Thank You To Our Partners The Institute, AutoFlow, AutoLeap, Shop Dog Marketing, In-Bound

Watch Full Video Episode

Todays Show Post - Our notes today will be in a different format, written by our host.

Welcome to another episode of Speak Up - Effective communication.

Your place for focusing on elevating our communication skills in the auto repair industry - I’m your host Craig O’Neill….

I want you to ask yourself a question today - each time you receive a notification on one of your devices:

Do I need this?

Do I need to do something about this RIGHT NOW?

This has been my question for any number of the alerts that pop onto my screens on a daily basis. - - As I’ve been at war with distractions in my life. Loyal listeners have become familiar with my growing concern on the topic and I feel that I’ve begun to find some more balance slowly as of late and will share whats working for me.

Of note - I’ve been reading a book titled, “Stolen Focus - Why you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again” by Johann Hari.

This read was a referral from Carm Capriotto - and it’s worth your attention.

In our episode today, I have some thoughts on the topic of notifications - and hope to get you thinking differently on what YOU are allowing devices to compromise YOUR focus!

Our Word of the Day:

Frenetic: fre·net·ic

adjective

• fast and energetic in a rather wild and uncontrolled way.

Listen to this excerpt from the book, Stolen Focus - the author, Johann Hari, writes about a conversation with a friend who was getting notifications for things he didn’t want… and I’ll quote:

“... All this frenetic digital interruption is “pulling our attention away from our thoughts,” and I think we’re almost in this constant stimulus-driven, stimulus bound environment, moving from one distraction to the next.” If you don’t remove yourself from that, it will "suppress whatever train of thought you had.”

That is a quote from Stolen Focus - Why you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again.”

The consequences of distractions are real - not just from tasks - but from our creative thoughts and even healthy mindwandering.

Hari mentions in his book that “a distraction such as looking at an image from a friend pulls the average person away for up to 20 mins! Not just one!

And if you look around, you’ll recognize that the distractions are EVERYwhere - and we now have this habitual tendency to scan for them, in our own pockets, and on our own wrists!

Look around you now - how many people do you see distracted by devices?

Before you blame yourself or feel bad about this - let me state - our technological world has been engineered this way in a deliberate attempt to get more engagement from us.

I will say - while I, like all modern humans, struggle with distractions, I have come to develop a few VERY simple and reasonable disciplines regarding notifications.

I feel sometimes a little old-fashioned on this… but as I discussed recently in