It only needs to happen once to be a disaster

Do you remember the most boring class you ever took?

Mine was world geography. Monday morning, freshman year. Just dreadful.

One time after falling asleep during class, the professor slammed down a seven hundred page textbook next to my head to wake me up. Guess that’s one way to engage bored students.

And if you research productivity issues like this, experts give useful suggestions:

Have an energy drink before class, sit next to an enthusiastic person, doodle in your notebook, make up little games, finish homework for other classes, do breathing exercises, massage the pressure points in your hand, eat a snack during class, sit in the front so you’re too scared to fall asleep, and so on.

But like most recommendations, they treat the symptom, not the source. And the issue here is not that someone’s class or instructor or textbook is boring. The issue is that of intention and attention. How we choose to experience the world.

Because if we’re disengaged with subjects because they don’t seem relevant to us, who’s fault is that?

Curiosity is the ability to relate anything to our own needs. It’s the constant challenge to find something interesting in an otherwise boring experience. The key to avoiding boredom is expand our repertoire of awareness. To increase the choice about the quality of our inner experience.

That’s how we improve the flavor and value of our life. It’s called an awareness plan, which is a procedure or mental recipe for perceiving and thinking about the world around us.

Turns out, if we concentrate our energy on thinking up original ways of experiencing things, then we can solve our chosen problems and move towards our goals. Here are three examples.

Envision what’s going on mechanically inside each thing you notice.
Make predictions about what is going to happen around you in the next few seconds or minutes.
Think of people’s words, phrases and comments as the title of a book and imagine what the book might include.

That last one is my personal favorite. It’s especially useful during weekly meetings with clients and coworkers, as the topics of discussion can often be highly repetitive and analytical.

Listening to people’s words as if there was a mental highlighter inside my brain and combing the conversation for pithy titles and sentences, that awareness plan makes me a much more engaged listener.

For example, our company president made the following observation during a staff meeting once.

It only needs to happen once to be a disaster.

Tell me that’s not a great book title. I can’t even recall what that was in reference to, but it doesn’t matter. It’s insightful, pithy, foreboding, and that kind of language is enthralling to my brain. It’s the reason meetings are rarely boring to me. My awareness plan is always looking for content like that.

Look, some subjects, some conversations, some people, really are boring. That’s the reality.

But instead of trying to change that situation, start thinking of new ways to experience it that would make a positive difference in how you feel.

Boredom, like most things in this life, is an inside job. We can’t blame somebody else for it. All we can do is regard every moment as a new positive opportunity to exercise our choice about how to experience life.

If you’re disengaged with something because it doesn’t seem relevant to you, who’s fault is that?