Most productivity advice treats distraction like an enemy to defeat. Block it out. Push through. Focus harder. But what if that fight itself is part of the problem?

In this episode, I talk with Kevin Lacroix, a meditation teacher and trainer who's spent over a decade studying how attention actually works—not how we think it should work. Kevin studied with renowned teachers Jeff Warren and Shinzen Young, and now teaches others using Shinzen's Unified Mindfulness system.

Kevin started meditating back in 2010 because he was caught in that familiar trap so many of us know: feeling like he needed to be constantly busy and overtasked just to validate his existence.

Here's what struck me most from our conversation: After a decade of meditation, Kevin doesn't necessarily experience fewer distractions—he's just learned to let them flow through without losing his concentration. Think about that. Instead of building a fortress of focus, he's developed the ability to stay focused while distractions come and go.

We dig into three skills that actually matter for doing deeply focused work—concentration, sensory clarity, and something called equanimity, which Kevin describes as the ability to let experience flow without fighting it. We talk about why cognitively demanding work feels so hard (hint: it's not the work itself), why boredom might be more interesting than you think, and how to find rest even while you're running—literally or figuratively.

For anyone feeling like their attention is more fragile than ever, or wondering whether there's a way to focus that doesn't feel like constant mental wrestling, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on what concentration can be.

*** LINKS ***

Kevin’s bio: https://unifiedmindfulness.com/trainers/kevin-lacroix/

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