Rhythms of Focus

This week we discuss the very real fear of disclosing our wandering minds with bosses and managers. Will they think less of us? Will they support the perhaps unique conditions of how our brains are capable of being used best?
It's a complicated scenario, and of course can depend very much on the work and people involved. It's not something to take lightly, but it's important to recognize, at its core the question comes from a place of care for your work.
While it can feel like a burden, a wandering mind is powerful, is creative, and can contribute positively. It's about asking ourselves the right questions to find the right structure for productivity.
We close with a piece called Weight in Arms.

Transcript
Should I tell my boss about my wandering mind, my ADHD?
It's an understandable but profoundly tricky question, rarely comes alone. A few other questions tend to follow in its wake, like what could I gain by saying something? Could it cost me my job? Would they even understand? And we can sit a long while in that not knowing.
That question, should I tell my boss about my ADHD, about my wandering mind?
The Stakes Are Real
Before anything else, it helps to say clearly that that worry, what it could do, what harm it could create, it's not imaginary. Telling someone can carry real weight. How a manager hears it, the protections it may or may not apply, whether it suddenly changes how our work gets read.
Some bosses can meet it with grace, others not. You might even get fired for it, but maybe they would just point at something else as the culprit. Even so, sometimes being fired, whether out of fear, wish, or both, can be useful. So even if that were to happen, is that the right thing? It's not clear.
Weighing whether to raise it is not simple. It's not weakness. It's care. Nothing here, of course, is meant to talk us past some genuine risk. I want to be clear about it. It's meant to be an idea that opens the question wider once the risks have been honestly faced.
A Weight of History
These questions have a history, something behind them. Wandering mind, ADHD or otherwise, is not just a person living in the moment. There's this history that follows us into the now.
In the days of school, there's a depth of creativity and intelligence that needs to connect with reality, and then it can be met with so many different attitudes.
As an example, when you raise your hand in class and this young kid wondering, "Why do I need to know this?"
One teacher may take the time to truly think about the power of the knowledge they are trying to impart, the sense of changing the world that could be beneficial to you, and then maybe find ways to connect with that driven spirit of care and play behind the question.
But many others, exhausted by their own gauntlet of impossible rules, conflicting requirements, and the like, find that question to just be frustrating. And with enough accusations, enough feelings of frustration from up above in the class, we might lose sight of the positive behind that question.
We might ask for accommodations. "Hey, give me more time. Give me a fidget. Give me a break." Any and all of them could be helpful, but the person asked to do more for us might end up feeling resentful, consciously or otherwise.
Each of us carrying more than the other can easily see. We can try to argue that such resentment is or is not warranted, but arguing the resentment away hardly works.
When Accommodations Become Apologies
Our arguments for accommodations are often these attempts to do what others do, get the homework in on time, avoid disrupting others, pass the tests. Such approaches play out in the days well beyond school.
In other words, behind the question of whether to tell a boss about ADHD is something along the lines of, "What if I forget something? What if I miss a deadline? Could it get me off the hook?" Or, "Give me lots of reminders. I can't handle them myself." And running underneath is all, "How can I not be a troublemaker?"
What's missing is the wonderful power and beauty of a wandering mind, the deep focus, creativity, discovery, play, invention, and more. Why leave these behind in this discussion? When our strengths are unseen in the glimmer of another's eye, there's no mirror to see them in ourselves.
A Practice in Presenting Strengths
Growing up now in a world of work, we often forget that these powers are there laying dormant. Instead, we continue to ask for mercy and forgiveness in the form of accommodations rather than the conditions that allow us to shine.
The trouble is often not that we cannot. It's that we do not have the practice of knowing and nurturing our abilities. Communicating, crafting the stories, conveying the sense of what we have to offer all take practice.
In putting my own thoughts together for my dear audience of fellow wandering minds, I've had to practice describing how whatever I have to say might be of benefit. Without doing so, I'm just another talking head easily ignored.
But when I can, for example, in the opening 90 seconds of my podcast, something I've worked hard to put together and then practiced, I hope to convey, "Hey, maybe I can help."
Certainly I'm simplifying a deeply complex issue. This is not an overnight endeavor. It takes practice, visits over time. Sometimes it helps to recruit caring others to the cause.
Among others, I give great thanks to my dear friends. one person who, uh, you've heard on an episode we did together, Rachel, who helped me recognize my voice, present my story, and describe the strengths I'm trying to portray.
Another, Billy, who, uh, on another episode we did together helped me think through also, "How do I craft my voice? How do I present something? How do I present that I have something to offer, hopefully, to an audience?"
With practice, we learn for ourselves where we can and cannot trust ourselves to follow through on something. We find how to structure our work, our ideas, so we can be alerted when we need to be, clear of distractions, respectful of our own working memory as unique as it is.
We learn not only what we need to get by, but more importantly, what we can use to excel. When we know how we can excel, what it takes to support our ability to do well, it's no longer about, "Do I tell my boss whatever?" It's about discussing specifics that help nurture an environment that works for you, that helps you build the relationships between yourself and the work that helps you engage yourself as a best self.
So for a moment, consider what helps bring about those spirits of play and care for yourself, maybe at home. What are those conditions? What comes from those conditions, those ways of working? And then rather than focus on conditions first, what if you considered what you could do and create if those conditions were there?
Music — Weight in Arms
Today's piece of music is called Weight in Arms. Enjoy.

