Ever feel lost at the starting line, waiting for motivation or urgency to nudge you into action? In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we break through the myth that productivity is just about interest or deadlines and instead explore the deeper role of trust—trust in oneself, in emotions, and in the gentle rhythms of daily life.

Discover how acknowledging your questions and fears can open the door to meaningful engagement rather than forceful productivity. Learn to nurture agency as you’d cultivate a delicate plant—growing your ability gently, with care and play, instead of harsh deadlines or rigid routines.

Key Takeaways

• Practice pausing with kindness to heal the injured trust beneath procrastination and overwhelm.
• Embrace agency as the starting point for guided growth, letting agency serve as your compass in emotional storms.
• Replace forceful tactics with playful, mindful rituals that support reliable starts and creative fulfillment.

Enjoy this episode’s original piano composition, "Snow," weaving gentle three-four rhythms in C minor—a musical reflection of trust and play in motion.

Subscribe now and visit rhythmsoffocus.com for more tools to nurture your wandering mind.

Keywords: #ADHD #WanderingMinds #agency #mindfulness #gentleproductivity #trustyourself #creativegrowth #emotionalresilience #playfulfocus #RhythmsOfFocus

Transcript

I just can't get started. Oh, but once I can, I'm good to go. It's a familiar refrain from many a wandering mind. Sometimes we work strong. The stars align whether by deadline or unknown, stumble, spark of novelty. Somehow we find ourselves in a deep dive.

In the immortal words of the Talking Heads, David Byrne, you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?  

Trust over Interest

Too often we say it's all about interest or urgency, something shiny or on fire. We throw up our hands and say, "without these we can't do anything."

But there's so much more going on than simply interest. Interest, after all, is a deeply complex emotion. In fact, it may be more about an injured sense of trust within ourselves.

The word "trust" itself might seem boring. We hear it so often, seems to have lost all meaning. I've said it before, but I'll say it again.

Trust is a sense of feeling that something will continue to behave as it has been, such that it might be relied upon.

It is a vital, vital concept that creates structure. Even words themselves. Our words exist because we feel that they will continue to behave as they have been within the ecology of the worlds in which we live inside and out.

What do I mean by trust when it comes to play and work?

A Few Examples

Well, let's take an example. Let's say you see someone schedule themselves to do a thing from four to 5:00 PM. Four o'clock comes around, they sit down and they do it. What's the magic? It doesn't seem like we can do that. What happens if we don't feel like it? The feeling of even "feeling like it" is deeply complex.

Wandering minds often face multiple worries each, and evidence of the loss of trust in ourselves.

For example, let's say we try to set something at four o'clock and we might wonder a whole series of questions:

how am I gonna feel when that time comes? What will I be in the middle of? Would I be able to stop if I got started? Would I be able to get back if I need to set it aside? Would I even know what to do if I started? And what if I don't? What if other things come up while I'm working? Will I even realize it? Would I miss yet another important matter? What if I run off on a thousand tangents in the meantime? And many other possibilities...

Now, this is just about a thing at four o'clock. There's many other types of work, not to mention, balancing various things that we've got going on in our lives. Each of these questions have fears within them.

For example, "would I be able to get back to it if I need to set it aside?" Well, here we might wind up creating another pile that's incomplete.

Each of these questions have a fear within them,

 if there weren't, it's because we would already have the trust we needed. The questions themselves wouldn't come up. But the questions as they are unanswered, bog us down, or perhaps we've answered them in some negative sense and we don't even wanna look at them, in which case we can't even engage. Each of these are evidence that this is not just about interest, but of an injured trust in ourselves.

Years of experience have taught us that things can go very wrong very quickly. Why start?    

Obligations Remain, So We Rely on Force

Unclear of what to do. We still have to make things happen. So until that hope for day that we can engage without fuss or that desire or that urgency or whatever will get us there, we rely on force using methods to induce those sorts of feelings.

Maybe we wait for deadlines. Maybe we wait until we feel like it. We hyper schedule our calendar beyond any developed practice. I've already talked about how scheduling one thing can be a problem. Here we make it even worse.

Leveraging the shame of past failures, yelling at ourselves verbally through post-it notes, through overburdened task lists. Ask others to remind us giving up our agency, tricking ourselves through hacks like false deadlines that we already know aren't real. Reminding ourselves again and again to "just start" forcing ourselves to stay in it while we're there. Either of those can make it worse for the next time that we wanna start, because those, I don't want our feelings grow even stronger.

Each of these are methods of force because we don't trust ourselves.

And while these sometimes work, they're often painful, unreliable, and create further problems down the line, including making those, "I don't wanna feelings" stronger.

Not the least of which, there's also the problem that when we use these, we effectively tell ourselves that we are untrustworthy because these are the only ways that we've found that work.

What We Don't Trust

But what is it that we don't trust? We don't trust that there are other waves of emotion that we can ride, besides urgency.

Could we engage if we, for example, don't feel like it. That doesn't mean we ignore those feelings. Quite the contrary, the exercise becomes one of agency: that ability to decide and engage non reactively.

Maybe we don't even act. Maybe we decide we don't want to do it. But if we can do that from this place of centeredness, where we've considered the feelings and what's going on, well now we are acting in a place that feels meaningful to us.

The injury to trust is also the injury to agency. We scaffold that sense by pausing, that magic button, that most difficult thing, the thing that's hard to remember to do.

But once we can try, once we get there, on those rare occasions, perhaps- if we can practice something that feels useful, meaningful, if we can be able to start to nourish those gentle tendrils of trust, maybe in a wave of play or care, we might be that much more likely to pause again, that's the practice. That pause is what starts to heal, or at least answers some aspect of these questions of ability and competency.

Bravery in Growing Trust

It takes a certain bravery and we can be brave without being reckless. We don't wanna throw ourselves at a task become yet another method by which we attempt force injure ourselves further. We don't grow a plant by pulling it upwards until it uproots. We don't develop our muscles by benchpressing 300 pounds when we've never done it before.

We grow trust as we would something gently through time and care. I tend to use the tools of anchoring, regular visits, a visit guide. These sorts of things that I may mention here and there I talk about in other episodes, it may not be enough to simply tell you that these exist, and the reason is because it takes practice.

There's a growth to developing trust in yourself because it's a living thing.

The seeds of play, for example, this powerful force for learning mastery, meaningful work- stirs in those windows of challenge, sometimes light, sometimes strong. Too much. We're overwhelmed, too little we're bored.

When we can allow ourselves to simply be in that visit with the work where we can walk away at any time, it lets us connect in those deeper emotional levels where the trust needs to build, where those questions I mentioned earlier, all evidence in the tendrils of growth. It helps to better find those windows, those trellis peeking out at the light.

For a monotronic, myopic, magnified mind- a wandering mind- either emotion can swallow as whole as strong emotions can.

Check out episode 14 for more on how I expand the idea of a monotropic mind. But when we can, let's say leverage play, we can find the root of it as we're sitting there, even if we didn't have it to begin with as we approached, we might be able to find a feedback loop within it.

A World Opens

When we can trust ourselves to find those seeds, the world starts to open up. The heavy fog of impossibility begins to lift. We can not only be on top of our work, we can start more reliably getting to things that matter to us, feel more confidence in our visions and how we develop them and even improve our relationships.

We garden that spirit through risk and bravery, and we do so in a kind considered way.

Music - "Snow"

Staring up to the sky. As the snow falls down, I think we can feel a sense of play between the flakes of snow and the wind. There's something whimsical in the blend of three- four time and a minor key, which is what I think tries to capture this idea. Today's piece of music is called Snow. It's in C minor.

Hope you enjoy it.