TOP REPLAY: The Hierarchy of Attention

Garrett is on vacation this week so tune in to one of the top replays of 2024 with Garrett and Tyler!

The conversation explores the concept of the hierarchy of attention and the importance of being intentional with our focus. It begins with a review of a podcast review from a listener who was struggling with balancing work and personal life. The hosts discuss the tendency to prioritize work and external validation over important relationships and spiritual growth. They emphasize the need to prioritize God, family, and close relationships over work and other distractions. The conversation also touches on the challenges of maintaining boundaries and the danger of allowing worldly desires and ambitions to dictate our attention. The hosts encourage listeners to be intentional with their attention and to surround themselves with a community that holds them accountable.

Takeaways

The hierarchy of attention is a concept that involves prioritizing who should receive our attention and at what level.
It is common for agents to prioritize work and external validation over important relationships and spiritual growth.
Being intentional with our attention means being mindful of where we direct our focus and ensuring that our priorities align with our values.
It is important to set boundaries and not allow worldly desires and ambitions to dictate our attention.
Surrounding ourselves with a community that holds us accountable can help us stay focused on what truly matters.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Review
04:33 The Hierarchy of Attention and the Influence of the Industry
09:04 Being Intentional with Our Attention

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Transcript

0:00

That's all we need. All right, here we go. I'm not sure how I found this podcast. I do know it was within my first year and in the midst of a truly horrid deal that had me questioning everything about being in this industry. I questioned if I'd heard God right when he led me to be an agent. I questioned how I'd allowed myself to become so absorbed in the work that I had zero boundaries. I'd stopped going to my Bible study group and stopped studying the Bible at all. And my family often found me angry and unavailable to them because I put so much into every part of the job. The heart and words of Garen and Tyler rang so clear and strong that I made a huge turn in my career and immediately changed everything about my business. I did hear God right when he led me to be an agent. I just wasn't being the agent he meant me to be. This podcast helps to keep me focused on being that agent. Thanks for working so hard on this community." That's from Hunter.99, a review on the podcast. First of all, we read that as, what a blessing, Hunter. We are humbled and honored. that you would think that the Lord is kind in that. We'd like to know who you are. So reach out to us please on Facebook or text me 804-878-2200. We genuinely would love just to have a conversation with you, but why you giving me a face? Cause I gave him my phone number. You go back and forth on that constantly. I'm gonna give it out to everybody. I don't want to give it out because I get too much I don't give it out to everybody. But yeah, here it is This is my people. You know what I mean? You clearly don't listen to my Tuesday short episodes, which you know, that's rude. But I gave it out. I gave it out. Oh, okay. All right. Don't pretend like you actually listen to these. You don't want to hear me talk more than you have to. I don't blame you for that. I don't even listen because I'm like, bro, who wants to hear that guy talk? No, but for real, reach out to us. We would be honored to talk to you. And the reason that we're going to dive into this in a minute here, the reason that I read that is Uh, 199, uh, whoever you are, your story is so common in the real estate space that we just wanted to dive into that a little bit, uh, actually talk with somebody else in our community who had the same exact story, uh, just this week. And so want to dive into that a little bit, but we are back here. What is up faithful agents while we record this, it is actually the week before the conference, so it's a little chaotic, uh, at least for me. Tyler, I know you're sitting back and enjoying it, but I am working so hard. I'm working so hard to make this happen. Uh, that's funny. So I wanted to make it even easier for Tyler and instead of asking him to have a joke ready, I asked chat GPT to give us two Christian jokes. I have no idea what they say yet and I'm gonna read them live and we're gonna see what happens. So what do you think T? Should we go for it? Me too. I'm a little scared. I said Christian so let's hope they know what that means. Okay. Here's a lighthearted Christian joke. Why did the computer go to church? Because it had a hard drive and needed to be rebooted with the word of God. I don't even... I have no idea what that means. Is that a joke? What is that? Okay? Alright, and the second one is... Why was Jonah so good at Monopoly? Because he was always down to go whale watching. That makes no sense. We have found the hack. Yeah. AI. I am doing that again, because that's fun. Why was Jonah... Why did Jonah love Monopoly? Because he was always down to go whale watching? What does that even mean? Uh, I like it. I've never been whale watching, though, so it makes me jealous of Jonah. You know what I mean? It wasn't even a whale, so that's not even biblically accurate. Maybe it's just proving that we're so shallow or dense that we can't understand the sophistication of the joke Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, but don't get it. Oh that's fantastic. Most things are I'm pretty short So let's dive into this buddy because I again, please identify yourself reach out to us We'd love to know who you are But I question if I heard God right when he led me to be an agent I questioned how I'd allowed myself to become so absorbed in the work that I had zero boundaries Wasn't going to Bible study wasn't even studying the Bible at all My family found me angry and unavailable with them because I put so much in every part of this job. It's such a common thing, right? We, uh, we're talking so much about recently on