How Gaining Traction Can Help You Become a High Impact Board Member

By J. Patrick Traynor

“Every aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of your attention … Those who successfully extract your attention will capture your interest, create followers, sell products, command fortunes, and control lives … Attention is now the defining resource of our age.”

-Chris Hayes

Your Energy Flows Where Your Attention Goes

Serving on a board is a privilege.

When you show up to a board meeting or engage in board activities, that organization expects you to show up prepared, enthusiastic, and fully focused on the task at hand.

It’s that last one that far too many of us have allowed to fall by the wayside.

We talked last month about just how ubiquitous tech has become in our lives. We’re constantly surrounded by phones, laptops, and tablets and spend about half of our waking hours on a device.

Healthy Tech Assessment

Directions: Download the Healthy Tech Assessment below, and then use your score to see how healthy (or unhealthy) your tech habits are

When we spend that amount of time and mental resources on pings, dings, and rings, we are less able to do the kind of critical thinking that is needed from us as board members and sacrifice the most important resource we have: our attention.

There aren’t many universal laws of leadership but here’s one: Your energy flows where your attention goes. 

If your attention is consumed by Facebook notifications, pointless emails, and to-do lists, that means it’s not consumed by the more important things an effective board member should be focused on such as:

• What do we want our organization to look like in 10 years?
• Are we spending enough time growing our CEO?
• Who are some potential major donors I could connect our development director with?
• How are our current programs performing?
• Do we have the right people in the right roles?

If you think you’re the exception to the rule, I have bad news for you: You’re not. Our working memory can hold about four pieces of information at a time, and when you put more than four pieces of information in your mental inbox, you suffer, your work suffers, and those around you suffer. And if you’re being honest with yourself, when was the last time you had less than four pieces of information in your inbox?

All of this is to say that the stakes of our daily distractions are so much higher than any of us realize, and, if we don’t take the proper precautions, we risk floating through life and falling short of our unlimited potential — as professionals, as parents, and as High Impact Board members.

Gaining Traction

To feed our focus and starve distractions, we need to gain traction. That’s why this month we’re going to spend some time thinking through what that means for each of us. First, some definitions:

Distraction: Falling prey to the things that move you away from who you want to be and what you want to accomplish in life

Traction: Zeroing in on the things that move you toward who you want to be and what you want to accomplish in life

To re-take control of our distracted lives, we need to become very intentional about avoiding the things that prevent us from becoming the best version of ourselves (distractions) and creating habits that move us closer to realizing our potential (traction). 

So that’s your homework: Spend some time thinking through what that looks like for you. We’d encourage you to actually download the exercise below and spend some time thinking through which routines, devotions, and practices you will implement on a daily basis to free yourself from the prison of distraction you’ve likely found yourself in.

Directions: Imagine you have “traction” and a firm grip on your life. As a result, you are moving toward becoming the person (and High Impact Board member) you want to be. On a typical day, what are the things you need to be doing to move you toward the you that you want to be?