#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunctions
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

As someone who loves tools and figuring out the best ways to use them, I've been intrigued with the potentials of AI, particularly using it as someone with a wandering mind.
This week I delve into my recent experiments existential dilemmas, and adventures with the so-called artificial intelligence I am feeding my own intelligence into.
So is it helpful, more efficient, how can I use it without giving away my agency? Let's find out.
#Mindfulness #Neurodivergence #ADHDpodcast #ADHD #WanderingMinds #Anchoring #AI

Transcript
Every Friday morning, I sit down to write on my own without the help of any AI this draft of my podcast and newsletter. So this morning, I tiptoed to the edge and asked, uh, "Hey, AI, I like to write on Fridays. I usually do so from this blank slate, but I wanna give it a try here and see what, uh, you've been about.
Maybe you can help me out. Maybe take a look at what I've been recently writing about. Give me... Show me what that's been and, and, uh, and then suggest something." And I used the latest and greatest from Claude, this Fable 5, and it gave me this perfectly cogent response, totally looked at what I did, and then I ignored it completely.
So here I am writing about AI instead.

Today's a bit of a wanderer, but I think I land somewhere useful, so tag along if you will.

The Whirlwind
Does AI help the wandering mind? My goodness, have I drunk the Kool-Aid with this thing. It's been a whirlwind, and my goodness, can there be controversy behind it?
I heard this story about some school somewhere using AI to announce its graduates walking across the stage. It then mispronounced a bunch of names, forgot to mention others, and by the time it was all done, they couldn't go back and announce those that it had missed. And then I get these emails, much like you get emails, and can't you just smell the AI on them?
What's that about? Why would I want to respond to a robot?
I hear stories of the massive warehouses that are being built, draining water from an entire state perhaps. But hey, maybe it's providing jobs? Or is it taking jobs? Or is it changing jobs? Having frank discussions with my longtime graphic designer and friend, Matt, who, was a guest in episode 64. Play around with Claude Design and see what happens.
Construction or Destruction?
I wonder about our civilization as it progresses here. Going through the industrial age, we polluted the heck out of things, didn't we? Beautiful Chicago River and its tributaries were just nasty. We could barely go near them. We'd choke in the smog, walk through horse crap. It was awful. But once we made it through that developmental stage, if you will, we've now come to some place where things are cleaner and kinda nice sometimes.
Progressively think about the world we live in.
Is it a truism that we go through messy stages to get to cleaner ones? How do we know if we're going through construction or maybe destruction? It's not always clear. Sometimes we think of the fight between money and the environment, those greedy people who have more money than various countries.
The question isn't how we resolve this fight between money and environment. It's, it's how do we align them? How do we make a clean environment profitable? How do we extend our vision beyond the myopic moment, beyond the quarterly report? But, ah, maybe that's not where I am. I'm one who likes to tinker. I like tools.
