Are You Distracted?

by Amy Parrish

Transcript:

Sierra: Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hey, Sierra.

Sierra: My question for today is you travel all over the country to do a lot of trainings with a lot of different companies and something you talk a lot about is managing distractions, and I was just wondering in your experience, what some of the main distractions you are seeing in your trainings are.

Amy: Well if anybody who’s watching this video has been in one of my trainings, they’ll know that I’m always inviting and asking, requesting, and eventually requiring that my participants turn off their phones, close their laptops, and really just be here. And number one distraction is people feel so overwhelmed by the amount of notifications that are coming in via, you know, their laptops, their phones, their watches. There’s so much coming at us all the time and it’s important, it’s all work, but really being able to batch that, like put it on the side and be present to whatever we’re about to learn, or a meeting with someone or a one-on-one conversation or an issue with a customer, an issue with an employee, being able to really stay focused, be present, and not be distracted.

I’m watching it in my trainings people are flying around, paying a lot of money to show up to a seminar and then they spend that seminar checking email. It’s crazy, right? I mean when you say it like that, it’s like, of course that doesn’t make sense, but in the moment these things are pressing in on us. And so I would say that’s probably the number one distraction that I’m always dealing with in my trainings. But it’s showing up everywhere. Next time you go out to dinner just look around at how many people have taken the time to go pay a heavy price for a meal and they’re on their phone instead of being with each other.

So I think that those are maybe some of the biggest distractions that I’m watching. So I’m trying to get aware of that in my own way of being and start to limit what I allow to notify me on my own phone. That seems to be an approach.

Sierra: That’s great advice. Thank you, Amy.

Amy: Yeah, thanks.