Do you have any resources that can help someone to improve their concentration skills. Ihave a Sales & Service agent who finds it very hard to concentrate during training and whilst talking to customers on the phone. He is easily distracted by things around him and tends to repeat himself on the phone.
Elaine Roy
2 Responses
Improving concentration
Elaine,
My starting point would be to ask what your colleague would rather be doing, because we all concentrate on things which interest us. The issue may not be one of how to help him to concentrate, but of what would have to change in order to raise his interest in his work. Alternatively, do you have a role for him which would interest him more?
There are NLP-related techniques which could help your colleague. Simplest is to identify some area of his life in which he is passionately interested, and as he talks about it, get him to “anchor” that passionate state, with a combination of some physical gesture (like holding a telephone) and a keyword or phrase which he says to himself (in his mind). Talk about something else, then get him to talk about his passion again and anchor it a second time. Repeat the process 4 or 5 times. Now get him to pick up the phone and imagine a customer call and as he does so, say the key word of phrase to himself. The anchor should be “fired” or triggered and he should find it easy to apply the same passion to the customer call as he does to his private interest.
Certainly worth a try.
David Cotton
Director
David Cotton Associates Ltd
http://www.davidcottonassociates.com
A couple of ideas
Hello Elaine,
This may be because he is in an environment or carrying out a task where he is not feeling confident and his habit when dealing with it is to use avoidance tactics to deal with his anxiety.
This problem could be specific or general (i.e. does he generally have a problem concentrating or is it specific to the ‘stress’ areas of training/phone calls). If he just has a low concentration level he needs to firstly recognise what is an acceptable level of concentration, and then work on his abilities to achieve it (it doesn’t happen overnight).
He could try some exercises linked with some counselling/coaching to address his confidence levels.
Have a look at the exercises on this site :http://www.counselling.cam.ac.uk/concen.htm
I’d be interested to hear how he gets on.
Regards,
Nigel