So, we did that. And then he was like, "Okay, I like how your brain works. Do you want to assist me?" That's how that all happened, he heard me speaking to a director in a rehearsal that he wasn't even supposed to be at. I mean, that's...talk about leaving room for serendipity, but also staying so open that you would hear something and then follow your impulse. Amazing.

Pete: Yeah, it's so amazing. Because I think the other...I'm just trying to fit all of these points back into this conversation. But they fit, I promise they fit. Because the other two things I wrote down were "empathy" and "coaching". Which, I think at the root of someone who is very empathetic is someone who is very good at paying attention and getting curious about what might be going on for that other person. I feel like in that example, Martin was practicing, to some degree, empathy. To think about the board, or the company, or the ideas that may be beneficial to them. To be paying attention to the things that you were saying, and then be able to like fit that piece of the puzzle together. And then I think, you know, it's very closely related in terms of coaching, whether it's coaching an executive, a leader, or a creative individual, or an artist. Something you do well, I've watched you do this, is like one of your superpowers is to pay attention to what you're hearing, what you're observing, what you're getting from that person to either reflect back or ask a question. All of this to say, I just feel like paying attention is...it's almost like the ultimate underlying skill and superpower of all of these things, of mindfulness, of coaching, of giving feedback, of being empathetic. It's just like, I don't know, I think you might be touching on something slightly magical.

Jen: Ooh. Well, I like magic, so there you go. Now that we've had this conversation, I'm realizing how important it is to draw the distinction between hyper-focused attention on a single thing, and then heightened awareness of all the possibilities...and that's really what we're talking about. So in the coaching realm, part of it is getting over what you think you need to say to a person because you think you know where they're about to go. And instead, staying open, paying attention to the cues, and then responding to the possibilities. As opposed to, "Oh, they started the sentence with this phrase that I've heard before. So, I know what I'm going to say is XYZ".

Pete: Yeah. I think that coaching is a great example of two people taking on the two different roles, whether they're conscious of it or not. One of the roles being the hard-focus, which is the client or the person being coached. They're like, "I'm so specifically focused on this challenge that I'm having. I have the blinkers on. I can't see anything else but this challenge." And the coach, by their nature if they're good at what they do, is able to see the macro, see the bigger picture, ask questions that help them kind of remove those blinders and help them pay attention to the things that are in their periphery.

Jen: Ooh, yes. Woah. I really like that. It's a good reminder.

Pete: Yeah. I guess the reason I share that, what I'm trying to tell our listeners and figure out for our listeners is, "How do we get clear in how to practice both?" I think both are really important. Right? We need to be able to specifically focus and pay attention to those very, very dialed-in specific projects that we have to execute. And how do we also pay attention and make space for, you know, opening our frame, looking around, seeing the macro, like we've been talking about with Martin? One such way is to work with a coach, but like also, there are a myriad of other different ways. It's just about, I think, first getting clear in that there's two kinds of ways of paying attention. Which, I'm sure there's more but like right now in that moment, I'm finding that really helpful.

Jen: Wow, who knew today would be a trip down memory lane? Thinking about the late Martin Charnin and all the amazing lessons he taught me and now all of you. I know he's often remembered for, "The sun will come out tomorrow," but maybe he has a new legacy, which is, "Pay attention."

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.