Monday Focus Check
Under pressure your attention goes wherever you trained it to go...
January 2009, US Airways 1549, both engines gone to a flock of birds at 2,818 feet over Manhattan. Captain “Sully” Sullenberger puts it in the Hudson and all 155 people walk away.
In the movie there’s this scene where they run the whole thing through the simulators, and the sim pilots make it back to a runway every time, which makes Sully look like he blew it. Until he points out what they left out. Those sim pilots knew the birds were coming. A real human needs a second (or 35!) just to catch up to the fact that the world changed. Build 35 seconds of that into the sim and neither plane makes it back.
In those seconds Sully didn’t get to decide where to point his attention. It went where 42 years of flying had trained it to go. Straight to the one thing that mattered and right past all the hundreds of things that didn’t… land the airplane.
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We treat focus like something we’ll summon when it counts. Really it just drops to wherever we’ve trained it to live, and for a lot of us lately that’s the phone and the feed.
So Monday’s the day I try to aim mine on purpose before the inputs aim it for me. One thing on a card. Phone in the other room for the first block. Nothing fancy about it. I’m just training my attention to fall toward what matters, so that on the ugly days it goes there on its own instead of straight to the noise.
You decide where your focus goes now, in the boring Monday version, over and over, long before any hard moment thinks to ask for it.
So where has your attention been trained to fall when the pressure hits, and is that where you’d have chosen to send it?