Even More on Being Good to Yourself

Okay, if you show up and bring all you have when you do, is that enough to bring out the absolute best that you can be? Not by a long shot. There is much more. If there were not more to it, life would be fairly easy. The next piece as I see it is not about what you bring to the party but how you behave when you get there. Perhaps chief among the things that are required to bring out your very best is to pay attention.

I know that sounds like something that your third grade teacher would bark at you just as you were about to dunk pretty Alice’s pigtail in the inkwell, (special points for all of you old timers that actually understand that allusion and bonus points to all who actually went to a school that had inkwell holes in the desks or better yet actual inkwells) but there is simply no better way to put it.

When I was in pilot training in the US Air Force we students were evaluated on the extent to which we were constantly gathering information from the sky around the aircraft and our instruments. The common admonition was that a good pilot has his head on a swivel and it is constantly searching for information essential to the safe and effective operation of the plane. In short, were we paying attention to what was of great importance if one were to come home alive from a mission? Granted, there was not a lot of information to get from the instrument panel in a biplane, but what was there was pretty darned important. So they tried to teach me that paying attention was a critical skill in developing a positive and lasting relationship with flying. Much later in life I learned that it is also darned important when it comes to developing human to human relationships.

By now we have all been exposed to the importance of listening as an essential relationship skill and I wish that paying attention were as simple as that. It is not. You see the demands related to paying attention in human relationships are much greater than those of a pilot in his aircraft. The key difference is that we learned that as pilots we could not trust our postural senses. That is you could not rely on your body to tell you what kind of motion was occurring because the multiple forces at work in the maneuvering of the craft could cause your body to lie to you. You could feel as if the plane were rolling over when in fact it was flying straight and level. So we learned to trust our instruments over our bodies and that learning saved many pilot’s lives and failure to learn it cost the lives of one of my classmates and his instructor pilot.

In human relationships, though, paying attention not only involves listening to words and syntax; observing body language including dress and appearance; and listening to the emotional quality in what people are saying; but it also means paying attention to one’s own thoughts and emotions at the same time. Now this is not easy. Despite the popular myth of multi-tasking, humans can only do one conscious thing at a time. Paying attention to both others and oneself simultaneously is a tall order. It is nonetheless true that paying attention as a requirement of being a successful social creature means exactly that. It serves you to, as Stephen Covey said, seek to understand if you would be understood and that takes listening to everything at once.

The good news is that it can be done because we can keep our consciousness on a swivel and sample outside and inside data alternatively just as we watched the sky and the instrument panel but not at exactly the same time. It only takes small samples of data to be paying attention if they are the right data and we alternate very quickly – at mind speed (think faster than a speeding bullet). We can sample the words and emotions of others as well as our own in incredibly small increments that can make it seem as if we are actually only doing one seamless thing. Isn’t it great being a human being?

Anyway, if Covey is right and I know that he is, a certain way that you can be good to yourself as you navigate the sometimes unfriendly skies of human relationships is to fully pay attention. It is the path to being understood and what feels better than that? In my early years of training as a counselor I was schooled in the skills of listening and self-monitoring, but I have had to practice incessantly all my life in order to barely maintain the skills. They have the shortest life of any that I know and fade quickly without rather constant practice. I guess that the urge to be the center of all things is so powerful for us Homo Sapiens that we drop the paying attention skills rather easily in favor of a more 70’s version of being good to yourself. Am I wrong?