one of our coaching calls, actually T, uh, and I don't know that you and I've ever talked about this, but this concept of the hierarchy of attention. So the higher, this was taught to me. This wasn't my idea. The hierarchy of attention. I had this actually a coach who's a speaking, uh, coach. A speaking coach was sharing this with me. She said, most people, you have organizational charts, you have blah, but we don't have this hierarchy of attention. An actual chart that says who should get my attention and at what level. Right. So the Lord, my wife, my kids, then for me, it's my real estate team. And then under that it's my group coaching. And then under that is the faithful agent community, right. As agents, we tend to think that everyone should get everything from us all the time. And it becomes this, whoa, what just happened in the background? I wish y'all could see that. Mike, my screen like exploded into. Yes. Right. Chat GPT. Uh, anyways, uh, but it's, we tend to think all these lower level things, right? Our clients, our business, I'm not saying those aren't important, but all of a sudden they become way more important than everything else. Right. The urgency of that, the desire to succeed, all of those things that the world tells us to do, all of the things that we believe lies in our own head become far more important than what we say is important. Right. That happens all the time. Romans seven, I do what I don't want to do and I don't do what I do want to do is what apostle Paul says. But why do you think that is? Do you mean you are a pro athlete, dude? Like obviously that happened. Uh, why do you think that is? Why does that happen? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot of different reasons. It's a great point to go back to what Hunter's talking about. I mean, that is the essence of what we're here for, why we exist. So I want to press more into that as we jump into this chat. But why do we get our hierarchy of opinions out of order, man, because we get tangible feedback. And A lot of our ego and pride strokes come from the lower buckets and from the things of this world. I mean, we're constantly diluted, or our perceptions, perspectives are constantly diluted by the things of this world telling us that we should be like this, or we should do these things. And you get immediate instant gratification and return on your investment when you're investing into, you know, things that are measurable when you're getting paychecks, when you are getting likes on your... social media accounts, when you are getting your name in headlines because of whatever performance or people telling you that you're great. So those naturally become, your pride gets sucked into those funnels of, how do I get more of that? Those are the dopamine hits because you're not guarding against the selfish ambition that scripture speaks to. You know, it tells us specifically to do nothing out of those selfish ambitions where our pride's being stroked because... It is so dangerous and it is so slippery. And when we have a taste of that, it's natural for that funnel to slowly become inverted or to dramatically become inverted if we're not guarding against it at all. I confess, like you and I have talked about this in the last, um, I mean, six to nine months, like that, that hierarchy of attention has, um, gotten a little bit of out of order, um, and in my life, um, you know, thankfully not, uh, in prioritizing, um, not prioritizing my relationship with the Lord or my bride or my kids, but allowing other things to maybe share the same platform as that and pull away, like making them bigger rocks than they need to be in my life and getting too much of my attention. And I don't think that fortunately the platform was never ultimately rearranged in terms of what was number one, two, three, but they weren't getting the bulk of the percentage that they needed. and instead of prioritizing that and putting the leftovers in the rest of those communities, not calling our faithful agent community leftovers or any of these other relationships leftovers, but other things that are on my plate that I've made commitments to become distractions. And so part of it is when you say yes to something, you want your yeses to be yeses, and so you want to do those well. Absolutely, we're called into that as Christians, but sometimes we say yes to too many things and we start getting distracted by too many things and... It's hard to prune those out of our lives. And so if we're not fighting and guarding against those, they're going to pull away from the hierarchy of our attention. We only have, but so much. And if we're not good at that, then we're not going to be good at it. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's really real that number one, I think when I, when I think about attention, honestly, for so long, I was thinking, well, attention is equivalent to time, right? How much time do I spend in those things? And reality is it isn't, you know, as I've, as I, and now you're not on social media, right? And I've significantly pruned it back to use your word of now I'm only, my wife set it up, I can only be on 20 minutes a day. uh, right, to get on and post and engage a little bit. And then I'm done because you might think listener. And I know that I thought like, Oh, I'm just on social media for five, five minutes, whatever 10 minutes. Doesn't matter. But it's that data, all the things that are going on in my head, it's the attention is now being taken from me when I'm like, oh, I just scrolled Facebook and then my wife's like, hey, dinner's ready, whatever, and I get up. And I can't just put that behind me. All those things are in my head. All that news or whatever that you're hearing is still in there, right? It's still ringing around. We all are guilty of, we're hanging out with our families, whatever. And we're thinking about everything but them. Right? And certainly, how often do we go about our day, and you and I, again, in the Lord's kindness, we tend to start our days in the Word and prayer, but that's kind of where it ends. Right? I mean, if I'm honest, like, I'm with the Lord, and then I'm with everybody else and everything else for the rest of the day. So I'm not with him. My attention's not there. You know, we