31. It's Too Hard to Even Make It There - A Lean Into Challenge
Feeling stuck—where even the simplest task feels too heavy to lift? In this episode, instead of chasing rigid productivity, listeners will discover the subtle art of finding ease within challenge, tuning into the rhythms of play, and learning how to gently move forward even when motivation wanes.Listeners will learn:How play, frustration, and challenge intertwine, illuminating gentler ways forwardPractical methods to surface and honor emotions that hinder focus, catalyzing growth through compassionTakeaways:Pause to reflect deeply before acting, creating space for authentic decisionsShrink tasks down to their smallest steps, inviting ease rather than pressureChannel rhythms of natural play into even the most stubborn work momentsThis episode features a performance of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. Subscribe and join our growing community at rhythmsoffocus.com—where wandering minds thrive along waves of agency and creativity.Keywords#ADHD #WanderingMinds #Agency #Mindfulness #GentleProductivity #PlayfulFocus #EmotionalEase #CreativeFlow #CompassionateGrowth #MicroActionsTranscript All right. Let's see what I've got on my list here to do today. All right. Uh, visit the gym. Are you kidding me? Sometimes the simplest things can feel like the heaviest weights. The simpler they are, the more paradoxically we "can't be bothered."Head to the garage, show up to the dishes, open the report- all of these can come with a wave of revulsion.How could we ever move forward?I often and continue to espouse a "visit" as a powerful unit of work. This idea of showing up to something or bringing it to ourselves and staying there for one single deep breath, and then making a decision as to what we wanna do, whether walk away or into the work.It is a powerful unit of work, but even so, it might still be too difficult to make it there, even with this idea of not having to do a thing.What then? I imagine there have been times that you've been here. Maybe someone kept bugging you, maybe a due date crept along far enough, or just yelled at yourself into this sort of painful, "just start" and you finally started going.But there are gentler paths and you may well have done those too.Take for example, how we already act when we are in play. When we enjoy something naturally, we might bump into frustrations, take stock of where we are, slow down, break things down, simplify things, find some ease once again, and finally return with that ease back into challenge. Dynamically, we tune to the windows of challenge for where we are in that moment.We find those places that are not so easy to be boring and not so intense as to be overwhelming.We can adapt the same process to difficult work, hard work, something we can also call emotional work, only by bringing the process to consciousness. The first and perhaps most important step is to pause, where we reflect without reacting, where we can connect to that deeper sense of self. It gives us that space to decide:" Maybe this isn't even a thing that is meaningful for me at all."But if we do decide to move forward. We can also sense in that pause where we rest in those emotions that we discover something hidden in the words that we've been using. The sort of, "I just don't wanna" sort of phrase, we might be saying to ourselves, we can discover this deep, complex, emotional world beneath those words.In that pause, we might see one such emotion that's contributing that of let's say, exhaustion. This consequence of repeated hits to our sense of agency, dropping, losing, forgetting things. We lose the sense of capability. Any attempt risks yet another injury as a fear of true inability would rear its ugly head in these clouds, choking us into collapse.Fully engaging these emotions, maybe even...
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