Leadership Column

By

Carmen Ohling

That’s the line Priscilla Shirer wrote in Discerning the Voice of God that stopped me cold. She went further: “Have we become so addicted to busyness that we’ve trained ourselves not to hear Him?”

That took my breath away. I had to admit it: the very thing I say I am devoted to, I was not aggressively present for. I was just showing up.

Once I let go of feeling called out, I recognized what was happening: God was speaking through her words to call me up, to reinvest in my time with Him.

For me, that looks like sitting on my balcony in Miami Beach as the sun rises over the Atlantic, reading my Bible, talking with God, and journaling, followed by my God Walks, where I breathe, release control, and listen for His nudges for the day.

I don’t have to wait until Sunday to encounter Him. Some of my most profound moments with God have happened on a morning walk or in my journal at sunrise. When I treat this time as sacred, it shows up in my leadership: more presence, less rushing, less being derailed by what I can’t control.

There’s research behind this. A 2026 Carnegie Mellon study found the average focus recovery time after a digital interruption is nearly 27 minutes. Workers facing three or more interruptions an hour need closer to 38 minutes to return to deep focus.

Dividing our attention doesn’t just slow us down. Task-switching produces measurably slower response times and a notable rise in errors during multitasking.

And the cost isn’t only cognitive. Researchers tracking couples found that simply reaching for a phone while with a partner, not total screen time but presence-stealing in the moments that matter, predicted lower relationship satisfaction. Distraction costs us the people right in front of us.

We are not just losing minutes. We are losing the capacity to be present with our families, our teams, and our God. It takes intention to get it back.

A few practices that have helped me:

1. Protect a real start to your day before the world gets a vote. Even fifteen minutes on a balcony or kitchen table counts.
2. Plan your day on purpose, or it will fill with other people’s intentions. Know your distractions by name with a “not-to-do list” alongside your to-do list.
3. Build accountability. Tell a Christian Chamber member, a friend, or your spouse you’re working on this. Presence is hard to sustain alone.
4. Don’t fill silence with activity. Lean into it. Listen aggressively.

None of this works as a hack alone. It works because faith is the soil underneath it. We don’t discipline our attention to perform better, though we usually will. We discipline it because God is actually speaking, and He deserves more than the leftover minutes of a distracted mind.

We’re not listening. But we can be.