This is a picture of me when I was totally focussed on a task. I was engrossed in the direction of an outdoor theatre production of Wendy and Peter Pan by Ella Hickson. I had about 40 actors in the cast and about the same number of stage crew to organise on a hot afternoon in Vientiane, Laos. Nothing distracted me from my mission. Not the beads of sweat trickling down my back, nor the ravenous rumble in my belly, nor the deafening sound of the grass mowers trimming the school field.
Still to this day I wonder how I pulled together the productions in the way that I did. At the start of the process, during the table read, the Devil’s advocates would always look at me disbelievingly and say “How on earth are we going to do that?”, “I just cant see how we are going to make this work! The old timers would sit smiling to themselves! They knew that there were no answers at this point, but that the answers would come.
I have tried and tested time management strategies which allow me to plan for the things that I know and to allow for the things that I don’t know yet. What holds the plan together is what I now understand to be called “Attention Management” and this is what I am doing when I direct a play. It’s all very well having a plan but if you don't give your full attention to each aspect, then you may well not see the answers when they appear, or fulfil your expectations as efficiently or as well as you would like.
I have also reflected on how much better I feel about doing a task or activity when I give it my full attention. Interestingly, it is the same as how I feel when I meditate or when I take my daily exercise. It will often take time to get into the zone, I will wriggle and squirm and try to get out of doing it, but once I’m in it, I don’t always want to finish!
From my research into this really interesting concept I learnt that if you want to meet your goals, be more productive, control your life and feel satisfied at the end of the day you need to engross yourself in each task without allowing distractions to pull at your attention. There are lots of techniques to achieve this and if you’re interested in reading more about these I found the articles at the bottom of this blog quite informative.
What I would like to explain therefore, is how Quest challenges encourages the development of attention management in its team building experiences.
Firstly, a Quest challenge takes the participants on a physical journey. Taking “physical activity” has been proven to send more oxygen to the brain, which helps to improve focus. The orienteering side of this journey requires mental concentration also. Maura Thomas points out that “counterintuitively, sometimes it’s when we’re moving around that we feel most quiet and still inside. “
https://maurathomas.com/attention-management-2/improve-focus-in-the-workplace/
Secondly, each task within the quest should be carried out one at a time, as all members of the team must contribute. Multi-tasking is not beneficial to a brain trying to get the most out of an activity. (This makes me think of my days in Laos when I was lucky enough to be able to have regular massages. On some occasions, when I was particularly busy, I would lie on the massage table and instead of allowing the experience to envelope me and do its job, I would lie there creating a mental shopping list - needless to say at the end of the massage I did not feel any physical or mental benefits!)
Thirdly, throughout the experience teams must connect with nature in a variety of specified ways, as well as interact with characters from the story. This requires active listening, patience and total mindfulness. In addition to this, the fact that typical distractions like the internet, telephones and interruptions from others are excluded from the experience (unless there is an emergency) allows the participants to fully engage in the Quest.
Being able to totally engross oneself in an experience and engage fully with a sense of purpose for a few hours is a great starting point. It’s up to you where you go from there and how you want to experience life.