Uncover a revolutionary approach to managing ADHD and wandering minds in this episode of 'Rhythms of Focus.' Discover the 'Waves of Focus,' a comprehensive guide designed to transition you from force-based productivity to trust-based agency. Delve into key concepts such as the anchor, visit, and visit guide. Understand how to create a meaningful, rhythm-oriented life framework that enhances agency and mindfulness.

- Key Takeaways:

- Learn to transition from force-based to trust-based productivity.

- Discover tools and techniques like the anchor and visit guide.

- Understand how to create meaningful rhythms and improve your sense of agency.

Subscribe to 'Rhythms of Focus' and visit rhythmsoffocus.com.

### Links

- [Crocodile and Cube: In the Studio](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaRbIj8RyZIaLGCiP4DYnPBsTbKuSj1Nw)

- [Episode 4](https://rhythms-of-focus.captivate.fm/episode/from-force-to-flow-with-a-visit/)

- [Episode 9](https://rhythms-of-focus.captivate.fm/episode/i-dont-wanna-and-the-practice-of-agency/)

- [Episode 14](https://rhythms-of-focus.captivate.fm/episode/the-magnified-mind/)

### Keywords

#WavesofFocus #Agency #Mindfulness #RhythmsOfFocus #Tools #ADHD #WanderingMinds #TrustBasedProductivity #AnchorTechnique #VisitGuide

00:00 The Principles of the Waves of Focus

03:36 What are the Waves of Focus?

03:47 One - a Goal

04:30 Second - a Philosophy

06:19 Three - a Metaphor

08:01 Four - A Set of Tools

09:29 Five - A Framework

12:25 Six - A Set of Rhythms

14:55 Seven - a Practice

15:26 Final Thoughts

15:59 Music - "The Dust Cleared"

Transcript

 How do we approach challenge? Sometimes we turn away, sometimes we dive in, sometimes we sidle up next to it. Gently stir the water with a big toe slip our legs in, sit with our feet dangling as we look across the pond and wonder. So I put a challenge before myself here now. It's about trying to explain my life's work, this Waves of Focus.

A guide for those with wandering minds, ADHD, and beyond. This course that I've put together, and I wanna be able to describe it in as short and simple as possible in this episode today. How the heck am I gonna do that?    

When you live and breathe something, it can become difficult to say what it's about to someone who doesn't live and breathe that same thing.

Sometimes we simply have a vision in our head. It could be a vision of a deck. We're trying to build a memory that came to mind from something that was said, an interesting idea about a story.

Whatever it is, it's hard to explain it, and sometimes it's even hard to explain to ourselves.

There's this hilarious set of YouTube videos called Crocodile and Cube. I'll link to it in the show notes. In which there's this one character, where he, hears something in his mind, this music, and he wants to create it.

And there's this other person that he's working with and they're trying to make sense of it. They're saying, okay, one person tells the story of what they want to hear. The other person tries to put it together, and together they try to bring this out into the world. It's a wonderful metaphor for the parts that can live within ourselves, even.

And wandering minds tend to connect with a depth of experience, a reality that feels alive. Words can feel hollow and brittle at times, unless they're really backed up by that sense of reality within them. How do we translate these ideas, these images, these somethings within our mind, into words, into images we can describe to others. and to anything?

But somehow we do. Artists, authors, creators, we all practice, define, refine over time, and eventually we come up with maybe not just a single story, but. Many perspectives. Really many stories. Well, anyway, . Enough rambling.

What are the Waves of Focus?

What are the Waves of Focus? Well, it's really about seven different things, honestly, which is probably why I've had such a tough time explaining it.

But I'm gonna break 'em all down here and give 'em to you. One at a time.

One - a Goal

First off, the Waves of Focus is a goal. I've described this transition from being able to move from force -based work to one that is more trust -based, where if we can believe in our own ability to engage things, take things on in our own time, and genuinely believe that, then we won't have to force ourselves to do things.

And when we believe genuinely that we can decide and act of our own accord, we tend to find, play and care, these spirits of mastery and meaningful work.

And these emotions of play and care as we are able to deliver them and find meaningful work connect them to our lives, our intentions, our relationships. It helps us feel alive.

