#62: Come Home to Yourself - Reclaim Attention & Restore Alignment

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Key Concepts Discussed

• Why alignment requires practice, not just awareness
• How constant device exposure increases stress and reduces presence
• The impact of attention fragmentation on leadership and parenting
• The connection between screen use, anxiety, and reduced emotional regulation
• Designing environments that support clarity, connection, and performance

Research-Informed Ideas

• cognitive load: Excess stimulation reduces your ability to think clearly
• dopamine reward system: Devices reinforce habitual checking and distraction
• attention residue: Your brain stays partially focused on your phone—even when you’re not using it
• oxytocin: Human connection supports regulation and trust

Practical Takeaways

1. Protect Your Attention

• No phones during meals
• No phones in meetings (remove from the room if possible)
• Use one communal device if needed

2. Implement the “First Hour / Last Hour Rule”

• No screens the first hour of your day
• No screens the last hour before bed

3. Create Device-Free Zones

• Dinner table
• Bedrooms
• Team meetings / classrooms

4. Practice Daily Alignment

Ask yourself:

• “Does this reflect who I am?”
• “Am I fully present right now?”

Leadership Application

• Phone-free meetings improve engagement and clarity
• Presence increases trust and team performance
• Better thinking happens in uninterrupted environments

Parenting Application

• Model intentional tech use
• Protect connection time
• Support emotional regulation through real interaction

Resource Mentioned

• Your Amazing Teen Brain (aligns with discussion on screen use and anxiety in younger generations)

Reflection Prompt

Where is your attention going… and is that where you want your life to go?

