We usually pay attention, it's just not always to what matters. It depends on what vies for our attention and our priorities and of course how well we balance those two. For example, having a smartphone nearby takes a toll on our thinking. In a recent study, 800 people were asked to complete a particular cognitive task. Individuals who completed these tasks while their phones were in another room performed the best, followed by those who left their phones in their pockets.

Plenty is written about the importance of listening and what active listening is. So if we know all that, why do we still find it so difficult to benefit from that powerful activity called ‘listening’. Seth Godin writes this week in his blog about the noise that is around us, that we choose to have around us and in our life. There is so much that we scan rather than read, swipe rather than click, and we read the headlines rather than the nuance that follow. We rarely stick ar