In today’s episode of Rhythms of Focus, we how motivation can seem to slip away when someone else's "should" enters the equation.

Why do wandering minds rebel against orders?

How does honoring our unique mental rhythms restore our sense of agency, especially when ADHD shapes our day to day.

Takeaways:

• Recognize the subtle ways internalized authority undermines our drive—and how to gently reclaim it
• Practice strategies for honoring our past, present, and future selves to smooth task transitions
• Reframe lists and routines as creative allies rather than rigid overseers

This episode features our original contemplative piano piece, “Shallow Breath,” designed to accompany your mindful moments.

Subscribe and join our compassionate community at rhythmsoffocus.com—let’s transform productivity into an art, not a struggle.

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#ADHD #WanderingMinds #Agency #MindfulProductivity #Neurodivergent #FocusStrategies #SelfCompassion #CreativeProductivity #TaskTransitions #RhythmsOfFocusTranscript

Transcript

 I might just might do the dishes now. Oh my goodness, I'm getting up. I'm walking over to the dishes. I'm gonna do it.

Suddenly a voice calls from the other room. Hey, you haven't done the dishes in a while. When are you gonna do them?

Uh, I don't feel like doing them anymore. What just happened?

 Sometimes we're right about to do a thing with our own volition. And somebody else suddenly says, Hey, go do the thing, and suddenly our desire to do it is gone. Our sense of agency was, in a sense, attacked wittingly or otherwise. Our hero already struggling with a want of motivation. Whim, or the muse finally had the winds tickling the sails.

When someone else told them to do the very same thing, the desire was gone. Many of us struggle with being told what to do.

Some blame dopamine. There's not enough. It's outta balance. It isn't interesting or urgent enough. Some make a moral accusation of laziness and the like.

However, when we approach from perspective our ourselves as growing human beings, you might recognize an early template at work. When our environments tell us what to do in this out of tune manner, in some way that doesn't quite recognize where we are, we might reject it.

Clean your room when our minds are elsewhere. When any process of transition is ignored rather than guided, doesn't work, it often creates problems.

The lack of empathy may not have been malicious. It was simply a disengaged approach to a mind that wanders, a mind fueled by, and reveling in play, creativity and discovery.

It may not even have been possible. The transition simply too long in whatever the scope of what needed to happen.

But when these things happen over and over, we absorb this message that our natural mental rhythms are somehow wrong, contrasting with the self that clearly exists, regardless of how wrong we accuse it of being and so we rebel.

Unfortunately, we may internalize the rebellion as well, forming a form of reflex, an unconscious ready path of rejection. We rebel against ourselves. The authority within.

How often have you written, write report, or some similar item on a task list? Only to see it later and then say, well, "not now."

Later. Continues to be later, as later always does, and the task languishes until it sinks below the surface or a deadline threatens from the horizon. We saw our past self as this unempathic authority to reject. When we see the task "do dishes" and the like, our emotions swell reflecting the relationships we've internalized.

Without a simultaneous honoring of our past self, caring for our future selves and respect for our present self, we channel and perpetuate the injuries. Our tasks, lists, and shiny new apps only become the medium.

Music - "Shallow Breath"

 Today's piece of music is a quiet, contemplative one. It's called shallow breath. I hope you enjoy it. 

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