The Tinker Man Tinkers
Tagline for my website when I first built it in 2000 or so used to be Mind, Music, and Technology. So the tinkerman tinkers. After wrapping up the last bits of The Waves of Focus, I had this idea to put together a beginner's series of the course for YouTube, um, and, uh, why not test the waters with AI?
Let's see what it can do. It's already released by the time, or at least partially released by the time this podcast episode's going out, so do check that out.
I don't even remember the first question I had asked of AI. It was maybe something like, "Hey, I'm building a YouTube series. Help me out, would you?"
A couple months later, I'm full steam ahead with not only that, but I've created several compendia of ideas from my DevonThink database. I've organized multiple next steps for marketing, extracted the nearly 360,000 words. Yes, I'm not so subtly bragging. From my course keynote to create a reserve of information from which to build the YouTube series and my next book and all that good stuff. How do I reconcile these?
Please Think for Me
Clearly there's a benefit, but clearly there are also problems.
I often like to say the more powerful the tool, the more caution it requires. And I wonder about AI and its impact on the mind. The trouble comes from the sense of, "Please think for me."
When we ask an AI to write our emails for us without our editing or rewriting it to fit our voice, when we ask it to come up with a gift idea for someone rather than reflecting on what we know of that person ourselves, when we ask it to tell us what to do without reflecting on what's meaningful to us in the first place, we only grow more lost at sea.
Thought is this cresting of emotion into mind, and as such, it's not static it takes time to form, something we often find in scarcity. So we often come to this erroneous, unspoken assumption that thinking is hard.
It's only hard in the sense of any hard work, that it's emotional work. We can pause where we offer the seed, the soil, and the sun, and somehow our brains seem to do the rest.
But of course, there may be other waves of motion at work, maybe in the difficulty to finish things. We fear the feelings of failure and how this rests on our inability to trust ourselves. The effort, if you will, is in allowing and sustaining a vision where we pause and ask, "What's on my mind about this?"
Allowing that question to linger and stir those unconscious waters, that's how we build the creative moment. Some part of us looks to reconnect, to grow.
Whatever the distance, whatever the injuries it may represent, there's some posing of a threshold beyond which it's difficult for us to engage this moment. That vision that we have necessarily comes from within us.
Our AI's vision comes from within it. The human tendency is to avoid difficult emotion, including those that would require forming a thought, these difficult things that are in our lives, marred by anger, irritation, shame, regret, pain of any and every sort.
The bridge between is to recognize that the pain and the lost trust may be one and the same, easier said than done. Where am I wandering off now? Let me return to this, uh, episode I'd recently done, Anchoring and the Option to Work, Episode 57.
Symbiotic, Not Parasitic

