Leaders across every field often think that to be successful, they need to use their attention in specific ways: By multitasking. By constantly planning. By having a future-oriented mindset. By simulating outcomes to strategize and prepare.
They also tend to believe they should be unemotional, disconnected, or stoic—especially in the military, first-responder, and business communities. I recently briefed a group of leaders at a large tech company on mindfulness training for attention, and why it was critical for them as leaders and innovators in a highly competitive industry. I also told them that these common assumptions about what constitutes strong leadership and clear strategic thinking are wrong. Instead:
To get more done, monotask—don’t multitask. Task switching slows you down.
To best plan for the future, don’t just simulate possible scenarios—observe and be in the present moment to gather better data.
To lead well, become more aware of your own emotions and those of others.
To do any of this, you have to be fully in the here and now. You need to observe. You need to be aware of what’s going on right now—around you in your environment, and inside your mind, in your inner environment, which is just as dynamic, distracting, and informationally rich as the world around you.
We’re used to living in action mode: thinking and doing.
Mindfulness training unlocks a new mode: noticing, observing, and being.
This observational stance is an elixir that allows you to do everything better: Accomplish tasks. Plan. Strategize. Lead. Innovate, Connect. All from a capacity to fully access the present moment and to know, moment to moment, what’s happening in your own mind.
When a bushfire starts in the Australian wilderness, it can grow quickly, decimating wildlife and racing toward population centers. It needs to be contained before it gets out of control. But much of the Australian bush is difficult to reach, inaccessible by road or any other form of land-based route. Specialized firefighters must be sent in by helicopter, where they rappel directly into the wildfire area. These rappel crews land right smack in the middle of a dynamic, dangerous, and rapidly changing situation. Job descriptions for roles like these—like “smoke jumpers” in the US—often explicitly state that you must not only be in excellent physical condition, but also possess a high degree of emotional stability and mental alertness.
Steven is a heli-rappeller who visited my lab all the way from Australia, driven to seek our help because of a recent incident. He and his fellow crew members were deployed to a particularly challenging terrain in the Australian bush to contain a blaze that threatened to grow out of control. Weighed down with heavy gear—each carried a personal kit with hand tools like rakes and shovels and firefighting equipment—they fanned out, each taking a sector; a support helicopter would soon arrive to drop foam or water from the air. Steven began working on a section of fire right in front of him. He was very focused and meticulous in his methodology. And then he heard a distinctive sound behind him, a roar like the loudest vacuum, the sound of the air being sucked up—the sound of the fire taking over. He was being engulfed by a wall of fire approaching from behind.
Now, firefighting rappel crews—along with first responders, pilots, health care teams, military personnel, judges, lawyers, and a broad range of leaders across various fields—are often highly trained in situational awareness. Situational awareness training in these professions usually takes the form of a decision-making model—a way to make sure that the choices you make in fast-moving circumstances are based on your real-time, present-moment observations, as well as your knowledge and experience, and are of course in service of your goal. Steven’s goal was to control the fire, which he was actively working toward; under pressure and surrounded by salient distractors, he had exquisite focus. His attention was strongly deployed to the fire he was fighting to control. And his training had involved simulating and practicing this exact scenario. But in that moment, something critical was missing.
In the previous chapter, we talked about how we use simulations to arrive at a mental model. We perceive, process, predict; this allows us to decide, act, communicate. These steps aren’t typically linear, but instead dynamic and interactive: Simulations create mental models that lead to decisions, which then influence the next simulation, and so on. This is a shifting, fluid, constantly unfolding process, not a static one. Dropping the story, then, is not a single action, but rather an ongoing process—one that requires you to become aware, over and over, of what’s happening not only around you, but also inside your own mind.
Steven got so focused on putting out that smaller fire right in front of him that he stopped monitoring the larger fire event. In cognitive psychology, we call this goal neglect: a failure to execute the demands of a particular task, even though you can recall the instructions. He knew that his broader mission was to monitor an unpredictable situation that could unfold in any number of ways, but he still got overly focused and lost track of the main goal.
Obviously, Steven lived to tell the tale—he was able to successfully navigate his way out of danger. However, the close call lingered with him. He started using the story to train new firefighters, to communicate that even with impeccable preparation, their situational awareness could still be incomplete. He now tells them that situational awareness isn’t enough. Surveilling the external landscape—even if you do it well, and mindfully, and with your attention in the present moment—isn’t enough.
