There’s a funny cartoon out there of some cows in a pasture eating grass. One cow’s head is lifted up with a sense of horror on his face and the caption reads “Hey wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” If I asked you, have you ever been sitting at a meal with someone or even by yourself and been halfway through the meal without having tasted the food? In my experience, the odds are likely that you’ll be nodding your head up and down. Our heads simply are often somewhere else, worrying about where we need to be, watching television, or engrossed in conversation.

This unawareness is the seed for making poor food choices, not to mention missing out on enjoying the food. This unawareness can also drive people to overeat as a way to cope with unacknowledged feelings and emotions. You may be in search of a “quick fix” that consists of caffeinated beverages and highly refined foods that burn very quickly and spike up the metabolism.  Many people have learned to comfort and sedate themselves with food.  Sadly our “super-size” culture not only supports these tactics but also capitalizes on it.

Since preparing and eating food is such an essential component of our lives, why not bring mindful awareness to this? 

I had a client who suffered from stomach pains always complaining of a sensitive stomach. I told him that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, has a system where he suggests chewing the food 30 times before swallowing (you don’t to count after you practice a few times). When he tried this he began noticing that his stomach didn’t hurt quite as much anymore because his food was broken down so much prior to hitting his stomach. I had another client that suffered from a food addiction and would often be found going to the bakery daily, buying a cake, and eating it that night. We practiced mindful eating with a raisin in session to experience the concept of slightly slowing down with the eating and beginning to bring all the senses to the food. She took time …

Ok…I’m outing myself. I was driving the other day with my mind wandering off the road and onto an idea for a wonderful blog that really got to the heart of people nowadays being potentially over-connected to a point where there isn’t time for oneself or to just be still. Very little effort is made to unplug as Therese Borchard courageously experimented with. So there I was driving, only to look up and find that I was three exits past where I needed to get off. Talk about being on auto-pilot. Sound familiar?

When you first learn how to drive a car, you need to think about all the intricate movements and are so present to where the foot is and where the hand needs to be placed. When driving through a new neighborhood, you’re very attentive to the street signs. But when things are familiar, the mind says “I got it, go ahead and take a break, let the mind wander a bit.” There may be nothing wrong with this, in fact, it could very well be where many creative ideas are born (e.g. new blogs). However, in an age where there is an overwhelming amount of things to connect to, we may be overconnected to a point where we become disconnected from ourselves.

I live in Los Angeles and was recently walking by the beach and watching people whizzing by on their bikes, people jogging and families taking walks. As I took a closer look I noticed that many of the people were carrying on conversations with their imaginary friends (aka their phones), even the father of a family walking was glued to his Blackberry furiously typing out some text or email. I looked to the right and saw the ocean and thought to myself, it is so easy now to not spend time with our thoughts, feelings, or emotions. It is so easy now to disconnect from the here and now and check out through technology. Now, I’m a big defender of technology, I actually think it can be enormously helpful, but if abused, it can take us away from a critical element …

Prior to becoming a Psychologist,  I was in the corporate world leading teams of people and becoming intimate with overwhelm and stress at work. The amount of workers today that say job stress is a major problem in their lives has doubled in the last decade. The US Department of Health reported that 70% of physical and mental complaints at work are related to stress, and stress-related claims are costing corporations over $300 billion dollars annually. 

I haven’t run into a single person that doesn’t want to be happy and successful at work and life. However, in today’s accelerating business world we’re exposed to a 24X7 round-the-clock atmosphere and faced with an increasing amount of information to digest, with demands to deliver more with less. People are constantly being told they don’t manage their time well and it’s no wonder why more and more people every day are left feeling exhausted, unfocused, unproductive, unhealthy, and burnt out.

“You need to manage your time better and learn to juggle more”, is the conventional reply to getting more things done faster. The American Psychological Association put out a report saying, the inability to focus for even 10 minutes on any one thing at a time may be costing you 20 to 40 percent in terms of efficiency and productivity. What more and more business leaders are finding is instead of doing more things faster, you need to learn how to prioritize your attention and do the most important things really well.

So whether you’re trying to be more effective and less stressed at your current job or schooling, or more effective at finding a job because you just got laid off, attention management is the key to being effective in today’s New Business World. In other words, the issue isn’t so much time management, but attention management in work and life.  When we learn how to refocus our attention on what is most important, we become more effectlive, less stressed, and seem to have more time.

Do you know where your mind is? The 4 Zones:

Stagen through the Leadership Academy (www.stagen.com) developed the Attention Zones Model providing a way to identify …