If there’s one mindset myth that needs blasting into oblivion, it’s this:

That high performance boils down to drive, grit and determination.

Now, I’m not for a moment diminishing the role that these factors play in achievement. They are indeed critical to success. (I will, however, argue to my grave that they have little to do with personality – but we’ll save that for another day.)

From the moment we step foot in a classroom, we’re conditioned to believe that if you have these ‘traits’, you’ll go far.

And if you lack them?

You must hold yourself to account when you underachieve. (I still recall the sting of the school report that said, “Nicole could do brilliantly in maths if she was as motivated and dedicated to learning as she is to talking.”) 

This comforting, simplistic narrative follows us into adulthood and we perpetuate it without questioning its validity, because it seems to make sense.

But from my perspective as a performance expert, it misses the most critical part of the puzzle – the part that drive, grit and determination always struggle to override…

Attention.

In short, attention is your brain’s capacity to zone in on one thing, for long enough to do it to the standard you need.

Sounds easy, right? But for many high achievers, attention is surprisingly difficult to maintain.

I call this the peak performance paradox and I see it repeatedly in the experts I support.

Highly ambitious, capable people with strong values, a deep sense of purpose, solid strategies and a good growth mindset. They do the ‘inner work’, they know their worth, and yet still, they can’t shake the feeling they are fulfilling just a fraction of their full potential.

When we dig into it, the peak performance paradox almost always bounces back to focus. It makes sense when you think about it.

When was the last time your working day had zero distractions?

No rolling to-do lists looping in your mind? No habitual checking of emails or messages? No back-to-back calls? No frantic task switching?

Ask yourself: when did you last have the space you really need to think, plan or create?

It sounds almost luxurious. Sadly, our on-demand culture is engineered against it.

Even the very objects designed to save us time and effort compete for our attention in exactly the same spaces. Just last week, for example, I wasted fifteen minutes locating a message because the sender communicates through text, messenger, social media, email and voice notes. It may sound extreme, but it’s worryingly common.

This means your attention is often divided between multiple things – all at once.

For high-achievers, that pressure is extra intense because expert-level performance comes with greater responsibility, higher expectations, and a constant need to over-deliver.

This fragmented attention quietly rewires your brain away from peak performance.

However, the effects are so gradual, that it’s easily mistaken for other things. (Think stress, menopause, tiredness and even conditions like dementia.)

The good news? 

Attention is a trainable mental system that everyone can improve. It doesn’t matter who you are, how old you are, or even if you have attention challenges such as ADHD.

Every single person can train their brain to improve their baseline of attention.

Focus Isn’t Something You Have – It’s Something You Do

It starts with understanding that attention isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you do.

Neuroscience shows us that it’s a dynamic neural system governed by executive control networks in the brain.

It sounds complex, but in plain English it means that your ability to focus is far more influenced by mental load, environment and training than by your genetics.

Let me illustrate this with my favourite example.

My son is autistic. Like many neurodivergent people, he can hyperfocus.

I’ll never cease to marvel at how deeply he can concentrate if he’s motivated by something. He can sustain attention for hours – even days – going far beyond what most of us could manage. (I’m not saying this is always a positive thing. The neurodivergent brain can just as easily hyperfocus on the ‘wrong’ thing – which I’ve discovered to my own peril.) 

But even my son’s ability cannot override the distractions. All it takes is a noisy environment, sensory overload or a niggling worry to snap him right out of it.

The same is true for you. Motivation and stamina can only take you so far, the conditions have to be right for your attention to lock in. The trouble is, most of us are unaware of what those conditions are.

Because attention is about capacity.

No matter how much you want to achieve something, if your attention is fragmented – bouncing between tasks either physically or mentally – sustained focus becomes almost impossible.

Yet this is how most of us now operate: flitting, multitasking and reacting from one moment to the next.

It’s tempting to give into this juggling and see it as a sign of your competence. But research shows that repeated multitasking weakens the brain’s ability to sustain attention, even for the most capable and goal-oriented people. (Shanmugasundaram, 2023).

The constant task switching chips away at your ability to concentrate by literally reshaping your brain. 

If determination, grit and motivation were the most important drivers of performance, highly driven people, just like you, would be protected from this effect. But no one’s immune. This simplistic myth prevents high achievers from identifying the real issue that’s holding them back – and from dealing with it like an expert.