Second - a Philosophy

Secondly, waves of focus is a philosophy that when we force ourselves, it's often because we don't trust ourselves. We drop things, we lose things, we forget things. We stumble through the social world and more.

We lose trust that we can make things happen of our own will. I mean, why would we? We've proven it that we haven't been able to. As an example, I have to act on this thought. While it's on my mind, I have to drop these other things because otherwise I'll lose it.

In this case, we suspend our ability to decide because we don't feel like we can. It's a luxury.

We force ourselves through many methods, many, besides the one I just mentioned. Deadlines, shame, sometimes asking others to be reminders, asking them to take on our agency because we feel we have none.

But if we could restore that trust in our abilities and our skills, in our sense that we could meaningfully, responsibly, be in tune with our own rhythms, where play and care tend to appear, and that felt genuine.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Trust is a feeling, a sense that something will continue to behave as a has been such that it might be relied on. Trust cannot be forced, cannot be willed into being. It's not a decision.

In order to trust ourselves, we have to genuinely believe that we can, for example, set something aside and come back .

Trust grows with agency. Agency is our skill and ability to decide and engage non-reactively. It's where and how we take risks, find, challenge, engage what's meaningful.

I believe it to be the centerpiece of any meaningful productivity. Not action, not, not even the task. Whether you're looking at sport, study, art, leisure, business, whatever the field, the focus is trust grows with agency.

Three - a Metaphor

Alright, first the Waves of Focus is this goal of moving away from force and towards trust and self.

Second, it's a philosophy that practicing a sense of agency could help us get there.

Third, is that the Waves of Focus is a metaphor of experience this boat on the sea of emotions

As wandering minds, we struggle with a constrained, but magnified world. We exist in the now and profoundly so.

The Now exists.

We can't see too far, but what we see is our world, and it looms large. We can explore deeply in this moment and then lose sight of the rest because that is what our lens of consciousness is.

The periphery, the Not Now, the distance beyond that now whether weeks or even seconds away, can feel unreal.

The storms, the winds, desire, regret, worry, demands, urgency, commitments all hit us that much stronger because The Now is our world, as much as those waves may come in from the Not Now this melding blend of dream, fear and fantasy flowing into the moment.

Meanwhile, we must do the things.

It can be difficult to deliberately set sail in any particular direction.

What if I miss something? I really wanna do this, but I need to do that. I don't have the motivation or the interest. How can I do anything?

While we may not trust ourselves, we do trust the power of the winds and waters around us. Urgency, desire, the shiny, the on fire, we can grab onto those.

Four - A Set of Tools

So first the Waves of Focus is this goal moving away from force to trust. Second, a philosophy that our sense of agency is center. Third is this metaphor of a boat in the winds and waters of emotion in which the wandering mind can often feel at the mercy of these elements.

Fourth is that the Waves of Focus is also a set of tools that help us manage, that help us sail in this sea.

There are quite a number of tools within the Waves of Focus, three of which I'm certain you know very well already and these are the calendar, alerts, and pen and paper, though you can substitute digital files if you'd like.

The Waves of Focus gives again a number of additional tools, but three of them probably give it its most unique nature. And these are the anchor, the visit, and the guide. Together with calendar and alerts, pen and paper, these tools create the foundational supports for the Waves of Focus, and they can rest on top of whatever else you use.

The Waves of Focus are not meant to supplant whatever system you've got. Whatever you've been building has been built over a lifetime. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. But rather than replace it, it'd be better to build trust where you can, you know, evolution more than revolution. Strengthen what works, and then maybe plant seeds for what might feel missing.

Five - A Framework

Alright, so first. There's a goal -force to trust. Second, it's a philosophy of agency reigning supreme. Third, it's a metaphor of the boat on water. And fourth, a set of tools.

Fifth, the Waves of Focus is a framework for the relationships that we can address with these tools. There are four relationships,

First is our ability to trust our own decisions . Two is the Now where we relate to our intentions, the things that we are doing. Three, the Not Now where we relate to our past and future selves. And four, the environment. Where we relate to the world around us.

Looking at these in a little more detail, the agency, but again, I know I've mentioned it, but among other things, this is a relationship with ourselves, our emotions, our thoughts, our options, the decision of whether to engage something or not. This is a skill that we develop with practice.