Steven faced a particularly challenging instance—a high-demand situation that also required close-field focus. And yet, you don’t have to be rappelling into a literal wildfire to experience something like goal neglect and to suffer because of it. Think of any time you’ve drifted off course from an important goal—and remember that goals show up in our lives in different ways. We could be talking about something at work: you get focused on one aspect of a project and sidetracked, losing sight of how it fits into the larger mission of your organization. We could even be talking about parenting.
My daughter, Sophie, gently summoned me to her room one night, frustrated. She was stuck on a particularly difficult math problem. She asked for my help.
I went in and sat down next to her and took a look at the problem. I started by trying to talk her through it, asking, “Okay, tell me what the problem is saying,” and other leading questions. But I was confused, too—I couldn’t quite remember how to tackle this particular formula. I should know this! I felt a surge of determination. And for the next forty-five minutes I worked furiously on the problem, completely driven: I’m going to dominate this math problem. I am going to crush sixth-grade math!
It worked: I solved the problem! I looked up triumphantly—to see Sophie leaning back in her chair, reading a book.
Oops.
My goal, always, is to raise independent, self-motivated kids who can problem-solve on their own. When I sat down next to my daughter and started talking her through the problem, that was absolutely my mission. I rapidly got sidetracked, even though I felt focused and on-task.
One of the reasons we get sidetracked in moments like these is that it feels good. You see a smaller goal you can accomplish—put out that fire; solve this problem—and you lose awareness of your larger purpose: control the unfolding fire event; raise an independent thinker. Solving that math problem was very satisfying for me, but as soon as I looked up I realized, This is not the best use of my energy with my child. Certainly a good realization, but how much better would it have been to catch those moments earlier, before I sank most of an hour into the task? Before the wall of fire raged up behind you?
Of course, we want to be able to focus. And we started this book by working on that important skill. But we also need to be able to pull out of focus when necessary—to be intentional about how and when we focus, and on what. In that moment I was highly focused—completely immersed, in fact. If you’d walked into that room, you’d have thought I had no problem with attention. The problem: this wasn’t a time for me to be highly focused. I lost track of that, and I lost track of what my mind was up to. I was off course and completely unaware of it.
So here is the next major way that we go wrong: We are paying attention. But our attention is too narrow or too wide, too stable or too unstable. You’re paying attention in some way successfully—but it’s not appropriate for the moment.
To correct that, you need meta-awareness.
Meta-awareness is the ability to take explicit note of and monitor the current contents or processes of your conscious experience. Basically, it’s an awareness of your awareness. When I say “pay attention to your attention,” what I mean is apply your meta-awareness. That day in the Australian bush, Steven was focused on the fire. But paying attention to his attention would have offered something more: the realization that he was fixated on it and needed to expand his attention.
If situational awareness in high-demand professions means “surveilling the external landscape,” then you can think of meta-awareness like this: situational awareness for the internal landscape.
My colleague and friend Scott Rogers, whom I’ve been working with for the past decade to bring mindfulness training to all different types of populations, is a wizard at describing meta-awareness. It can be a tough concept to grasp, but Scott has a knack for coming up with phrases that really make difficult mindfulness concepts more easily accessible. When we worked with the University of Miami football team, he put it this way: “You are scanning the field.”
He asked the players to picture the football field and all the dynamic elements that go into it: the sidelines, the goal lines, the moving players, the ball in play, the roar of the crowd, the constant chirping from opposing players, the Jumbotrons in every corner . . . everything. He invited them to think about how they navigate that complex landscape, full of salient elements that want to yank at their focus. Then he asked them to visualize their mind the same way: as a field, with the same kind of salient moving pieces that might grab your attention and suck it in. He suggested that just as players choose how to navigate the football field, and how and when to engage other players, they think of the “field” of their mind the same way.
You can hover above yourself—observe from a distance, as we practiced in the last chapter with the “Bird’s-Eye View” decentering practice. And there are other important cues you can notice, as you build an “awareness of your awareness” that will clue you in.
Some of these cues happen in the body. When I went into Sophie’s room to help her understand a math problem and instead emerged an hour later a heroine in my epic battle with middle school math, I became hyperfocused. I wondered why that had happened, when I went in with such a clear goal. As I thought back to the incident, I remembered feeling gripped by a desire to win—to “beat” the math problem. I understood that I was driven by the feeling of satisfaction I get from “winning,” and that it fueled my hyperfocus. For me, that “gripping” feeling is a red flag. I’m much more aware of that sensation now—when I feel it, I check in: Is my attention where it needs to be?