Symbiotic, Not Parasitic
We allow thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions to come to mind. We pause to allow ourselves these thoughts. When they come to that place of being settled where no new thoughts are coming to mind and there are only ripples and variation, then all the information about whatever can come to mind has come to mind. That's the strongest ground on which we can stand.
And from that firmly anchored place, we can then decide on our next action, this next direction, with whatever vision we have, as clear as we can make it. When we do that and then ask AI, "Hey, what do you think?" rather than it giving me garbage, it now gives me an approximation of where I am. I work with it and what I understand of it, and it can work with me and what it understands of me to develop a vision that I see as ringing true. We work together. It feels meaningful to me. But then I guess we're also talking about the art of relating to anything and anyone, aren't we?
It's nice when we can engage symbiotically rather than parasitically. When we have a friend who hears and listens as we do the same. When we have a job that supports us, and we feel we can support it. When we sit with the dishes and feel engaged because we directly feel how that moment connects and clears paths for those things that we feel meaningful in our lives.
Those are good moments. So does AI help the wandering mind? I think it's the same question about any of our tools, really. Are we asking it to be us, to create our vision? Or is it there to help us realize the vision that can only come from within ourselves? Depends on whether we've anchored, recognized where we are, where we'd like to be.
From there, from that deep place of being, play, care, meaning, we can consider how to arrange for those places of symbiosis, for those gardens, if you will. Thought and AI, money and environment, self and world.
Music — Torn
Today's piece is an improvisation called Torn. It twiddles a bit between two or three main notes with some chords floating around. Improvisations are essentially the realization of some vision in the process of creating them. Well, I guess that's really any form of creativity, isn't it? Enjoy the piece.
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

The anxiety of a task taking too long, a project starting too late, or the loud silence of an undone to-do list can be incredibly overwhelming. This is particularly true for those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like.
But what if the clock on the wall isn't the only conductor we should be setting our rhythms to? This week, we explore listening to the three foundational rhythms living within ourselves, and reflect on how the anchoring technique can prove useful across them all.

Transcript
The clock. The tick tocks of the clock.
Be there at eight. Be done by three. How long will this go? Why can't I know how long this will take? Do I have time blindness?
What if this so-called time blindness is less about being unaware and more that our own experience of time takes prominence? So much of our modern society runs on these external measures of time.
Of course, it does. We have to share our existence. We have to meet in places, present our deliverables. But how much gets lost when we ignore our own experience of time?
The time within ourselves
While the clock does its thing, measuring our days by the seconds and the hours, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice losing sight of the time within ourselves. The afternoon, the evening, the time before lunch, the walk from here to there, the time to remember a song, the time of being.
Considering our own time isn't a selfish act, it's an act of self-reflection, and when we do it, we start to guide ourselves and gauge better, and sometimes even sync with the world's clocks better if we decide to.
I find three foundational rhythms that I want to call attention to. One is the breath, second is the session, and the third is the day.
Each of these are foundational because they rest in our experience.