had a guest on here, Henry Kestner, and he talked about, yeah, he's really good at praying for the big decisions, but what about the medium and the small decisions? He doesn't even stop to say, Hey Lord, I'm about to make this decision. Give me wisdom, right? Just small things like that. Our attention is no longer there. It's taken on to something else. And we've got to understand that that's what this industry does. That's what the world does, right? That's what our own sin nature does. Is it desires to, uh, take us into places that we aren't supposed to go again. Apostle Paul, I do what I don't want to do. And I don't do what I do want to do. He had a problem with that too, because we're sinful people. We struggle with giving our attention to things that shouldn't have it. Right. I was working on the talk that I'm going to give for the conference. Excuse me, which will, you know, by the time this episode comes out, we've already had the conference. Uh, but about the scoreboard and our audience heard me talk about the scoreboard, but I was thinking about this concept of the hierarchy of attention. This is kind of where this came from. We're having this conversation in the coaching, uh, call this past week. And one of the questions I asked somebody in the group was, so let's talk about the hierarchy of attention. Then I said, who should get more of your time and attention or excuse me, who should get more of your attention? Who should get less of your attention? Right? Because I think that in, in exactly what you said, I think the reality is I tend to just convict myself and say, you know, my wife's not getting enough of my attention. And that's true, right? There's plenty of times where that's true. But then I don't stop and say, okay, if she needs to get more of my attention, who needs to get less of my attention? Right? It just feels wrong. It feels mean. It feels off, whatever. But the reality is, like you said, we only have a finite amount of it. So I can't just keep. doling it out and dishing it out more. And I think that's one of the problems with agents. We're like, oh, I work 24 seven. Everyone has access to me. I answer my phone always. I always respond to texts. I always, you know, I'm open, whatever, blah, blah. It doesn't matter. And we've made it so the world thinks we're always available to them, which means we're never available to anyone else and not them well either. And so we need to get in the mindset of saying. Like Hunter was talking about, which I just so appreciate her vulnerability there. She was getting angry and frustrated at her family. Why? And I felt this way too. I've confessed this on the show when my wife's gone and I'm watching the kids and I'm thinking, I'm going to work and watch the kids. I get way more frustrated at the kids. Why? Cause I'm like, I want my attention to be on work and you're taking it from me. Right. Um, we've got to understand if someone needs more of our attention, then naturally, right, someone else or something else needs less of our attention. And how do we be intentional in that too? And that's hard. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great comment. That's a great comment. I was actually talking to a brother this morning who wrestles with that a lot. I mean, he's in vocational ministry, and so he wrestles with the delineation of pastorally, how do I leave the 99 to invest in one for, you know, five, ten, fifteen hours a week when necessary, and forego my responsibility to the rest of the flock? intermittently or indulge more and invest more time than he actually has to give. So how do you manage that? And I didn't have any encouragement for him because I'm not in vocational ministry outside of the truth in that, I mean, Jesus had an inner circle. Jesus had his disciples that he lived life with. Now Jesus shepherded millions of people. I mean, as the Savior of the world, so we are not like Christ, or we will not be Christ, or live a life as purpose-filled as Christ is, as much as we yearn for that, and we are sanctified constantly in doing that. But He was intentional with His time, right? Like we think about how His hierarchy of relationship was, and what that looked like when He lived His life, and what His ministry looked like. Did He skip out on time with God? Absolutely not. He pulled away to Himself to... worship and honor and mourn and pray. He was in very private time with God constantly. I mean, we see that explicitly. He invested into his relationships with his inner circle of three that he was most close with and trusted and whom he built his church on. And then he had 12 that he pursued passionately that actually ultimately became the initial church and acts that grew from there. So, I mean... There is a hierarchy of these tiers like we're talking about and how we spend our time. And how do we be intentional about who that's gonna be? And it's not a callous, like, you're not in my inner circle or you're not a part of my 12, or again, to use the same image, or you're not in my three. It's not as hard and fast in that. But what it does mean is those people that are already in those inner circles and in those crews with you, they're already there. And so recognizing who they are and then just like you said, gee, prioritizing how I'm gonna spend that time with my bride, with the people that are closest to me, my brothers that can encourage me the closest and then making sure I'm seeing them consistently, daily, weekly, even beyond then weaving my life, our family's lives together. Like you have to advocate for those things. I mean, more than I've ever known. I mean, I'm... 34, not having lived life for a very long time, but more than ever in my life, I have to choose to pursue those relationships to make them intimate, right? Like you naturally have close friends when you're in school all the time, or you're in college, or you don't have kids, and you can just kind of gallivant around and do whatever you want to do with the people you want to do it with. You have to choose to enmesh your life now with the people. that are going to sanctify you, that are going to sanctify your wife or your husband, and that are going to rear up your children in the name of the Lord like that. And those choices to spend time with those