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Transcript

Why You Feel Disconnected

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you've been feeling a little disconnected, maybe distracted, or just not quite like yourself lately, it may not be because you're lost. It may actually be because your attention is getting pulled away from you. I realized this myself recently. Our world right now constantly demands our focus. There's notifications, messages, scrolling, reading, like coming home to yourself has quietly become one of the most important skills we can build, even though we were born that way. Today we're not just talking about alignment. We're talking about how to actually practice it and get better at it. We know what it costs us when we're out of alignment, and I want to give you some tools to help you get back into it. In your leadership, in your parenting, in your everyday life, when we take back our minds, when we take back our lives and reclaim our attention, we restore real human connections and we create environments where people can really think and feel and show up authentically just being who they are, living in congruence. Let's get started. What if the reason that you feel disconnected isn't because you've lost yourself, but because your attention has been taken from you, almost stolen from you, not intentionally and not maliciously, but constantly, pulled, interrupted, pinged. And the question becomes: how do we come home to ourselves in a world that's designed to keep us elsewhere? It's become increasingly important to be able to discern who and what has the ability or the freedom to distract us from where we are in the present moment. In the last episode, we talked a lot about alignment and what it feels like when you're living in it and what it costs when you're not. But today is different because awareness without action, frankly, is frustrating. So today we're going to answer the real question: now what? What do I do? I know the cost of it, and I know I need to be better at it. What do I do to get more aligned? Alignment is not a mindset, let's be clear. It's something that you think about, it's something that you practice, it's coherence between your thoughts and your body and your relationships and your environment. And if your environment is constantly pulling you away from you and taking your attention away from you, then alignment becomes almost impossible. The real problem is that attention is being hijacked, so let's just start with it. I tried to figure out what exactly is it, what's causing this. So we'll start with this. Most people think they're distracted. It's actually deeper than that. Your attention is being trained every day to leave you. And one of the biggest culprits, something that we all have within arm's reach, something I'm recording this episode on as we speak, and you might be listening to me on it, is your phone. This is not about blaming technology. I want to say that up front. It's not about breaking up with your phone, it's just about having a healthier relationship with your present moment and how you can take back your life a little bit. Technology is powerful and it's useful, but we haven't created the boundaries and it evolved so quickly. I feel like we it just happened so fast we didn't have time to stop and think. Research shows that even having your phone on the table face down, which I used to do until I learned about this during a conversation, increases stress and reduces your ability to be fully present. Why? Because part of your brain is still tracking your phone, waiting for it, listening for it. So even when you think you're here, part of you is actually somewhere else. I was kind of frustrated when I learned this, but to tell you the truth, my phone, even though it's face down, is not even in the room anymore when we're having dinner, because it was true. So when it comes to leadership and environment design, let's make it practical, especially for leaders and for you parents out there, because this is where the change actually happens, and you're planting seeds for the future. It doesn't happen in our intentions, it happens in design. We've got to start asking what kind of environments are we creating? Because right now, most meetings, most classrooms, most family spaces are competing with devices. And even if we say screen tilt, which we used to say when I did trainings, or face down or phones off, it really didn't take the problem away. And we're wondering why people aren't fully engaged. Conversations lack depth, creativity can often feel really blocked, and connection feels thin. So here's a bold but pretty practical invitation. I know sometimes I'm a little bit of a disruptor here, but sometimes that's the way we can get it done. What would you think about trying phone-free meetings? Like completely, honestly, and I'd love your feedback on this. Not face-down phones, not on silent, not in your pocket, like literally out of the room. Most of us are in environments where there can be a number or one responsible person who you can give in case your family has an emergent situation and they need to reach you. And just for the duration of the meeting, if there's a concern, you can have a computer in the room in case somebody needs to look something up. Great. So here's one communal computer. Use it intentionally, but remove that constant pull of personal devices. Because the moment you do that, something really shifts. After people get past the initial anxiety and discomfort, they begin to actually start thinking more clearly. They listen more deeply. They actually come to the meeting. Now let's talk about this in the context of parenting or working with young people because this matters deeply. There's a growing body of work pointing to the connection between screen use, social media, pornography exposure, and rising levels of anxiety, especially in younger generations. And this is not about fear. I am not trying to get you to be at that level at all. This is about awareness, calm awareness. Because who's got control over this? Guess what? We do. Many young people are not getting enough real human connection. There are more children than ever, people under the age of 25 going to doctors and complaining of symptoms of anxiety and depression, and three times the amount. And there's currently four times the amount of therapists. So obviously that's not working. We need to try something different. We need to do something with the environment. Their brains are constantly being stimulated but not necessarily integrated. And when that happens, we normally see increased anxiety, increased, decreased attention span, difficulty with emotional regulation. Any of these sound familiar? And a loss of that natural sense of curiosity and wonder. How many of them wonder? How comfortable are you wondering? Because being able to search it up immediately on the phone really doesn't give me time to just sit and wonder about things. And I'm not saying I don't use my phone for that sometimes, but what I'm saying is sometimes it's a really good thing to sit with the wonder. We're not looking for perfection, just more like intention. So it could start, a conversation could start like, let's try no phones at the dinner table, or let's try no devices the first half hour of your day, or maybe the last hour before bed. Not as a punishment, but as protection, just a way of taking back your life so that you can just focus on you for that time. Because those are the moments where identity is formed, where connection happens, where people come back to themselves. If you're sitting here thinking, okay, I see it, I feel it, I get it, I am really not as aligned as I'd like to be. Where do you start? So start here. Number one, interrupt the noise. You can create small little pockets of time where nothing is pulling your attention. Step two, reconnect your thinking and your feeling. Ask yourself not just what do I think, but what do I feel? And one of the things that I do with kids that was recommended to me was the 54321. It's like stop and name five things that you see, name four things that you feel, name three things that you hear, name two things that you smell, and name one thing that you taste or you want to taste. And just that stopping, I think it probably took me about 15 seconds, got me present. Step four, act in alignment. Make one decision each day that reflects who you truly are. We make a lot of decisions every day. I don't know the exact number. I think it's probably 50 to 60, it might be more than that. After each decision, we can feel in our bodies, but it happens in a microsecond and we probably don't even record it. Are we reacting to make this decision? Are we performing to make this decision? Or is this decision just naturally coming me because of who I am? So here's the truth about coming home. I don't think that people are broken. I think that we're a little overstimulated, just a little. We're a little overconnected to everything except ourselves. And that's exactly what I see. Maybe you're feeling it too, is that people are ready. People all over are ready to come home. There's movements for free-range kids now. There's talking about the new good old times. There's people that aren't even wanting to use a lot of electricity at night, which is far-fetched for me. But I mean, if it works for people, it works for people just to reduce the blue light exposure. So we're not talking about coming home in some abstract philosophical way, in a very real, grounded, daily way. Through how they spend their attention, through how they show up in a room, through how they choose to connect. So, how about you don't try to fix everything this week? If you're like me, you're like, yeah, yeah, all gung-ho, and then you dive in, and then you're like, ugh, where do I start? Or I can't possibly do all these things. You don't have to try to fix it all. Just start here. Maybe try one meal without your phone. Maybe try one meeting or conversation being fully present. Or one morning when you don't reach for a screen, and just notice what comes back to you. Because alignment isn't something you find, and that's the thing. It's not something you take a course in, it's something you return to, and that return starts with your attention. If this episode resonated with you, don't just move on. Apply one thing, give it a go. You've got nothing to lose. Maybe try a phone-free meal. Maybe start your morning without a screen and see how long you can go. Just play with it. Or walk into your next meeting and be fully, totally present. Because alignment is not something that we're figuring out all at once. It's something that you practice moment by moment. And if you're ready to go deeper into this work, whether it's leadership or your family or just your own life, this is exactly the kind of transformation that I support people with when I coach. Until next time, protect your attention and come home to yourself. Thank you for spending your time with me. Thank you for being a part of my life. Just count me in the