The breath
So first, the breath. It's useful as a measure for a pause. When we can pause, which may be the most difficult of all the productivity exercises there are, we reach a higher state of agency. Agency is this skill of deciding and engaging non-reactively
It's where we can make our decisions with our greatest sense of meaning. When we can pause, we're able to connect with those things that resonate with us more deeply. That connects with what we care for, how we play, which in turn help us guide our moments, our days into mastery and meaningful work.
The session
A second foundational fundamental rhythm of time is the session. This is the time in which our attention aligns with some intention, even if our intention is just to think about something for a moment. Every time we align our attention with an intention, we create a wave of focus. It might be disrupted, it might be rough, it might be smooth, but each one of these waves has a beginning, middle, and end.
The most experiential way to practice this is to recognize the power of a visit. You know, listen to episode four for a deeper dive on it. But for here and now, the idea is that we approach, we reach this edge of action. We pause at some work in front of us to feel whatever is at risk, whatever we are feeling we might lose, or whatever frustration is there.
We expose ourselves to the emotions of the work and hear what they have to say. And then as needed, we can mount the bravery and care that it takes to engage. At any time beyond, we can let go, whether it's done or not.
A second, a minute, an hour, these have no feeling. But an experienced time, the moment of a breath and its pause, the flow of a thought and action in their own times, those we can pay attention to.
We can feel the beginnings, the middles, and the ends. The beginning is where we approach. It's where we can get thrown off, how emotion might have us avoid something, how we might inadvertently defend against something. The middle, while we're in it, we might feel confused, overwhelmed, bored, angry, anxious.
We could feel excited, excited about something else entirely, and the daydreams that pull us out. And then there's the ending, the transition out. Whether we're done or not, that dreaded hyperfocus or exhaustion or just dropping it and discovering later, "Oh, I didn't finish that." Or maybe the rare, "Oh, I'm done."
Across all three, anchoring can always help. Check out episode fifty-seven for a deeper dive there. But for now, know that you can always grab a pen and paper and write down the thoughts that are on your mind and decide which one you wanna be with. Anchoring itself becomes this moment in time.
The day
And then there's the third, which is the day.
Many of us keep some form of daily to-do list. We think about our habits. We wake up, hopefully every day, until one day we don't. Which, on reflection, points to a fourth cycle, the life itself, momentary or a hundred years, or either way, a single unit. But I guess that's tangent to these three. Back to the day.
If we can visit something and not finish it, that idea that we can step away before it's done and still want to come back, well then, what do we do? We can invite our future self into the next day. Hey, future you, somewhere between waking and sleeping, can you make a visit to this?
That person now has the whole cycle of the day to honor that self who sent the invitation, to then mount the courage to pay the visit, to expose themselves to the emotions of the work, and to make their own decision.
Maybe even to extend yet another invitation to that next future you down the line. Using the experienced time of the day, we practice building a trust with ourselves, a sense that something will keep doing what it's been doing so we can rely on it. In this case, ourselves. Meanwhile, we distance ourselves from alarms artificially bolted onto the mechanical clock, designed to interrupt us wherever we are.
Alarms do their job. They disrupt whatever wave we're in. But that's irritating, and I like to avoid it when I can.
So that rhythm that we return to something perhaps every day can become a current, a stream, this river of trust that's formed of three parts: the honor for the self who gave us the invitation by showing up to it; the respect for the present self by deciding from that deep breath, from that place of, "I've been here"; and the care for our future selves by asking them to return tomorrow for another invitation if we want to.
These are three fundamental cycles: the breath, the session, the day. We all share them, ADHD or not, neurodivergent or neurotypical. It's just that for some of us, they run choppy and hard to navigate, and sometimes our zoomed-in view makes the waves loom so large we lose sight of everything else. But that's another story.
The takeaway
Meanwhile, as a takeaway, may be that somehow you're feeling time blind. May be that your time hasn't yet found some harmony with the hands of a clock.
But what if there's some way to begin practicing that harmony? What if you picked up one thing and invited your future self to visit it sometime tomorrow, sometime between waking and sleeping? It's not something you'd have to finish. You don't even have to do anything once you're there. That single deep breath counts.
May not be easy, but there is a simplicity to it. And if you can do that, and then do it again, well, now you've got two beats. And in two beats, you have a rhythm.
Music — Feet on Pebbles in Water
Music's an art form whose very medium is time. And you may notice that it too doesn't necessarily connect with a clock. While there is a metronome, there's other ways of ar-arranging notes to, to music.
Chopin's tempo rubato, this expanding and shrinking of, of the, time and the speed of the way, we play the notes, translates literally as "stolen time."
When I play a series of quarter notes, then a series of half notes, I can tell something's shifted. It doesn't just feel longer, it feels larger, grander. And if I shift to whole notes, it can feel larger still. Yet the quarter notes and the half notes that came before simply are.
There's a relativity of time. It's not just one against the other. It seems to give time its very definition, the experience of time itself. The piece I play in this week's episode is called Feet on Pebbles in Water, and I hope you enjoy it.
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

