Are you a dialogue artist? Do you know how immersion in digital media can adversly affect your capacity to hold powerful conversations? Like everyone else, coaches, supervisors and mentors live in a digital world; indeed coaches and their clients are immersed 24/7 in the technologies that make our businesses possible. Yet, recent experiments show that digitisation affects who we are, our thinking, our capacity for attention, our relational intelligence and our patience – all essential capacities for professionals who work closely with others. Digitisation alters our brains.
‘The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.’ Our attention is affected by being one of the ‘hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest’ . The new normal for many of us, is ‘continuous partial attention’. We are too often everywhere but here, right here in this moment, fully here in this conversation. This is happening, subtly, day by day. The result is that it is becoming harder to inhabit the ground we stand on and so our attention, thinking, speaking and relating are impaired. This video offers a new focus for ‘A Supervisor’s Diary’. Find out more about how to protect your brain and become a dialogue artist.
Edna Murdoch