families come at a cost in terms of maybe inconvenience of having to take other things off your plate. Maybe you missed something that was on your calendar otherwise. Maybe you have to travel like you and I have to, to see each other, for our families to be together. not calling that an inconvenience at all, but you have to choose to do that. You can't just drive across town and spend the day together. We have to choose to do that. I think the lesson in this hierarchy of attention and hierarchy of relationships is that it involves action. So much of what we talk about in this is not sitting back and waiting for the Lord to change our path or waiting for... sovereignty and this Jesus-take-the-wield mentality to say that He's going to light the path for us and that we just walk down it. That is a misunderstanding of what the action that we are called into as new creations to go forth and actively pursue. Like, there is their action verbs. There's nothing passive about being a believer, particularly when we're talking about these things right here. So, I think the encouragement in fighting for this attention move forward rather than staying in one place. It's just gonna, we can, you can stay in one place if you just continue to make excuses for it and don't choose to actively change the direction you're at. Hmm. That's good. Yeah. I kept thinking about it. I haven't thought about it this way until this moment. But what is the intention of my attention? Right. The intention of my attention. That's good. Right. Yeah. Chat GPT told me that. No, I do like my piss because I'm not smart enough to remember more than like three words at a time. So but I think like, you know, in 199 isn't a great example of that. And it's such again, it's so helpful to think about. What is the intention of my attention? So if I'm gonna give my clients all of this intention, if I'm gonna spend my business and do all this attention, what's the intention of that, right? What am I trying to accomplish in carrying that out? Am I trying just to make more money? Am I overworking because I'm not trusting the Lord to be my provider, which I'm guilty of that, right? Am I numbing myself with social media because I don't wanna deal with my real problems? Am I whatever? Right? What is the intention? And I think one of the challenges that I personally have that we all have is we aren't intentional with it, right? Too many things throughout the day. If someone followed me around all day and wrote down everything I did and where my mind was, which obviously they can't, but, uh, if they did that, they would see, man, a lot of your attention is not intentional at all. It just goes wherever the world wants it to go. Right? I was outside this morning. doing my quiet time, because it was nice out. And it took me, no joke, like 35 minutes to get into it. Why? Because I was looking around, I was listening to the birds, which is cool, you know, it's fine, listening to the birds, whatever. And then I thought, oh my gosh, I should check on that person. And I started texting them, right? And then I thought, oh man, there's somebody else I should check on them. And then what happened? What happened? My time to have my quiet time started to dwindle. I'm like, dude, I really need to read. the word, right? I need to pray. But that became such a small part of what I actually did. It was my attention on everything else. There was no intentionality on that. And I think we've got to be really careful with that because the world wants us to pay attention to anything but where we're supposed to pay attention, right? Neither Tyler and I are advocating, hey, don't pay attention to your clients. That's not what we mean at all, right? But we are saying, and you said this, T. I love the faithful agent community. I am passionate about Christian agents, not about all agents. Don't like all agents. I love the Christian agent community. I am passionate about that, but guess what? Faithful agents, as much as we love you, you should not get more attention than our own wives. Right. You should not get more attention than our kids. That is not the biblical model and how this sets up. And if you're following a leader who gets all of your attention and they're leaving out their families, then you're following the wrong person. Let's just be totally honest about that, right? So I think we've got to understand and hold one another accountable to this. Are we being intentional with our attention and how quickly, how quickly we can chase after whatever we think we're supposed to chase after? So. I want to take us out there brother because I think that we could talk about this forever. Here's my encouragement to you audience, agents, here's my encouragement to me and T is who is around you? I love that you talked about your circles. The people are already there and you get to pick who gets to be in those, you know, hierarchy of attention. Have people around you to say, hey, help hold me accountable to this. I'm planning to only spend, I'm not going to work past five. make sure I don't do that. Cause I wanna be there with my family. I wanna do this with my family. Hey, if I'm gonna go watch my kid play soccer, whatever it is, can you take my phone? Maybe it's your spouse, just take my phone. I don't want to be distracted by those things. We've gotta be super intentional people. That's not only how we succeed, that's how we honor the Lord. Because at the end of the day, Tyler's kids can't get a new dad and Chelsea, his wife, can't get a new husband. But... your client could get a new agent or someone helping them. You know, Ryan Holmes can find someone else to help them acquire land. Someone else could get a new agent to help them buy a house. Not me. Right. Did I butcher that? You're in land acquisition. Come on now. I know what you do. Right. But that's the reality of it. So agents be in community and encourage one another. That's the reality of it. Your husband, your wife, whatever's going on, your kids, your grandkids, doesn't matter. They can't get another you. Right? But your clients can. All these people can get another. Those things are the eternal things. Go pursue them. What needs more of your attention? What needs less? We love you, faithful agents. We will see you next week.