Intent & Paying Attention Part 1 by Jeff Bramhall

If we know how important focus is in achieving the results we want, we need to design our programs to maximize intent.

Maximizing intent means taking a minimalist approach to the work we assign to our clients and athletes. Training cannot be monotonous as monotony is the enemy of intent. 

If we, as coaches and practitioners, are going to lead by example, we need to choose intent, and we need to choose mindfulness.

We need to model these traits to our clients and athletes.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a recommended read to learn how to strip down your life and focus on the essentials that allow you to be productive and intentional

There is a single skill that underlies both intent and mindfulness. It’s a skill that’s sorely lacking in our society and is also one of the most sought after commodities: paying attention.

In this article, I’ll share how that skill of paying attention manifests in my practice as a manual therapist, in my life as an athlete and a man, and I’ll offer ideas of how you can bring this skill into your work both for yourself and for your clients and athletes.

Going to massage school was the single best decision I’ve made in my life and not for the reasons I expected.

Yes, it was AWESOME to get four or five massages a week. And I did get to meet some really wonderful people.

Where I took the most out of massage school is one skill that we cultivated relentlessly: the ability to really pay attention.

It’s transformed every facet of my life.

We built it internally through practicing qigong, yoga, and self reflection and then brought it into our massage practices with exercises like doing massage blindfolded or in silence.

Our attention is the highest valued commodity in the world today. You can see that value everywhere, from the addictive nature of social media scrolling to the fear-and-soundbyte driven news cycle.

It shows up every day in my practice. Almost all of my clients come in a state of overwhelm.

They feel pulled in a thousand directions. Our time together is built around helping them get out of that state. When I reach out a couple days after the session, their response is an almost universal feeling of calm and ease (and they’re usually pretty quick to rebook!).

This tells me that the value someone finds in our work isn’t necessarily a change in discomfort, or in quality of movement, but it’s in the sense of wellbeing that comes with finding calm within.

The analogy I usually use when someone asks me about this is that calm is like an anchor.
The current may be strong and the waves high but that anchor gives them security.

Within a couple of sessions together they begin to both develop the skill of paying attention to their state, and develop habits to set that anchor when they feel the current pulling them away.

This builds their toolbox and helps them find transformative resilience in themselves.

The skill of paying attention shows up in all the parts of my life. In my past, I was an all-gas, no-brakes kind of athlete. Whether I was a bike racer, CrossFitter, powerlifter, runner - it was all out until a crash.

That’s how I dealt with my professional and personal life as well. I’d work so hard that I’d forget to take care of myself.

I’d dive into a relationship or friendship with both feet, regardless of the consequences to my well-being.

I look back and know that it sure was fun, but that there’s a hell of a lot of potential that I left on the table.

It was after a hospital stay for a serious medical condition that I realized something fundamental needed to change for me to live the life I wanted to live.

When I enrolled in massage school in 2014, my thought was that I would help other people. What I found was that I really helped myself. Yes, that’s a cliche. Cliches are cliche for a reason.

More to come in part 2

Jeff Bramhall is the owner of Just Breathe Manual Therapy located in Eastern Massachusetts. He’s a licensed massage therapist whose focus is on helping people achieve their potential through integration of their mind and body. He works with people from high performance backgrounds, including Olympic gold medalists and world champions, to successful business owners, to regular folk who simply want to get out of pain.

You can find him at justbreathemanualtherapy.com, on Twitter @jeffreybramhall, and on Instagram @jbramhall & @justbreathemanualtherapy.