I recently came across a conversation between Tony Robbins and Theo Von that included a remarkably simple exercise.
Robbins asked Theo to look around the room and notice everything he could find that was brown. After a few moments, he told him to close his eyes and name everything he had seen that was red.
Theo struggled.
Then he opened his eyes and looked specifically for red.
Suddenly, red was everywhere.
Same room. Same objects. Same person.
Different focus.
The exercise is simple, but the principle behind it is important: we do not experience everything around us equally. We experience much of what we have trained ourselves to notice.
If you look for problems, you will find them. If you look for reasons people disappoint you, you will find those too. If you believe you are failing, your mind can assemble an impressive collection of evidence to support that conclusion.
But something else is also possible.
Look for progress and you begin seeing progress. Look for opportunities and you begin seeing opportunities. Look for things to be grateful for and things that were previously invisible suddenly seem to appear everywhere.
The world may not have changed.
Your attention did.
Attention Is a Filter
We sometimes imagine that our eyes operate like cameras, recording everything happening around us.
They do not.
There is simply too much information. Our brains constantly decide what deserves attention and what can be ignored.
One of the best-known demonstrations of this is the “invisible gorilla” experiment conducted by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
Participants watched a video of people passing basketballs and were told to count the passes made by one team. During the video, someone wearing a gorilla costume walked directly through the group.
A surprising number of participants never saw the gorilla.
It was directly in front of them.
They were not blind. They were focused.
Psychologists call this inattentional blindness. When we devote our attention to one thing, we can completely overlook something else that should have been obvious.
Other research has demonstrated similar effects. Psychologists have found that what we expect to see and what we have been instructed to look for significantly influence what captures our attention.
In other words, focus is powerful partly because it is selective.
When we choose to see one thing more clearly, we often become less capable of seeing something else.
Beliefs Tell Us What Evidence to Collect
Attention is only part of the problem.
Once we develop a belief, we also tend to look for information that supports it.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias.
Peter Wason demonstrated the tendency in classic research during the 1960s. Participants trying to discover a rule frequently tested examples that would confirm what they already suspected rather than looking for evidence that might prove them wrong.
Later research by Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper showed something equally interesting. When people with strong opinions were shown mixed evidence, they tended to evaluate information supporting their existing beliefs more favorably and scrutinize contradictory evidence more aggressively.
We like to believe that we examine evidence and then form conclusions.
Sometimes we do the opposite.
We form a conclusion and then begin collecting evidence for it.
That has enormous implications for how we see ourselves, our workplaces, and other people.
This Happens Constantly at Work
Imagine a manager who has decided an employee is lazy.
The employee arrives late.
Evidence.
They make a mistake.
More evidence.
They ask for help.
Clearly they lack initiative.
Then the employee stays late to complete an important project, volunteers for an uncomfortable assignment, or quietly helps a coworker.
Those things barely register.
The manager has become very good at seeing brown and very bad at seeing red.
We do this in organizations constantly.
A technician solves nine difficult problems and makes one mistake. We talk about the mistake.
Someone develops four promising opportunities and loses one deal. We focus on the lost deal.
An employee improves substantially but still has weaknesses. We continue seeing the person they were six months ago.
Problems matter. Performance matters. Accountability matters.
But we should recognize how easily attention becomes self-reinforcing.
We see what supports the story we have already written, and then what we see makes us increasingly confident that our story is correct.
What We Focus On Changes Our Experience
Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough studied what happened when people deliberately focused on things for which they were grateful.
Participants in their experiments were asked to regularly record different kinds of experiences. Some focused on things they were grateful for, while others focused on hassles or neutral events.
The gratitude groups showed improvements in several measures of well-being.
That does not mean gratitude magically eliminates problems.
It means deliberately directing attention toward something changes what becomes psychologically prominent.
Think about what happens when you finish every day by mentally reviewing everything that irritated you.
The customer who complained.
