Awareness: The Most Overlooked Skill In Modern Leadership

This expert opinion by Jon Rosemberg was originally published on Inc.com.

Everyone has their cameras on, but no one’s really present. Seven faces nod politely as Slack pings in the background, and the calendar chews yet another hour. The presenter is focused on reading from a slide deck we could all be skimming in silence, and your focus wanders towards a draft email on your second monitor. 

That’s the attention tax. We pay it daily, even if we don’t notice until the bill comes due: fatigue that sleep won’t cure and irritability that steals from conversations and connections with others. Most of us are seeking new tools to evade the attention tax, like apps or online courses that promise magical fixes, when the tool we need most we already have: awareness. Not awareness as an Instagrammable quote, but as a practice we can leverage in between back-to-back meetings to slow down our overthinking and expand the space between impulse and decision so that we can become drivers of our lives instead of just passengers.

Awareness is the ability to notice what’s currently happening in your body, in your thoughts, and in the space you’re in. That’s it. The pause that comes with awareness has tremendous power because it’s where agency begins, and agency is the capacity to stop operating on autopilot and intentionally choose what happens next in our lives. 

For the skeptics out there, there is ample evidence supporting the power of awareness. In a Harvard study, people reported their minds wandered nearly 50 percent of the time, and mind wandering preceded a decrease in well-being. Another study showed that mindfulness training increased working memory and reading comprehension, while decreasing intrusive thoughts. Measurement of workplace programs shows how awareness can reduce stress and help people hold their attention long enough to make decisions that truly add value.

Between hybrid work schedules and AI-prompted workflows, we’ve introduced acceleration to our lives without brakes. The machine has sped up, and attention spans are being blown to pieces. Awareness is our way of putting ourselves back in the driver’s seat and regaining steering over our lives.

A very simple three-step process I use with my coaching clients to reclaim agency is AIR: Awareness, Inquiry, Reframing:

1. Find Awareness for 60-90 seconds. Ask yourself, aloud if possible: Am I physically safe right now? What thoughts are looping? What signals is my body sending? What emotion am I feeling? Notice how your body responds, then choose an anchor (a slow breath usually works) and stay there until you feel your nervous system settle one notch down from red alert.
2. Proceed into Inquiry for 90-120 seconds. Get curious about what’s going on in the moment: What does this mean for you? What belief or assumption is causing this reaction? What else could be true?
3. Finish with Reframing for 60-90 seconds. What’s one small thing you can do differently starting today? (Just one, not ten). For example, responding to that email that’s been sitting in your inbox with an open-ended clarifying question instead of a defensive paragraph.

When used this way, awareness can help us reclaim authorship of our lives within minutes. And the positive effects compound: a pause here, a pause there, and by the end of the day, you made choices you wouldn’t have otherwise made and that are aligned to the person you want to be versus the one you were yesterday.

Maya, one of my clients and a COO who was supporting her company through hyper-growth, began to test AIR breaks before high-stakes decisions. Within one week, she noticed a pattern she hadn’t seen for years: a spike in stress every time there was a vague email from the CEO. Simply being aware of what was going on helped soften the reflex. Inquiry exposed the underlying belief for Maya: that asking for clarification meant being weak. Reframing provided her with a new way forward: “I’ll share a few options with you by 4 p.m., does that work?” Same competence, different approach. AIR helped her (and the CEO) collaborate more, make cleaner decisions, and reduce re-work loops.

If you lead a team, AIR-ing your way through challenges can be a powerful lever, as long as you’re as intentional about practicing it as you’re about cash flow or new product launches.

Five Design Moves Any Team Can Implement In One Week

1. One-screen meetings: Close the lids on secondary devices and give the team an opportunity to pause and come up for AIR when their mind wanders. The first time, it might feel weird, but by the fifth time, you’ll be asking yourself why you haven’t done it this way sooner.
2. Notification budgets: Together with your team, set a limit on the number of alerts per channel per week. The goal is fewer, clearer alerts that actually matter. Less performativity will open the door to more value creation.
3. Protected focus blocks: Many of my clients start with two blocks of 60 minutes per week, highlighted on public calendars and honored as if they were client-facing meetings.
4. Decision hygiene: Before making a big decision, offer team members 2-5 minutes to come up for AIR. Then, each person shares one observation and one question. Watch the room move from debate into learning.
5. Shorter defaults: 25- or 50-minute meetings. Save the remaining time for AIR, to reset your energy with a walk, a cup of water, breathing, or whatever clears your brain.

If you’re worried it will slow the business down, look closely at what’s already slowing it. Multitasking helps you appear efficient, but it lessens accuracy and recall. Awareness does the opposite: it may appear slower in the moment, but it sharpens focus and helps you make deliberate choices instead of having to circle back to fix what went wrong. Awareness is the first step toward agency, and agency is the fuel for thriving in complex spaces.

Let’s come back to that meeting at the start. The seven faces again, but now everyone is holding a minute of shared silence, before the agenda starts. The leader asks, “What do we notice? How can we get curious? What questions help us make the best decision?” The team is engaged, and creativity flourishes.

Start with just 60 seconds and see how those small moments of awareness begin to change how you work and how you meet the people around you.