As someone with ADHD or a wandering mind, you may have been told to keep a scratchpad on you at all times. It's a great way of capturing our thoughts in the moment so they don't flutter away as our minds are want to do.
But, a scratchpad on its own doesn't always spur us into action. And in some cases, it can turn into the thing we avoid at all costs, serving as a reminder of many things that have been left undone.
So how to we move past the scratchpad phase and turn into a powerful tool that is helpful? This week we walk through the different layers of the anchor technique. It's a tool that has worked very well for my students and for myself when feeling scattered. It's one that can be used in conjunction with other tools and often makes them more helpful.
We close with a new take on a composition I've played here before, Caregiver, in C minor.
Transcript
What do we actually do with a scratchpad? There are various ADHD talking heads out there who tell us, "Keep paper on the desk, in the car, by the bed, on your person. Capture whatever's loose. Get it out of your head."
Good advice. But you've likely noticed writing things down doesn't make them done. Sometimes it just builds the pile higher. The list itself can become something we dread. So what's the difference between a scratchpad that helps us and one that haunts us?
Again and again, students have told me how they find the anchor technique to be a powerful way of engaging work and life in general, whether they're scattered, exhausted, even when they are focused and they're just trying to figure out a way to be even more so.
Whatever system they build or use, whatever productivity method or app they try, they bring this anchoring technique with them. And I've explained it in some detail in episode sixty-two if you wanna have a listen there.
But what about it works? Isn't it just using a scratchpad? Well, this is similar to asking, "Isn't meditation just about focusing on one thing?" Well, eh, kinda, maybe, some ways, yes. But it also misses the entire point.
Mindfulness, reconsidered
We engage a type of mindfulness. The trouble, I think, is in that word, mindfulness. I, I don't know about you, but the word tends to make me feel a bit of the ick. I think it's been kind of mauled by the marketing machinery of, of everything. It's so amorphous, so soft and squishy. Aren't we mindful all the time?
And even if I were to suddenly be mindful somehow, whatever that means, so what? I've still got things to do, matters to address, stuff to stuff. I like this comment that a particular Redditor pointed out and said, "Mindfulness is an unlucky translation of the Pāli word 'sati.' It's remembering to observe how mind's attention moves."
When we do engage in this mindful approach, which I'll point out in a moment, we tend to help ourselves move from scatter to smoother waves of thought where we can more deliberately, deeply, calmly engage the moment.
Okay, so well, that's all well and good. What am I talking about anyway? What is anchoring and how does it relate? So I'm gonna walk you through eight levels of how this practice of pen and paper deepens and, and how it becomes more mindful and hopefully it'll, it'll give you a sense of , what I mean by this.
From to-do list to a menu of the moment
Level one. We all know how to use a scratch pad, right? You write stuff and sometimes that's totally what we need to do. There's nothing more that we need to do. We just need to write what we need to do and do the things.
Typically we write a to-do list of sorts. We throw things down, remember, "Oh, I gotta do this, that, the other thing," all the things that are weighing us down and ah, doesn't that feel good to get out?
Trouble is none of it's done and that can be exhausting depending on what we've written. Sometimes we can even overwhelm ourselves looking at whatever we've just created, this awful golem ready to destroy its creator.
One thing that's missing is any respect for working or short-term memory, those parts that engage the now. These are the things that would hopefully help us stay with this present moment instead of having to juggle the zillions of things that are bubbling outside.
So level two. What if we just listed what was on our mind to do in this moment? What our mind is juggling just about the now. Those things that are not now, well, we could put those somewhere else. Those are quite likely important in their own ways. Fine. But just doing that, chances are you'll have reduced that list considerably.
Just what's going on in our mind right now? What is on my mind? We might even recognize that having these items of the now sitting on paper can now support us. We have more mental energy available to clearly decide where we want to rest our attention next. We're not being dragged down by whatever we cannot do in this moment.
In this way, anchoring answers two questions. First is, what's on my mind? Maybe something that's bubbling just below consciousness or right there. What's on my mind to do? And then secondly, where would I like my mind to be? And that's where we circle something.
Now, we're only at level two here in terms of the levels of mindfulness, if you will. So let's keep going here. So far, we've only written down the things that are likely "shoulds", but what's also in our mind are "wants."