It's this relationship we form in time. The tool that relates most to agency in this course, is that of the anchor . Whenever we feel out of sorts, distracted, scattered, exhausted, we can pause for a moment, give our options a place to rest, choose something and launch.

This gives our. Working memory, rest, so that we can decide with greater clarity.

The better we get at this, the stronger our focus tends to become. We start being able to choose from the winds and waters as to which wave we want to engage.

 Which then leads us to the Now. The Now is our relationship with an intention. Work plays something we sense can be moved from one state to another. We can use the practice of a visit. We would bring it to us or we go to it.

As we approach, we might consider the context and how we can craft it to raise the thresholds against what might distract us and lower them in favor of the directions we do want to go.

Then we could be worried about what about the rabbit trails and procrastination of even doing that. Well, we don't suppress that feeling. We give it a place. Where we can more clearly decide amongst our paths forward. Whatever we decide, it's not impulsive.

We stand at that Edge of Action where it's as easy to take a step forward as it is to step away.

We can sit with frustration, exhaustion, scatter gently, gradually. We can rest our attention. Consider and acknowledge and sometimes even see how the puzzle pieces come together.

In disengaging, we don't force ourselves to stop. Instead, we use project maps to help capture the moment that we're now in. We can create this node between the waves, between the visits, this one and the next.

Every visit we make, every time we disengage, we actually strengthen our next steps forward, giving ourselves energy. Helping our unconscious minds think things through while also clearing our paths elsewhere.  

Six - A Set of Rhythms

And this leads us to the sixth perspective of the Waves of Focus. That it's a set of rhythms.

Every time we show up to an edge of action, we create a visit .

When we can make two visits to the same thing, we have two beats. We have a rhythm.

When we can make regular visits we gather momentum, a blend of motivation and the world aligning.

Past, present, and future selves communicate through desire, demand, worry, confusion, and more. Improving their relationships over time , with every visit starts to smooth the waters. We learn how to respect the present self. We start to care for our future selves. We honor the past selves . Every time we make this visit improves the trust in ourselves and the sense of agency that now is resting on it.

We create rhythms that clear and organize by our standards gently and over time, rather than by some unsustainable binge, or by some prescribed notions, we can take the lists and inboxes that inevitably decay around us and transform them to better support us rather than feel enslaved by them.

Beyond the two beats in the rhythm are multiple rhythms . Let's say we have two projects, two streams of visits going .

You can touch each one and be done by 8:00 AM or you could dive deep into any one , however you feel in that day, in that moment.

They could compliment each other, each allowing rest or support from the other,

Imagine being able to have an idea and relatively easily know where it would best wait for you, such that it respects your sense of agency, your time, your working memory, what you trust you can get to, and your emotional state when you get there.

Developing that trust over time is the guide.

Typically I see the structure of a guide as evolving into three components. One is the engaged. These are about one to three things that we're visiting perhaps daily, that are new and developing, emotionally charged, whether with worry or joy and all the blended worlds in between, it's somehow this vanguard of change in our lives.

Then there's the steady. These are those things that we've worked in ready to be part of the days, the weeks, the months,

and thirdly, there's a small handful of things that we'd like to get to. Waiting for a spot to open

Together with practice , this guide can function as a central hub to our attention network .

Seven - a Practice

There are more exercises and nooks and crannies I didn't quite get into, but that's the overview. Which leads us into the final bit practice. The waves of focus as a practice is this arrangement of exercises such that you can grow the skills at your pace.

Picking up the smallest pieces and then growing those over time, such they build on each other. You know, it doesn't make sense, for example, to take on an inbox if you don't trust that you can  show up to one without screaming.

Final Thoughts

So the waves of focus are not about forcing us to do anything. It's about standing at the edge of the water, maybe with our feet in the pool and considering from this depth of self, what would we like to do, if anything at all? What makes sense in the world of desire, responsibility, and more in this moment? Does it make sense to stare at the clouds?

Or maybe it's about being ready to set sail and see what's out there.  

Music - "The Dust Cleared"

Frank Zappa once called Music wiggling air molecules. Music itself is a series of waves flowing through air to caress or crash into our eardrums. I like the idea of music as a series of waves. Today's piece is an improvisation, a flow of its own sort. It's called the Dust Cleared, and I hope you enjoy it.