The employee who disappointed you.
The traffic.
The email.
The meeting that wasted your time.
Do that consistently and you become extremely good at noticing irritation.
But you could also ask:
Who helped me today?
What went well?
What did I learn?
What opportunity exists now that did not exist a year ago?
What do I have today that I once desperately wanted?
Both sets of facts may be true.
The difference is which ones we continually train ourselves to notice.
Positive Thinking Is Not the Point
There is an important warning here.
The answer is not blindly focusing on positive things.
If focusing exclusively on problems can distort reality, focusing exclusively on positives can do exactly the same thing.
A business can be struggling while its leaders insist everything is wonderful. An employee can be underperforming while a manager sees only potential. A relationship can be unhealthy while someone continually searches for reasons to excuse it.
That is not optimism.
That is simply inattentional blindness pointed in another direction.
The goal is not to replace a negative filter with a positive one.
The goal is to recognize that you have a filter.
Strong leaders deliberately search for evidence that challenges their existing conclusions.
If you are convinced someone is failing, ask what they are doing well.
If you believe everything is going wonderfully, ask what you may be overlooking.
If you think something cannot be done, ask what would have to be true for it to become possible.
Sometimes we need to intentionally look for the red after spending months staring at the brown.
The Questions We Ask Matter
One practical way to change our focus is to change our questions.
Consider the difference between:
“Why does my team keep disappointing me?”
and:
“What is preventing my team from performing at the level they are capable of?”
The first question asks your brain to find evidence of disappointment.
The second asks it to find causes and solutions.
Or consider:
“Why am I failing?”
versus:
“What is working, what is not working, and what can I change?”
The situation has not changed.
The search criteria have.
Questions direct attention. Attention influences what we notice. What we notice influences what we believe. And what we believe influences what we do next.
That is why the questions we repeatedly ask ourselves matter so much.
You Will Find Evidence for the Story You Tell Yourself
Perhaps the most important application involves the stories we tell ourselves.
If you believe you are unlucky, you can probably compile a convincing history of bad breaks.
If you believe nobody respects you, every disagreement, interruption, forgotten email, or difficult interaction can become additional evidence.
If you believe you cannot handle difficult things, every struggle reinforces the belief.
But what if you intentionally looked for contrary evidence?
When did you solve something difficult?
When did you survive something you once thought you could not?
When did you learn something new?
When did someone trust you with something important?
When were you afraid and moved forward anyway?
That evidence probably exists too.
You may simply have stopped looking for it.
Gratitude Is an Attention Practice
This is one reason I increasingly think of gratitude as more than a feeling.
Gratitude is a discipline of attention.
It requires deliberately noticing things that have become so familiar that they disappear into the background.
Your spouse sitting beside you.
Your children.
A friend who answers the phone.
Employees who care.
Customers who trust you.
Meaningful work.
A healthy body.
A sunrise you have driven past hundreds of times.
None of those things become more real because you notice them.
But your experience of life changes when you do.
The red was always in the room.
You simply started looking for it.
Look Around the Room Again
The Tony Robbins exercise is powerful because it exposes something we are doing every day.
We walk into a world containing thousands of pieces of information.
Then we decide, consciously or unconsciously, what matters.
And we begin finding it.
There are problems everywhere.
There are also opportunities everywhere.
There is evidence of failure.
There is evidence of progress.
There are reasons to be discouraged and reasons to be grateful.
There are people who will disappoint us and people doing extraordinary things quietly around us every day.
None of this means we can create whatever reality we want simply by thinking positively.
Reality is still reality.
But we have far more influence over our attention than we sometimes realize.
And attention matters because what we notice influences what we believe. What we believe influences how we behave. And how we behave eventually helps shape the life, relationships, teams, and organizations we build.
So every once in a while, particularly when you become absolutely convinced that the world looks a certain way, ask yourself a simple question:
What color have I been looking for?
Then look around the room again.