What if we expanded? What if we allowed onto this list our current wants? I wanna play a game. I wanna step outside. I wanna watch a show. Even allowing ourselves to recognize that we have wants, that they might have a place to sit side by side with our needs, that can be a revelation.
Not the least of which, and one that can take considerable practice for some, is realizing how this sheet of paper can now shift from "shoulds" and "have tos" into a list of options, a sort of menu for the moment.
At the fourth level, even further, when we start to conceptualize more deeply how this is just about the now, we can start feeling like this paper is not here for us to serve it, it's there to serve us. It supports us.
The way we do that is we allow ourselves to throw it away. We can throw this away at any moment, whenever it no longer represents the now. Now, of course, if there's something we wanna keep, we can put that somewhere else. But here we've got this thing that is dynamically shifting to meet us in this moment.
Okay, but what about when we finish writing this beautiful list and perfect it in whatever ways, although I'm not saying that one ought to perfect it in whatever ways, but let's say you're doing it anyway, and then wander off immediately. Well, we've been impulsive, haven't we?
So we can define impulse as this sort of flow of emotion into action that at least in part has overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. Let me say that one more time. We can define impulse as a flow of emotion into action that at least in part overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. In other words, something unconsciously happened.
We suddenly realized we were in our emails or social media, three tabs open researching the best possible air fryers when all we wanted was a snack. Well then, what if we acknowledge those, too?
That's level five. In those moments, we catch ourselves, which we may not always be able to do, but when we can, we can return to that list, that anchor path that we've been building here, and write down where we wandered.
In that way, we're doing a few things. We're, we're making the unconscious conscious. But not only that, we're giving it a space, a place that it can rest, where our working and short-term memory can again be supported, where we can gently decide where would we like our mind to be. We're not forcing ourselves out of where we went. We're not forcing ourselves into something else. It is now an option amongst the rest. Agency is strengthened.
WIN, WIND, WIND-E, BE WIND
With these ideas so far, we've got want, impulse, need. A lovely mnemonic already. WIN. Win of the now, right? This prompt can already be helpful to help us be mindful in engaging, in helping support that sense of agency at the moment.
But there's deeper we can go yet. What if we wanna do nothing?
Level six. Don't we have that right? Of course. We can drift. D for drift. Adding to our mnemonic, we have WIND.
Level seven, deeper yet. We can recognize how our options are all formed from emotion that which is cresting into consciousness. These emotions are coming from somewhere, maybe somewhere of meaning, known, unknown, conscious, unconscious, well beyond.
We could, if we wanted, don't have to, write a word or two about where our mind is. Write one part frustrated, three parts worried, and a dash of curiosity somewhere in the corner. Maybe we start to journal or not at all, but doing so adds E for emotion to a misspelled WIND-E mnemonic.
Finally, we've got level eight. We can think about how these emotions even rest in the body, a tension in the gut, a crinkle of the eyebrows, a tightening of the breath. Our bodies are trying to tell us something, whether clear or not.
So B for body creates the mnemonic B WIND. I find there to be something deliciously paradoxical between the idea of anchoring and being wind, but it works. Anchoring is pausing, not tethering. Often when I mention anchoring, people at first think I'm talking about tying ourselves to something, and that is not at all the case.
Anchoring is about pausing. It's creating that breather, that space between the waves of focus to look at the possibilities....

This week I am joined by storyteller Neal Foard to discuss the act and emotion of care. Those of us with ADHD and wandering minds can often get overwhelmed by the negativity taking over our social feeds, looking at the news, or even just talking to those around us.
Neal reminds us that while compassion fatigue is real, it's also not all doom and gloom. Our algorithms are created for engagement, doom sells and our attention is our currency.
It's important to take a step back and look at the good things going on around us - even at a micro level. From the person letting you merge during heavy traffic, to someone turning in a lost wallet. Good things are happening all around us, and when we put more care into the world, more care comes back.
Learn more about Neal and his work on his website StoryFire.net
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
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