How High Performers Stay Focused When Everything Feels Urgent

In this episode, Derek Oaks shares powerful lessons from flying combat missions, training fighter pilots, and navigating high-pressure environments where one wrong decision can change everything. Through real stories from the cockpit and everyday life, he breaks down the concept of “focus allocation” and why multitasking is one of the biggest myths sabotaging performance, leadership, and decision-making. You’ll learn how elite performers identify what matters most in the moment, eliminate distractions, and build the mental discipline required to stay effective under pressure, in business, relationships, and life. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision? Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything. Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose. So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oak.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

I'm going to take a break from boring stuff and talk to you about something that may be boring to you, but it's not boring to me. That's about flying aircraft. But I'm going to relate it to your life, whatever it is that you do for a living or just for fun. Flying any aircraft is a lesson in prioritization. Flying a fighter aircraft, even doing something relatively simple like a takeoff, can quickly become overtaxing if you do not have a method and a habit pattern of focusing on what matters most right now. As a pilot, and really in anything in life, learning how to focus on what matters most in the moment is perhaps the most important skill any of us can develop. We're all bombarded with information overload, with too many tasks that are staring us in the face. And if we don't learn how to manage it, it can overwhelm us. First of all, how many people believe that they can multitask? Is multitasking a myth? I personally think that it is. And I've done a lot of research on it, that your brain only focuses on one thing consciously. You can do a lot of other things subconsciously, but you can only focus on one thing consciously. But the key is to know how long and exactly what it is that you should be focusing on if you're going to try and be successful, if you want to be successful. Kind of like flying an airplane. Once the simple mechanical skills are mastered, flying a plane is actually pretty easy because you're going to learn how to focus on what matters most. If you can do the basics of takeoff and land and turn and just the basics of it, then the rest of it becomes easier. If you can make those simple skills, those mechanical skills subconscious, then you can focus on the other tasks. You can focus on where you need to be making a decision in order to be a safe and a better pilot. A lot of you probably don't know what CFIT is. That's controlled flight into terrain. That's where a pilot runs the aircraft into the ground. And I guarantee you every pilot said, that can never happen to me. And yet the reason it happens, the reason you take a perfectly good aircraft and run into the ground is because you're not focusing on what's most important right then. You get distracted. You go heads down in the cockpit and you're looking at a map and you fly the aircraft into the side of a mountain. Okay, dumb story. Last week I was backing out of a neighborhood driveway thinking about a million different things, and I took a quick closer look behind me. I've got a backup camera, but I don't really use that unless I'm in a tight space and I'm worried about how close I am to the vehicle. I normally just use my side mirrors. Well, the road was pitch black, and there happened to be a dark car parked behind me, right where I needed it not to be. So I'm backing up, I'm looking at my side mirrors, thinking about a thousand different things, and all of a sudden, right as I'm pulling it out of reverse, putting it into drive, I hear this crunch. And so I immediately get angry at myself, pull forward a little bit, put the car in park and go outside, and sure enough, I had hit a mid-2000s Honda cord. And my bumper on my truck, it had just a small indention in it. So that stupid misprioritization of focus is gonna cost me a lot more money than I care to admit. And that's all a simple, stupid tax. I wasn't doing anything hard. I wasn't doing anything overly complicated. I've backed up vehicles literally thousands of times, and yet I let my focus be not on what it needed to be right then in that instant. I'm gonna take you back to all my trips to Afghanistan. I flew a number of night missions where we were supporting special operations task forces as they hunted high value targets, Taliban and Al-Qaeda members that were a particular thorn in the side of the coalition forces. During these missions, I never actually dropped a single bomb, never actually shot a single bullet, but I provided escort, overwatch, protection, and eyes on the target area while the forces on the ground did their work. Let me break down a specific mission for you, and this is one that sticks out in my mind. We are picking up these Mates 47 helicopters, very large transport helicopters. They're fairly fast, but they're also big targets for anybody who's trying to shoot at them. We are flying a two-ship at night near the Pakistani border, and we're holding over the task force HELOS, waiting for them to lift off. Well, they lifted off, they didn't give us a radio call, they didn't have their lights on, all of a sudden they're up and running. And we're flying at night. I'm looking at them through night vision goggles, and I'm also looking at them through my targeting pod. And we're just kind of doing 360 racetracks overhead them. Wingman and I are stacked on top of each other, so he's a thousand feet above me, so we don't hit each other. We're not flying with autopilot, so it just makes the workload a little bit greater as you're looking outside, managing your aircraft, managing your altitude, making sure you stay away from your wingman, and then also doing what you're there for, which is to provide overwatch and escort for the helicopters. So we started proceeding northeast up a valley, and we're watching for muzzle flashes from the surrounding terrain, from underneath them, from in front of them, and just looking for any potential threats, all while following them through our night vision goggles and our targeting pod. The challenge was not to hit my wingman, to monitor my aircraft gauges, not to get spatially disoriented because you're in a perpetual bank, which is terrible for the gyros in your brain, especially on night vision goggles. And of course, you try not to hit the mountains. It's a constant active scan of my heads-up display, my attitude indicator, my radar altimeter, my altimeter, my other gauges, my moving map, and going back and forth between my visual scan with the night vision goggles and my targeting pod. To keep the targeting pod on the heels, I had to constantly slew it where it's looking. Imagine looking at another car or a spot on the ground through a soda straw, and that's kind of what you're doing with the targeting pod because it's a very narrow field of view, and you got to keep it centered on the target area. So in this case, it was on friendly helicopters. So radar altimeter, visual scan, add to indicator, targeting