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In 1998 Linda Stone, former Vice President of Microsoft, coined the term continuous partial attention. Stone is quoted in, Your Brain at Work David Rock’s book, as saying that:
“To pay continuous partial attention is to keep a top-level item in focus, and constantly scan the periphery in case something more important emerges”.
I acknowledge that in some situations it is important to have CPA (continuous partial attention). However, CPA can have damaging consequences.
Here’s why. If you have continual partial attention during your working day and during your interactions, it will be difficult for you to shift from CPA to giving full attention to an event or interaction.
That is, the cumulative impact of CPA will undermine you when, for example, you want to give full attention to an ‘A’ class customer or prospect. You may be perceived by the other person as not fully there and you’ll also miss out on subtle voice and body language signals that the other person displays.
Rather than CPA, aim to be fully present at a task or during an interaction. Even for short periods of time this can be done (approach it as a behavioural skill that can be developed).
For example, if someone asks for 30 seconds of your time, aim to be fully present during that 30 seconds.
In a meeting, one way to cue yourself to be fully present is to write DBAE (Don’t Be Anywhere Else) in the right hand corner of your meeting notepad/agenda. You can also imagine the DBAE letters on the forehead of the person you’re interacting with.
With repeated practice of DBAE in your interactions, you’ll develop that habit of full attention. You’ll be able to switch between various types of interactions, chance encounters, meetings and sales presentations and be fully present.
Sometimes, though, you might know in advance that you won’t be able to fully attend in an interaction because there are numerous things on your mind. Knowing this, (for example in a chance encounter) you might tell a person you don’t have 30 seconds.
You might say, “Finbar – I can’t give you my full attention now – catch me later in the day, say after 3:00pm. ok?”
Your CALL to action/HOW to apply for this post: In the next seven days, in your meetings, write DBAE in the top right hand corner of your meeting pad/agenda to cue you to maintain full attention.
Check out more speaking advice from radio luminary Angela Catterns
Picture this. You’re walking out of your office and you spy one of 
your organisation’s senior executives standing in the office lobby area. This person is someone whom you’ve been trying to talk with for the past two months, without success. How you would make a positive impression with this person?Continue reading
Picture this. 
Imagine you could were standing with your face a couple of centimetres from the largest rock in Australia, which is called Uluru.
You look up and are awe struck for several moments by how huge and enormous the rock is. Take a few moments to imagine that.
Now come back to the present, and consider this.
Compared to the size of your ego, Uluru is tiny.
If the hairs on the back of your neck are rising now, you’ve just had a bodily reaction of judgement.
Now, THE ABOVE SCENARIO WAS NOT MEANT TO INSULT YOU. I’m not suggesting you have a big ego.
Rather it was shared to dramatise a point.
Let me explain.
In the first meeting I have with a pitch team that is competing for a prized piece of business, I relay the above scenario to the group.
The reason I do this is to expose any oversized egos that are in the room.
After relaying the scenario, I tell the pitch team members that during our work on the pitch, they should always picture an imaginary box in the room. Whenever the group is working on the pitch, they should imagine that their ego is a physical object in their head, and they can get take it out of their head, and put it in the box.
When we are finished with the meeting, they can ‘take’ their ego back.
My field work reveals that if the ‘ego in the box’ technique is not done, junior members of the pitch team may be hesitant to disagree with senior members of the pitch team, for fear of retribution or fear of embarrassing those senior people.
This ‘ego in the box’ technique encourages all pitch team members, regardless of rank, to contribute and offer ideas freely – ideas that could make the difference between winning the business and coming in second place.
In essence the technique’s focus is on ‘What’s right, versus Who’s right’. With this approach and with the team repeatedly asking WECWD (What Else Could We Do) that our competitors won’t do – all things being equal, we’ll win the business.
Your CALL to action/HOW to apply for this post: Trial the ‘ego in the box’ technique with your BDM colleagues when your pitching for business. If it works for you, make the technique an integral part of your business development team meetings.
Check out this post which quotes radio broadcaster, Angela Catterns
Picture this. . . You’re in a business meeting and we can freeze time at a random moment. Images of every person in the meeting, at that moment, are displayed on a screen in front of the room. What would your image convey about you? 
Assuming you were not speaking at the frozen moment, I’d suggest you’d want to be perceived as being intelligently curious and engaged.Continue reading