It’s not always a “satisfaction” feeling—sometimes we get tripped up and sucked into hyperfocus (or another attentional state that isn’t appropriate to the moment) by anxiety, fear, or worry. Sometimes, “seeing” the mind is actually about feeling mind-states in the body. These might show up as restlessness in your legs, nervousness in your stomach, tension in your jaw. All those years ago, when I lost feeling in my teeth? I was completely unaware. That’s why it got so bad. I had no meta-awareness, no sense of what was happening in my mind and body, no ability to course-correct until it got to a crisis point.
With more awareness of my inner landscape, these days I am able to intervene earlier and more effectively in my own attention issues. I’m attuned to how my mind and body are relating to each other when I’m hyperfocused or stressed. I can notice now when I’m starting to clench my jaw; I do a three-minute practice, I take a walk, I relax my mouth—any number of things to stop the mindless teeth clenching. And the last time I wrote a grant application on a crazy deadline, I knew I wasn’t going to be great at staying meta-aware. So . . . I wore a mouth guard. (Sometimes, we just have to accept our limitations!)
When I talked to Steven in the lab about his instance of “goal neglect,” he described feeling “enticed” by putting out the small fire—that’s what led to his hyperfocus. Now, he watches for (as he calls it) “that delicious satisfaction feeling” in his upper arms and stomach. That’s what tips him off that he may be sinking into hyperfocus. He can respond by broadening his attention as needed.
He described meta-awareness, from a firefighter’s perspective, as “watchstanding”: taking a position where you can see what’s happening more clearly. That’s an important part of what having a peak mind really means: it’s being able to get that “peak” perspective and take in the entire landscape of your mind. With meta-awareness, we are aware of the current contents of our conscious experience, and we monitor to see if those contents are aligned with our goals. We’re asking ourselves:
What am I perceiving?
How am I processing it?
And is the form my attention is taking aligned with my goals?
It’s easy to confuse meta-awareness with another thought process we call metacognition. The difference is this: Metacognition is thoughts about how you think. It’s knowing that you have certain mental tendencies. Metacognition is, in part, self-awareness. “I have a tendency to assume the worst,” is an example of metacognition. Or: “I take a long time making decisions.” Metacognition is certainly helpful—this kind of incisive self-awareness of your own cognitive tendencies can clearly support you. But it’s not the same as meta-awareness, and it can’t replace it. While you might know that you tend to think in certain ways, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to be aware of problems as they’re happening. When you’re mind-wandering and simulating, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most “metacognitively” savvy person on the planet—you’ll still get caught up in these mental processes in the moment.
We brought 143 undergraduate students into the lab to test their awareness of their own mind-wandering. We knew people were mind-wandering about 50 percent of the time, but did they realize it? We gave them a standard “working memory task”: remember two faces, compare them to a test face, do this multiple times over a twenty-minute period. We tracked their accuracy and speed as usual, but this time we stopped them in the middle of the test at various points and asked two questions: How “on-task” were you—very, somewhat, or not at all? And how aware were you of it?
The results? There were four main clusters of responses: (1) reports that participants were on-task and aware of it; (2) reports that they were on-task and unaware (this would look like a deeply immersed “flow state”); (3) reports that they were off-task and aware (choosing not to pay attention anymore because they thought the task was boring, which researchers call “tuning out”); and (4) reports that they were off-task and unaware (“zoning out”).
In addition to all these response clusters, we found that participants’ performance got worse and worse, they mind-wandered more and more, and they became less meta-aware over the twenty-minute task.
The drop in performance over the course of the twenty minutes was not surprising—we’ve already discussed the vigilance decrement: performance gets worse over time when continuous attention is required on a task. What these results pointed out is that mind-wandering was increasing as performance was getting worse. When we first talked about mind-wandering, we talked about all the evolutionary reasons the brain might be “wired to wander,” like opportunity costs, scanning, looking for something better to do, and so forth. The human brain may simply be designed to cyclically pull away from the task-at-hand. We are built to have these cyclical patterns in our attention. And that might be fine—if you can notice the pulling away. But what we found here is that we do not notice.
