Untangle Your Thoughts and Focus Your Energy on What Matters Most
Bruce Gibson
CoachingbyBruce.com
As an executive coach, I have had many clients start our first session by describing their feeling of being “jumbled up,” “overwhelmed with options,” “unable to make sense of it all,” and feeling “analysis paralysis.” They are so filled with frustration and self-doubt, and they feel unable to process anything at all.
When this happens, it is important that the coach stay in a state of flexible service for the client. Yes, there may be awesome leadership topics that you want to explore but you must meet the client where he or she is. Focus on first things first in how you help your client: Untangle the mental ball of twine. Decide what is urgent or important. Focus energy on one thing at a time.
The situation always reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, because the fundamentals must be addressed before moving on toward growth and development. Abraham Maslow stated in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that people are motivated to achieve certain needs and that some needs take precedence over others. It's hard to be thoughtful or efficient when you're irritated, frustrated, and distraught about your psychological and safety needs.
When the client feels jumbled up, the first priority is to help him or her sort things out and reduce the feeling of chaos. Here are three steps to helping your clients untangle their thoughts:
Reassure them that they are smart and have good ideas. It’s only a matter of too many good ideas clogging the drain at once.
Lay each topic on the table and find patterns to reduce the chaos. Sorting socks may be a painful experience, but the results are worth the trouble. When matched sets are in a drawer, grabbing the right pair becomes more approachable.
Explore each item one at a time and discuss feelings, experiences, and consequences. Encourage them to ignore the other items and focus only on the one being discussed.
At this point, the client is able to see individual topics and ideas and can express his or her thoughts and feelings about each one. This is progress. The next goal is to further reduce the noise and then get organized so that the client can focus his or her energy.
First, set aside topics that are no longer a real stress or a viable option or if they can be dealt with at a later time. This reduces the overall population of topics to deal with. Next, force-rank (most important to least important) the remaining topics. This is easier said than done.
Stephen Covey’s four quadrants of time management help make sense of the chaotic demands on our attention. Using this method, the two main criteria on which you evaluate tasks are urgency and importance. Urgent activities require immediate attention; important ones contribute to your mission, values, and goals. According to Covey, we should all strive to spend most of our productive time in Quadrant 2.
With your client, apply the single-task analysis to Covey’s four quadrants. This will help her see the disparity between how she should spend her time and how she is spending her time. Here is a brief explanation of each quadrant:
Important & Urgent tasks include immediate deadlines and daily fire fighting. These are not just distraction but actual must-do tasks.
Important But Not Urgent tasks are the things that matter in the long-term but may yield no tangible benefits this week or even this year. They are things we know we need to get to but probably will push off.
Urgent But Not Important tasks are the biggest reason we’re not more successful in the long-term. These are interruptions that happen such as phone calls, meetings without an agenda, and other activities that in retrospect are not important.
Not Important & Not Urgent tasks are the things we do because we need a break or are just bored. Channel surfing, scrolling Facebook, and cat videos are examples of things that seem time-worthy in the moment and do provide pleasure but are not urgent or important.
When your client sees items that are clearly distractions, interruptions, and time wasters, he or she needs to set those items aside. Ultimately, we want to coach them to focus most of their energy on activities that are important but not urgent—the activities that fall in Quadrant 2. This is because investing energy in Quadrant 2 results in fewer emergencies in Quadrant 1. Covey says, "Your crises and problems would shrink to manageable proportions because you would be thinking ahead, working on the roots, doing the preventive things that keep situations from developing into crises in the first place."
Now that your clients’ thoughts are untangled and placed in order of importance, coaching can help them manage the time and energy that they invest into these plans or issues—all the while ready to handle the daily minutia that interrupt us. The key goal is to focus energy on what’s important. Multitasking is the enemy of focus.
In his Harvard Business Review article How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking, Peter Bregman explains that doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. He continues: “We don’t actually multitask. We switch task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.”
A good example of single tasking is described in Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Author Brigid Schulte batches her tasks into protected blocks of focus: When she’s working, she turns off email and phone. When she’s with her family, she does the same. Perhaps the best and simplest way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Schulte writes, “It was easier to stay focused on work knowing I’d given myself a grace period to get to the pressing home stuff later.”
Going back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for a moment, your client can take a breath and open up to growth and development when he or she is not worrying about the fundamentals of psychological and safety needs. With concerns and ideas untangled, organized, and prioritized, the client can focus his or her energy on what matters most.
As a coach, you will witness a decrease in stress and an increase in confidence by your client as he or she begins to process clearly and move forward.
Works Cited:
Artwork: otakuxhana.deviantart.com
Bregman, Peter. How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking. Harvard Business Review, 2010.
Covey, Stephen. Merrill, A. Roger. Merrill, Rebecca R. First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Maslow, A. H. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 1943.
Schulte, Brigid. Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Picador, 2015.