Focus under pressure

There’s another major factor eroding your focus – and it’s one you’re likely far too familiar with.

Pressure.

Most high achievers are adept at performing under pressure. You may feel it sharpens your thinking and boosts your motivation – and to a degree, you’d be right.

A little stress is like a kick up the bum for your brain. (I’ll admit, I totally need a tight deadline to deliver good work.) But pressure is a double-edged sword. Moderate stress can boost performance, but just a little too much tips you into threat mode – and that tanks performance.

Under heightened stress, capacity to control and direct attention weakens, and it limits access to working memory – even when effort and commitment remain high (Jha et al., 2021; Jha, 2023). This reduces your ability to plan, think effectively and complete complex tasks well.

More concerning still, the same research suggests that attention systems can become reliant on stress in order to focus.

Given that stress reduces performance (even for highly trained individuals like soldiers and doctors) this distorts your perception of what high performance really looks and feels like for you. Your standards slip, affecting your outputs long before your efforts matches the decline.

This explains something many experts experience, but often struggle to articulate. 

You feel you’re still working just as hard, but your results are underwhelming. Thinking feels slower. Decisions don’t flow. Mistakes creep in. The work that would usually grow and fulfil you just feels harder.

I have a client who client calls it, “chasing-your-tail syndrome” because you’re constantly on the go but your outputs don’t match. You still achieve a lot compared to the average person, but the dopamine hit of a job well done is sorely missing. Why?

Because you also need focus to feel engaged with something. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions.

Strengthening your attention is like flicking the lights back on.

A study published in Motivation and Emotion found that just four weeks of attention training led to significant improvements in focus, levels of engagement and a reduction in boredom. (Ng, Wong & Chan, 2024).

As a high-performing expert, training your attention is not something you can afford to ignore, it’s continued investment in your talent, performance and ability to achieve.

Diminished attention doesn’t just rob you of your performance, it also affects your mental wellbeing.

The effects of this aren’t limited to your performance either.

Diminishing levels of attention clouds your mindset, zaps energy and reduces your sense of wellbeing by forcing your brain into a constant – and unnecessary – state of heightened alert.

Think about the last time you were truly relaxed, or ‘in the zone’.

How did you feel? Calm? Absorbed? In flow? Chances are you felt good because your nervous system was regulated. Your brain sensed safety so there was no need to react to multiple demands at once – you could choose when to respond.

Conversely, when you allow your attention to be divided, your emotional reactivity rockets. Rumination intensifies. Resilience drops. Everything feels urgent. Mental fatigue sets in faster because your brain is working overtime in the background.

If you think you’re a great multitasker, you’re kidding yourself.

Your mind can only focus on one thing at a time.

Multitasking is just rapid focus-switching disguised as efficiency. It’s all breadth with no depth. It slows you down, increases errors, and slams the brakes on your processing and reaction times. (Which is exactly why it’s illegal to use your phone at the wheel of a car.)

Now let’s add multi-screening into the mix.

I’ll bet you’re rarely more than ten feet from your phone.

Chances are you work on screens, relax in front of them, and play on devices. You may find yourself filling every spare moment with ‘screen stuff’. The potential for distraction is constant and the scroll-hole lurks, waiting to absorb you.

Contrary to what you might think, high performers are no less resistant to the mindless scroll – even though we’d like to believe that we are.

You may convince yourself that scrolling helps you regulate or gives you a momentary break, but those moments bleed into minutes which drain you of hours – hours you could spend doing the things that really move the needle or mentally refuel you.

Boundaries quickly blur between work and home when your attention is attacked from every single angle. This also hits your ability to recover from the extra effort of the constant distractions.

Even relaxing can become frustratingly unfocused.

Hands up if you’ve lain in bed, sacrificing shut-eye for the doom-scroll, even though you desperately need to drift off to sleep. (I’m guilty of this and had to use a blocking device to train myself out of it.)

But scrolling is far from restorative for the brain and can contribute to burnout – a documented disruptor of attention, memory, executive function and processing decline. (And also a mental state that many high achievers are worryingly too well acquainted with.) (Maslach & Leiter, 2021).

The Data Is Clear: we’re in Trouble

Over the last two decades, our capacity to sustain attention hasn’t just dipped – it has plummeted.  

We now spend over four and half hours per day online with three or more hours lost to mindless scrolling. (Ofcom, 2025.)