This is what the meta-awareness responses conveyed—as mind-wandering was going up, meta-awareness was going down. We are mind-wandering more and more over time, and growing less and less able to catch ourselves doing it. And when we don’t catch ourselves, we cannot course-correct to get attention back on task.
I started this book by telling you that you spend 50 percent of your time mind-wandering, and that’s true—that statistic has held up across many studies. It’s easy to conclude, looking at that number, that mind-wandering lies at the root of our problems with attention. The surprise, though—from this study and others—is that mind-wandering itself may not be the real culprit. After all, there are plenty of instances where it’s fine to wander. Think of how you allow your thoughts to roam while watching your child’s or grandchild’s favorite movie for the third time, or while doing something automatic and easy, like vacuuming a room—“tuning out,” on purpose, as opposed to “zoning out.”
The difference? Meta-awareness.
With tuning out, meta-awareness of the situation lets you make sure that your current behavior is aligned with task goals before you decide to shift your attention away—no adjustments of attention are needed. But if the task demands suddenly rise, and performance starts slipping, attentional resources will be diverted back to the task-at-hand. Your own mind cues you—you don’t need an external cue, which, as we know, usually come too late anyway. Without meta-awareness, no monitoring occurs—no noticing of the task demands growing, no noticing of the current state of attention, and no redirection of attention.
ADHD patients tend to have high mind-wandering—so high that it can lead to detrimental real-life outcomes. A recent study found that even though mind-wandering is higher in these patients compared to those who don’t suffer from ADHD, the “costs” of mind-wandering were abated in patients who were more meta-aware of their mind-wandering versus those who were not. Meta-awareness “protected” them from making mind-wandering–related errors.
The problem is not mind-wandering—the problem is mind-wandering without meta-awareness.
The very young field of contemplative neuroscience is pushing us toward the new science of attention: meta-awareness may be the key to improving attentional performance.
Chris McAliley, a federal judge in the State of Florida, was inspired to start a mindfulness practice “like a lot of people do—when I was beset by unwelcome events in my life.” She was going through a divorce. Her children were teenagers, “with all that that entails,” she says now, with a sigh.
“I was in a complete mental battle with my ‘now,’” she says. “I didn’t want it. I was judgmental with myself, with others; I was mad at the universe. I was at the mercy of repetitive thoughts. And I was trying to work through it all. I had to go to court and make all these decisions—decisions that affected people. Meanwhile, there’s this constant rat race of thoughts in my head. I was exhausted by it.”
Chris and I met at a conference for female judges where we were both panelists invited to speak on the topic of mindfulness and judging. We shook hands waiting backstage before the event. Chris joked that attendance might be sparse, that we’d only have the other panelists as our audience—would anybody come to a panel on mindfulness and judging? Perhaps it was too niche a topic for the judiciary world. But when we walked on stage to take our places at the table, the cavernous room was packed with people. Every one of the five hundred seats was filled; women were standing in a crowd at the back of the great ballroom. It appeared there was indeed a need for mindfulness in judging.
A courtroom is actually the perfect example of a space where you would need both situational awareness and meta-awareness. Sitting on the bench, Chris is required to engage and sustain multiple types of attention. There’s a lawyer questioning a witness the judge must attend to. Meanwhile, the judge is holding in mind the testimonies she’s just heard, the laws that apply to the facts of the case, and the rules and standards that govern what the lawyer is saying in the moment: she is listening to what is being said, while being ready to respond if the opposing lawyer objects (will she sustain or overrule?). At the same time, she’s monitoring other people’s attention: Is that juror in the back row asleep? Is the court reporter keeping up? Judge McAliley needs to make sure that every word is captured, so if the reporter looks harried, she should slow things down. There might be an interpreter she needs to be aware of, as well; there might be a baby crying in the gallery.
“There is so much to attend to,” she says, “and then on top of it, there’s your own mind to attend to. If the lawyer is making his closing arguments, and I’m thinking about my divorce, or what I want for lunch, I’m not doing a good job. I’m not there! And it’s consequential.”
She needs an awareness of what’s going on in the courtroom and what’s going on in her mind. Mindfulness training has given Chris greater insight into the kind of stuff that gets her off-track. Frustration, anxiousness, worry—they all show up in the body. She often does a mini-practice in the courtroom: be still, sense the body, sense the breath.
“I have to get below my neck,” she says. “It’s so amazing, to notice what happens to the body when we have emotional feelings. We ignore them, but there’s great information there.”
