You Have to Think About the Notes: The Transformative Power of Attention
I’m a fairly sing-songy person. I hum, I sing along, I make up songs about my dog. My husband, Sam, on the other hand, is musically tone-deaf in a way that feels almost impressive. When he sings, it’s as if the melody has been completely reimagined by someone who’s only heard about music in theory.
One day, with A Whole New World stuck in my head, I started singing to myself. Sam decided to join in, doing his best to match what I was singing, his brows furrowed in concentration. And to his credit, this was the most recognizable attempt I’d ever heard from him. When we finished, I told him, “That was actually… not bad!”
His face lit up with discovery. “You have to think about the notes!” he said, as if he’d just cracked the code.
I blinked at him. “What do you mean, you have to think about the notes?”
He said, “If you think about the notes, you can sing the notes!”
And I burst out laughing, because it was the most ridiculous, self-evident thing I’d ever heard. Naturally, I’ve given him endless grief about it ever since. Anytime one of us catches ourselves doing something absentminded, I’ll grin and say, “You have to think about the notes!”
Half-tuned
Months later, I found myself in one of those moments when life holds up a mirror to your own face.
I was convinced I had plenty of time before a virtual meeting—twenty minutes! Practically an eternity. As I stood in my closet to pick out an outfit, I noticed it could use some reorganizing. I started pulling out my clothing and shuffling things around.
Somewhere around minute eighteen, I looked at the clock and realized: no, actually, twenty minutes is not an eternity, despite the fact that it seems to be my personal threshold for losing all sense of urgency. A single episode of The Office is longer. It’s about five stops on the train. It’s not long at all.
I threw something on in a hurry, leaving a pile of clothes hangers strewn on my bed. I chuckled as I muttered to myself, “You have to think about the time.”
Most of us move through life half-tuned, humming a familiar song on autopilot. We respond the same way, assume the same things, and replay the same stories. We let twenty minutes feel like an eternity, only to be jolted by the clock. And we allow a job that we’ve outgrown or the slow erosion of connection with a team or partner to run on silent, until the day we realize we’re not where we want to be.
Attention as transformation
The more I pay attention, the more I realize that most of what truly changes our lives isn’t some secret insight or advanced technique. It’s intentionality: awareness plus clarity of direction.
When you stop long enough to pay attention—to actually think about the notes—you start hearing where you’re off-key. You notice the rhythm you’ve been keeping without realizing it. And you gain the perspective to create something new.
This is what makes attention so transformative, and it’s what I witness every day in my coaching work. That kind of attention is generative, not just corrective. When you start asking better questions, you find better answers: What do I want to be known for? What am I actually trying to create? What matters most here? What assumptions am I making that need challenging?
That’s where transformation begins. Not in the grand gesture, but in the micro-moment of awareness that lets you choose your next move. And when you think about the notes long enough, eventually the tune becomes second nature. That’s how new habits are formed and new ideas are put into motion.
Ask better questions
Clients have often come to me looking for frameworks and answers. And, indeed, a framework can be powerful when it helps you ask the right questions. But there’s no magical key to unlock success; sometimes you simply need to think through things from all angles, identify what’s most important, and see what’s getting in the way. My job is to help you see yourself, your context, and your goals more clearly so that answers can emerge.
So: where in your life are you moving through the motions without really hearing yourself? Where could you be asking better questions?
Coaching is, at its heart, a dedicated place to think about the notes—to ask the right questions before playing the next verse. What could open up if you did?