We’re devouring content that’s short, fast and designed to offer an endless slew of quick dopamine fixes. It’s no wonder that we’re now seeing the flip side of that behaviour.

Research by Dr. Gloria Mark at the University of California shows that the average task-orientated attention span was around two and a half minutes back in 2024.

But by 2020, this had tanked to just 47 seconds! 

FORTY. SEVEN. SECONDS. It’s almost impossible to comprehend.

But the most concerning aspect? 

Half of those interruptions were entirely self-made. We’re literally sabotaging our own focus.

The impact of our declining attention means we’re more susceptible than ever to distracting ourselves.

You might know how this feels: responding to every ping of your phone; checking your social media multiple times per day; flicking between Slack, Teams and email; bouncing between tasks on your to-do list.

When you’re interrupted – regardless of whether it’s an internal or external distraction – it takes up to 23 seconds to get your brain back on track (Mark et al., 2008).

Just five interruptions can lose you hours of deep work. Twenty interruptions can wipe out your focus for an entire day.

Is it any surprise that doing your best work can feel disproportionately hard, even when it’s meaningful and you know you’re damn good at it? This cost to your time, energy and capacity is catastrophic.

Everything hinges on your ability to focus on the right thing at the right time.

It still shocks me that we’re so apathetic towards our own attention when your Expert Edge depends on your capacity to think, lead and perform effectively.

The identity shift of reduced attention can’t be overlooked either.

The damage of this can run much deeper in your mind.

When you repeatedly struggle to focus, remember, or think clearly, you’ll rarely jump to the logical conclusion of, “My attentional system needs some work.”

You’re more likely to leap to, “I’m losing my edge.” “I can’t think like I used to.” “There must be something wrong with me.”

Over time, that narrative takes root in your sense of identity – increasing self-criticism, downgrading your performance and dulling your sense of achievement.

Research into the role of executive function on identity shows that difficulty in sustaining attention long term can actually alter how you perceive yourself.

This is particularly pertinent to your sense of competence and authority, even when your underlying ability hasn’t changed at all. (Ng et al., 2024.)

To sum this up, when your attention is compromised:

-Your memory suffers.

-When memory suffers, your processing slows.

-When your processing slows, you make more mistakes – and everything feels harder than it should.

And that hits the  confidence you have in your expertise, and also the confidence that others have in your ability to perform.

So attention doesn’t just affect what you produce. It doesn’t just affect your time and energy either. It alters your perception of who you are.

And when you’re a high-performing expert, that’s the crux of everything.

So where does this leave us?

Whilst it’s highly concerning that attention is paying the price for our reliance on technology, for high performing experts, I believe it presents a unique opportunity,

I predict that:

⑴ Focus will become a premium human currency in business. 

⑵ The experts capable of bucking the trend and harnessing their attention in a distracted world, will have a disproportionate impact over those that don’t. (And the gap between the ‘high performers’ and ‘everyone’ else will continue to widen.)

⑶ Organisations who foster environments where focus can thrive will reap the rewards in terms of effectiveness, employee engagement, talent retention and overall profitability.

So what next?

If you want to take the first step in training your attention and ditching the distractions, grab a space on my ‘Control the Scroll’ virtual masterclass on February 10th at 12.30pm UK time. It’s free, practical and science-backed – and it can save you an hour or more of focused time – every single day.

And if you can’t make the masterclass? Book a complimentary call here and we’ll nail down some personalised strategies together.

References:

Shanmugasundaram, M. (2023). The impact of digital technology and continuous partial attention on cognitive performance. Frontiers in Cognition, 2, 1203077.

Ng, H. C., Wong, W. L., & Chan, C. S. (2024). The effectiveness of an online attention training programme on sustained attention and boredom. Motivation and Emotion.

Jha, A. P., Morrison, A. B., Parker, S. C., & Stanley, E. A. (2021). Practice effects of mindfulness-based attention training on working memory capacity and stress resilience. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.

Jha, A. P. (2023). Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention. HarperOne.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2021). Burnout and engagement in the workplace. Taylor & Francis.

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. University of California, Irvine.

Ofcom. (2025). Online Nation Report. UK Office of Communications.

Yousef, A. M. F. (2025). Demystifying the new dilemma of brain rot in the digital era. Frontiers in Psychology.