For her, these feelings will show up as anxiousness or frustration—the lawyers don’t seem prepared; she notices her own voice rising; she realizes she’s been ruminating. Should I call them out for not being prepared? What impact will that have on them, or on the case, or on the defendant? Mindfulness practice has helped her use her own emotions as information.
“This is supposed to be a rational system,” she says, “so I don’t want my emotions—without my understanding or decision—to lead me to a decision. But I’m a judge, not a robot. I need to be able to experience emotion and be informed by it . . . not ruled by it.”
Meta-awareness allows her an awareness and understanding not only of her own thoughts and emotions, but also of her implicit biases. It’s something she has to think about in every case. If there’s a police officer testifying against a previously convicted felon, Chris asks herself: What are her personal assumptions? What’s her drop-down menu of biases when it comes to gender, profession, class, race? Can she notice them, but not be constrained by them?
“A lot of this practice is simply trying to notice our assumptions in life,” she says. “When you actually pay attention to them, you understand: they are rapid-fire.”
For her, the big revelation was paying attention without judgment. Without judgment of herself, or of others, or of circumstances. Ironic, because judging is quite literally Chris’s profession. But being able to pay attention to the present moment, without judgment or elaboration, is what now allows her to be more effective when she’s making decisions that shape people’s lives.
“It’s such a privilege to be a judge,” she remarks. “Our society picks people like me to resolve disputes. I’m sitting there, hearing people testify to completely opposite versions of events, and it’s my job to determine who’s credible. Sometimes it’s clear, but sometimes it’s not. And I have to try to get it right.”
In the lab, it’s really hard to “see” meta-awareness directly through people’s behavior alone. So (as in the working memory study I mentioned above) we have to give people attention and working memory tasks and ask them to then self-report on it. Study after study shows that the more aware people are of where their attention is, the better their performance is. We also know that when they are more aware, they can catch themselves mind-wandering (without being asked). And we know that some things cause meta-awareness to tank—like cigarette cravings and drinking alcohol.
With experienced mindfulness practitioners—and even with people who’ve taken an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction class—we see something else, too: reduced default mode activity. You remember what that is: reduced activity in the brain network, sometimes called the “me” network, that’s most involved during internal attention, self-focus, mental simulations, and mind-wandering. Why would mindfulness training, compared to no training or some comparison training, reduce default mode activity? As we’ve discussed, there is growing evidence that mindfulness training increases attention and decentering, and decreases mind-wandering. Mental simulations that can hijack attention are less frequent and less capable of keeping you locked-in. But all of this may hinge on mindfulness training’s power to increase meta-awareness.
When you’re meta-aware, you’re looking at yourself. You’re the object! You can’t be simultaneously immersed in self-related thinking (mind-wandering, simulating) and reflecting on the self. This is why, as meta-awareness goes up, mind-wandering goes down. It makes sense that these would be antagonistic processes: the self can’t be outside and inside at the same time. Think back to the decentering technique you practiced in the previous chapter, which asked you to step outside, or “de-fuse,” from the self for a moment. You were already practicing meta-awareness in that moment—now, we need to be able to do it even more often, as a mental habit.
We want greater meta-awareness . . . and mindfulness practice is what gets us there.
Think back to your first time doing a mindfulness exercise, like Find Your Flashlight. You might have been surprised at how much your attention moved around. Attention is like a ball in motion. To effectively dribble it, you have to keep engaging and reengaging it over and over. If you “zone out” (mind-wander without realizing it), the ball will roll away. And the ball rolls away often. You only become meta-aware when you completely lose the ball: You walk out of a meeting and realize you have no idea what has been said. During an important conversation, you hear someone ask “Are you even listening?” and you realize you’ve been nodding along, but hearing nothing. You hear yourself shout, angrily, “I’m NOT angry!” You realize: Oops. I’m angry.
In each of these examples, that moment of realization of where your attention actually is and what your mind is doing—that’s meta-awareness. That’s it—that’s what it feels like. Those “meta moments” are what we want. But we want them much earlier, when they can truly be effective and protective.
Our goal with mindfulness training is to increase our meta moments so that we can actually execute the attentional pivots that are so critical for our success and well-being. Even if you have the strongest attention system in the world, you could direct it to the wrong place. To be able to implement any of the tactics you’ve been learning, you have to realize that you need to do so.
