Right now your brain is taking in 11 million bits of information.
You are consciously aware of 40.
The other 10,999,960 are making decisions for you.
(And they have been doing it your whole life.)
Why Your Brain Filters Out 11 Million Bits Every Second
You planned the whole event.
-The AV.
-The hotel block. -The run of show. -The dietary restrictions nobody told you about until 48 hours before. The speaker. -The CEO's slide deck that came in at 11pm the night before.(You know. The usual.)
It went well. You know it went well.
And yet on the drive home all you can think about is the one piece of feedback that was not great.
Your brain was designed to scan for threats. It kept our ancestors alive. A snapped twig in the dark. A shadow that moved wrong. The brain that noticed those things first survived.
It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
The problem is the threats are different now...
Behavioral scientist Pragya Agarwal confirms our conscious minds handle only 40 to 50 bits per second... out of 11 million coming in.
Here's what surprises me the most...
You are NOT the one choosing which 40.
Your habits are.
Your history is.
Whatever you trained your brain to find... that is what it shows you.
(Read that again.)
Those 40 bits are not random. Your brain picks them based on what you have been focused on.
Train it to look for problems and it finds problems. Train it to look for the good and it finds that instead.Why Your Brain Finds the Bad Before the Good
Here is the part that nobody puts in the employee handbook.
Your brain is not neutral about what it lets through.
In other words your brain is spending two thirds of its processing power scanning your inbox for what went wrong.
YOUR brain. Built to find what is wrong before it finds what is right.
And here is what that means for you specifically.
You are the person responsible for everyone else's experience in the room.
You carry that weight before the event. During the event. And clearly... after it too.Your team is tired. You know it.
You feel it every time you try to get them energized for the next thing and realize there is nothing left in the tank.(Yours included.)
The One Question That Changes How You Show Up
Whatever has been weighing on you today... ask yourself this.
Was it on your mind every single second?
Or were there meetings today where you forgot about it completely?
-In that conversation.
-In that meeting. -In that hour where something else needed your full attention.Your brain found something else to focus on within that time frame.
That is ATTENTION DISCIPLINE.
Here's another surprise...
It is a skill .
You are not born with it or without it.
You build it.
Here is what attention discipline looks like in practice. Before your next meeting ask yourself three questions:
- What actually went well in that last meeting that I skipped past?
- Who on my team did something right today that I have not said out loud yet?
- What is the one thing on my list that I can actually control right now?
It only takes 30 seconds of your day.
Your brain will spend the rest of the meeting finding answers.
I talk about Looking For the Good on stage. If you want to see how it works in a room, start here.
