Accommodation to your environment could lead to losing your attention

People, thoughts, events, times, and things are considered the five main triggers associated with the nature of the environment and subjected to its quality. For example, a village environment by its trigger stimulates and evokes certain habits of thought, emotions and behavior to accommodate and adapt to the quality of the environment. So, generally, people are attached to these triggers and form their habit chains (trigger — action — reward), as Charles Duhigg states in his remarkable book, The Power of Habit. Every environmental trigger is part of a habit chain running inside us, which is why we are overwhelmed and massively influenced by our environment.

Our desire to survive and feel in control will not only accelerate habit formation but also push us to work with fast-thinking processes and be more reactive. This is why 95% of people live with a fast-thinking brain, while only 5% work with a slow-thinking brain, according to Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow.

Whenever the trigger’s intensity is high, we will adapt quickly and noticeably. Every trigger has an impact either consciously or unconsciously.

In the business environment, the same triggers impact employee behavior, motivational drives, and their way of thinking in the context of the workplace. If you are a manager and evoke threatening triggers by either your thoughts, attitude, or actions, your subordinates and colleagues will perform certain habits to accommodate you in an attempt to feel secured—survive!

Unfortunately, in this threatening environment, people consume a lot of energy in being accommodating, triggered by some of their basic hidden emotions such as worry, fear, and anger. Because of a low level of energy, their reactivity and accommodation will negatively affect their attention level during their ordinary, day-to-day work.

Moreover, ambiguity triggers that are manifested by managers will stimulate a fast-thinking process articulated from certain old habits of the employee’s thinking process, resulting in judgmental and presumptuous actions.

As a business leader, be careful about what triggers you continuously evoke during your interaction with subordinates; obviously, any triggers need to be accommodated by a certain habit or reactive action which may lead to losing people’s attention level depending on the severity of the trigger effect.

Losing people’s attention means draining energy necessary to perform activities required of you that consequently affect business outcomes and negatively affect the 4 Cs (communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking) of the 21st century.?