In The Art of War, which I used to introduce this book, Sun Tzu offers up a second approach one can use in an unfair fight:
Don’t struggle against a brick wall. Find a way to apply the minimum amount of force with the maximum amount of impact. The skill we want to cultivate is not only the capacity to pay better attention, focus more, concentrate harder: this is equivalent to going to battle and training for the fight—helpful but incomplete. We need to build something beyond this. We need a force multiplier, like a power-up in a video game. The attentional force multiplier you need to acquire is your capacity to be meta-aware, to notice.
To notice when we are not focused or too focused.
To notice when we are mentally elsewhere and not in the here and now.
To notice what is happening around us and within us.
Noticing is what unlocks our capacity to intervene in these pervasive attentional problems.
It’s simple: To know if you’re getting grabbed by something and need to intervene, you have to be watching.
The good news: You’ve already been practicing this the whole time. Meta-awareness has been part of every practice you’ve done so far.
In the Find Your Flashlight practice, the moment you noticed that your flashlight had drifted away from breath-related sensations—that was meta-awareness. During the Watch Your Whiteboard practice with labeling, when you noticed a thought, feeling, or sensation and labeled it—that was meta-awareness. During the decentering practice, when you took the bird’s-eye perspective and scanned your mind for biases, simulations, and mental models—that was meta-awareness. Even during the body scan, when you directed your attention to a particular bodily sensation, you were noticing which sensations were there and becoming aware of mind-wandering.
Up to this point, our goal has been to make sure that your attention was on a target object, like your breath. Now, the target of your attention . . . is your attention.
Ultimately, all the practices you’ve been working on in this book will build meta-awareness—and practicing any of them regularly supports your ability to observe and monitor your own mind. This next practice is specifically designed to notice the moment-to-moment contents of your conscious experience, without getting caught up in the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise.
This is a variation on a traditional “open monitoring” practice that asks you to observe the contents of your moment-to-moment conscious experience without engaging with it. While the prior formal practices have aimed to cultivate concentrative focus, this practice is instead about having receptive, broad, and stable attention.
CORE PRACTICE: RIVER OF THOUGHT
I’ll be honest with you: participants often report open monitoring to be the most challenging of the core practices. So here’s a way to think about what we’re doing in this practice, from an experience I had recently while practicing it myself.
I had set myself up to practice in my living room. It was a beautiful autumn day, breezy and warm, and I had all the windows open. My dog was in the room with me, lying by the window and gazing out at the street. Tashi is a Lhasa Apso. If you aren’t familiar with them, Lhasa Apsos are small dogs with long white hair that sweeps the floor if you don’t cut it. I find mine adorable, but I’m willing to acknowledge that they look a little bit like a floor mop. Lhasa Apsos came from Tibet and were historically kept in monasteries—their job was to monitor the common areas of the monastery and alert the monks of any intruders by barking. And they are very good at barking.
I was a few minutes into my practice when Tashi was already yapping at something. He does this all the time—he loves to go and stare out the window and then if anybody walks by, he’ll bark. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be a person. It could be a car, a squirrel, a small branch falling off a tree—anything will get him going. I tried to forge ahead with my practice—after all, I figured, the barking was just a sensation like anything else—but he simply would not stop. I was getting so irritated—and then it dawned on me: I’m doing the exact same thing that he is. I’m sitting here, watching for what’s different on my whiteboard. He’s watching for what’s different in that rectangle of window available to him—that’s exactly what open monitoring is! Sure, maybe I’m not actually barking at stuff, but it’s kind of the same thing. Tashi barks when he notices something, while I might get stuck and emotionally reactive about something I notice. I got up and closed the curtain. He stopped barking and lay down.
We can’t just “close the curtain” on our thoughts. We also can’t sit at the window and bark at every passing thing. But we can learn to notice it—and let it go.
My dog doesn’t have that ability—but you do! Think of it this way: Would you run outside to talk to every person who walks by your house? No. So treat the thoughts that arise for you throughout the day in the same way. You can’t stop them from coming any more than you can stop people from walking down your street. But you can change the way that you interact with them. You can decide when to engage with them, and when not to, and instead allow them to pass by.
When offering the president of the University of Miami and his leadership cabinet MBAT, the program my colleague Scott Rogers and I codeveloped for high-demand professionals, we set up shop in a conference room. After a bit of discussion, we got into the practices. We had been working with this group regularly, and were in the part of the program that introduced them to the open monitoring practice.