pod screen, altimeter, visual, radar altimeter, visual scan, edge gauges, targeting pod, where's my wingman, radar altimeter, and so on and so on. By the time we got to the target area, I was spent. It was exhausting, and the constant battle to know what needed my attention right now and in that particular moment was it was a lot of work. And each item was so important that when I needed to focus on it, even if it was just for a split second, it required my entire focus. I call what I was doing during those missions a skill that came from thousands of hours of work and thousands of hours of practice called focus allocation. Focus allocation is a recognition that I can only do one thing at a time consciously. So I needed to constantly ask myself, what required my focus right now? What is it that I need to be looking at right now? That focus may have been only for a second or two and sometimes even less, but it meant that I was complete for that period, that when I had quote unquote completed the task, I'd move on to the next task that required my focus right then. Success in those and other missions came from ensuring that my focus was on what mattered right then at that moment. It came from a constant identification of what needed my focus, what might needed my consciousness right then, and then my proper focus allocation. So I want you to ask yourself, how much of your day is spent actively monitoring something that is not what matters most, that really doesn't matter, or even if it does matter, that's not the most important thing at that given moment. How often do you try and do too many things at once and you end up doing nothing at all and because you're not present and you've got nothing invested in them because you're just scanning around, you're just going from thing to thing to thing to thing without really taking the time, albeit short, to say what needs my focus right now and what do I need to be doing at one at that point. And I once read a study that stated that it was about texting and driving. And it said that the only people who could do it were fighter pilots. Now, I don't encourage that. I don't say that fighter pilots should text and drive. And despite what my wife thinks, I don't text and drive. I'll do voice memos using Siri on my phone. But the reason that's possible, if I were to do it, the reason that's possible is because of focus allocation. Thousands and thousands of hours of constantly asking myself, what is most important right now? The idea of constantly shifting focus around, shifting focus allocation, delivering time slots of dedicated conscious focus to what was most important right then, in this case in flying, and right then and there trained fighter pilots to do that for the rest of their lives. But it does not work unless your focus during that conscious attention is complete, regardless of how long it is. Now in the A-10, we had three radios, and we were often talking to three different agencies at the same time. That could get pretty confusing and it could cause you to misinformation if you did not allocate focus to the right frequency, right radio frequency when it was needed. There were times when I recognized that my Neanderthal brain was not fast enough to go back and forth between the different communications, and I would literally just shut off one of the radios until I was ready to respond and really listen to what was being said. By shutting off even important noise, because those people weren't talking to me for fun. They were talking to me because they had specific instructions or information for me. But by shutting off even important noise, I was able to focus on what mattered most in that instant. And then once finished with that conversation, I could turn back to the other radio, turn it back on, and receive and pass information effectively on that frequency. And that way I didn't foul up both conversations. So ask yourself, how do you sort through the chaff, the noise around you, and you focus on what matters? How do you know what's most important? Requiring your conscious focus then and there. I've alluded to it a little bit. Turn off the radio, turn off the music, close the app, turn off the TV. I have never had a successful, important conversation with my wife with the TV on. I've tried it a million times. I failed watching TV and I've failed at talking to my wife. So now I turn it off or I pause it, or I just assume that what we're talking about is not important. It's just I like hearing her voice because I'm not going to get anything out of it. And if she wants me to listen, she's going to get mad at me because I won't. So how do you learn to focus on what matters right now? First, I'd say you start with a plan via surreaction. What matters most today? If I get up in the morning and I've already come up with a plan of what matters most, and I've developed habit patterns of what matters most, I'm more likely to be successful. You put what matters most in the forefront of your mind, like by writing it down, to start your day instead of letting distractions fill it up first. In flying, we say cherrify the mission. Well, you chairfly what your day is going to be like. So you sit down and you think through, first I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that, and then I'll probably get interrupted by my three-year-old at this point. And so I'll have to take care of that. And you kind of think through what's going to be most important, what's going to need your focus. When I'm giving flight instruction, I'll sometimes tell the student to leave the phone in their bag, to put the phone away so that they don't see the notifications pop up, they don't hear the ring, and I definitely don't let them connect it via Bluetooth to their headset because they don't need that instruction. That is not important to them right then. Being present for what matters right then and deciding what needs your focus is how you stay alive when you're flying. It's how you stay effective in the rest of your life. You build a plan, you think through that plan, and doing so ensures that you've decided beforehand what you're going to allocate your focus on. And then when things change, it doesn't totally trash your plan. You're able to adjust and segment your life a little bit and be able to shift your focus for a minute and then go back to whatever it was that was important to you. If you decide what matters most in any instant, you're going to focus on that instead of trivia. If you learn to dedicate your conscious attention to what will keep you alive, what is most pressing, your likelihood of success is going to go up exponentially. I promise you that. I'd love to have a longer conversation with you. If you want to talk to me directly, go to my website, go to asterisknow.com, and we'll have a direct conversation about that. Appreciate you being here. If you have not subscribed yet, go ahead and subscribe. If you haven't rated the show yet, please go ahead and do that also. And then join us in the future so that we can continue to become better decision makers for better results. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intend Podcast. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oaks himself. So head on over to Commanders Inten Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.