May I have your attention, please?" How many of us, how many times in our lives, have heard that question? It's generally not a welcome one, coming as it does typically at the beginning of something unpleasant, such as biology class. And usually, no one pays it any great attention.

But there may be no more important request in the world.

Think for a moment what your world would be like without attention, if your spouse paid you none, your children ignored you, your boss acted like you didn't exist. You'd feel like a non-entity. You wouldn't matter to anyone. Is there a worse feeling imaginable?

The power of attention is probably the greatest and least-used power we possess. Whatever we pay attention to thrives. Whatever we deny attention withers. The examples are endless: the puppy that becomes the snarling cur, the empty house that goes to ruin, the promising career that goes to hell.

What did Willy Loman's wife have to say when it was too late? "Attention must be paid!"

Of course, Willy himself had a genius for giving his attention to all the wrong things, to the empty distractions life threw at him. The attention he paid was given to social strivings, to appearances, to being "well liked." He looked at others-at his sons, his wife-and could see only himself and his needs. If "Death of a Salesman" is indeed an American tragedy, it's a tragedy about the effects of paying attention to the wrong things, of not seeing and therefore not listening to others.

Who, after all, is more valued in society than the person who can listen to others? What higher praise is there than "He's a great listener"?

And what makes a great listener? Attention.

When you pay attention to somebody, your mind and your body focus exclusively on that person, to the exclusion of everything else. The "payment" when you pay attention is your life. It's payment because it's a choice of one thing over all other things.

When someone pays attention to you, you become informed by them. Their judgments of you affect your opinion of yourself, often affect your activities, and usually shift your thoughts. When you pay attention to the attention someone is paying to you, you cease being the subject of your experience and become the object of their experience.

At the moment you become aware that someone's attention is on you, you become aware of your looks and your behavior as they may be seeing you. To some, the attention of others is like a flashlight disclosing them. To others, it may seem like a spotlight illuminating them. And to still others, the experience is negligible, like being looked at by a bug. But in all cases, it is the attention of others that has stolen your attention from whatever you were involved with.

This can have glad or unhappy consequences. The world that Willy Loman fell for, with all its distractions, stimulations, and conditioning, took over his life by diverting his attention toward trivialities, fantasies of success. He could never see his way clear, couldn't see what needed to be done.

But if you've ever received someone's full, intentional attention, you know it can be an almost magical thing. Maybe you've come to that person with a list of complaints or worries. You talk, she listens. Pretty soon, what seemed crucially important, even outrageous to you before you began to talk, now seems less so. Vastly less so. You begin to wonder why you were so upset in the first place. What was there to get all worked up about? Maybe the other person hasn't said two words, but you leave the room feeling somehow renewed. And maybe-because the mind works like this-you figure you somehow talked yourself out of your difficulty, since you did all the jabbering. But it was whole-hearted attention being offered by the other person that was at work in you.

These are examples that only begin to touch on the power of attention. The real power of attention goes much deeper; it's a power that's seldom used and little understood-call it the internalization of the power of attention. Apply attention to your resources and you have access to them. Apply attention to your behavior and you'll discover what kind of person you have created. Attention is the tool of change, the tool of success, but it is also the tool of your higher being.