We all took a seated Mountain Pose, and we talked them through “watching mental content pass, like clouds in the sky.” At a certain point before beginning the formal practice, one member of the group loudly sighed.
“This noise is driving me crazy!” she said. Indeed, the air conditioner was making a persistent, irregular rattle. “I don’t think I can do this practice with this thing going. It’s so irritating!”
She was right—the air conditioner was very hard to ignore. It was also a great opportunity to point out why engaging in open monitoring practice can be helpful for precisely these types of irritating, annoying, or anger-provoking moments in our lives: we can recognize choice points.
I conveyed to the group that I didn’t know her direct experience in that moment, but I have similarly been irritated by annoying sounds during my practice on other occasions. If I could have watched her mental whiteboard, or mine, in such moments, here’s what I might have seen: A sound was noticed—a sensory experience registered on the mental whiteboard. Then, a concept showed up—the thought It’s so irritating. Next, an emotion—feeling that irritation. And finally, the expression of emotion aloud—“It’s so irritating!”
It may feel a bit contrived to break it down as a linear sequence—sensation, thought, emotion, action—especially when it feels so packed together, like a big jumble of irritation. But as we learn to watch what is unfolding in our minds with a practice like open monitoring, we can see the sequence of mental events flowing by with greater precision and granularity. And we may notice the small gaps between events—where we are making choices. Linking the sensory experience of the sound with the concept of irritating is a choice. Feeling irritation is a choice. Expressing that feeling is also a choice.
With practice, we get better at noticing mental events and identifying opportunities to intervene—to make different choices. Think of instances in your own life when your reaction felt ballistically driven by an instigating event, like getting cut off in traffic and flipping someone off. It may seem very difficult to break down such episodes to see choice points. But we can get better at this, and open monitoring practice helps. It tunes up our meta-awareness. With more practice, we might even be able to experience events as spacious, appreciating the infinite possibilities before us in any moment. My favorite expression of this insight comes from Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed: “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.”
There wasn’t anything we could do about the sound—we couldn’t adjust the thermostat to turn it off, and there really wasn’t time to try to find someone to fix it. The sound was going to be there as we tried to practice. However, thinking about our experience of it in terms of choice points, noticing the space between the thought and expression, offered an opportunity: when the thought This is so irritating occurs, you can make a different choice. Instead of feeling and then expressing anger, you could choose not to hang onto it. Just let it fade and allow your whiteboard to remain “receptive” to whatever arises next.
Whether it’s a thought tied to the rattling of an air conditioner or a fear or worry that loudly presents itself in your mind, you can use this same strategy. Thoughts, memories, and anxieties may appear in the mind unbidden. We can remember that we have a choice on what we do next. Think of Tashi, and make a different choice. No need to bark: let them walk on by.
There is a concept in Buddhism called the “Second Arrow.” It comes from a famous parable: the Buddha asked one of his students, “If you are struck by an arrow, does it hurt?”
“Yes!” the student replied.
“If you are struck by a second arrow,” the Buddha asked, “does it hurt even more?”
“It does,” the student replied.
The Buddha explained: In life, we can’t control whether we’re hit by an arrow or not. But the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The first arrow causes pain—the second arrow is our distress about that pain.
I love this parable because it very simply encapsulates the connection between mindfulness and attention: The first arrow happens. There are arrows every day. But the second arrow—your response to the first—is what sucks up your attentional bandwidth. And that is within your control. This is another choice point you can access—if you have an awareness of your own mind.
Choice points become especially important in another arena: relationships.
Whether an interaction you’re having is with a loved one, someone you’ve just met, or a nemesis, the “packaged” story you’re carrying in your working memory about that person, or about how the interaction will go, can determine how events flow . . . not only between you and this other person, but also with others. The ripple effects of our relationships, and whether they’re effective, compassionate, and communicative or closed off and full of misunderstandings, can have a far reach.
One important node in the brain network for meta-awareness is located at the very front of the prefrontal cortex—it also happens to be part of the brain network for social connection. It’s activated when we are meta-aware and also when we connect with others by simulating their reality and seeing things from their point of view. Meta-awareness offers us a window into our own minds as if we are watching it from someone else’s perspective, but it also allows us insight into others. Using your attention, you can not only time travel, but mind travel.