Hello, and welcome back to Wreaking More Joy, I’m Janette Dalgliesh; and in this season, Rekindle, we’re exploring how women can reconnect with and reclaim the joy of fulfilling our purpose in the world, whatever that might be.
Today, I want to talk about focus, because there is so much going on in the world right now.
We’ve got a bunch of stuff happening in Australia. We had a big hate crime happened in Bondi Beach, we’ve got fires in my state.
We’ve got a lot of stuff going on in The United States, a lot of stuff going on in Europe and all around the world, so it can feel really overwhelming.
And I want to share a mantra that sits front and center in my home office.
It’s the one that maybe has helped me perhaps more than any other over the past few years, particularly in the context of my still feeling the joy of showing up, whether things are going right or wrong, and whatever happens to be going on around me.
It is liberation through constraint.
I literally have it written on a big chalkboard in my office.
This is founded on the concept that my attention, my energy, and my focus are precious resources, and I should be the one to say how they are expended.
When I remember this mantra, it regularly helps me to replace burnout, compassion, fatigue, and exhaustion with compassion, and that leads me to be better at my job, have more joy, and have sufficient energy to engage with the activism that is also an essential part of my life.
It’s founded upon this concept that it is my right to author my own constraint, to choose my limitations, to decide when and where I say no and when and where I say yes.
And some of what I’m about to say and share with you probably won’t come as a surprise.
But I just wanted us to all kind of get on the same page with this, because we live in a culture that is obsessed with freedom, with options, with limitless possibility; and is also simultaneously underpinned by multiple systems that seek to control and limit us in both very grand and very subtle ways - systems that say only certain people have access to freedoms and limitless opportunities. And that’s a whole big discussion for some later conversations.
Today, I just want to focus in on this, focus in on, pun unintended, focus in on our relationship with our own work, that place where we want to experience the joy of purpose fulfilled.
Because in this space, infinite choice is like water. It is absolutely essential for daily life, but too much of it in the wrong place, like a lung, will kill you.
So we live inside this story that says more options equals more freedom. More input equals more intelligence. More responsiveness equals more competence or more connection.
On top of that, women are regularly praised for being adaptable, available, responsive, emotionally attuned, endlessly flexible, and biologically designed for multitasking.
So I’m going to start with debunking that last one because fairly recent research has shown that human brains don’t actually multitask. Instead, what happens is our brain “task hop”.
It switches extremely rapidly between multiple tasks so that it feels like we’re doing them all at the same time. But actually, they’re doing all of this switching back and forth, and it’s a huge drain on our energy.
And we aren’t necessarily conscious of that drain while we’re doing it, because we’re sort of ‘in the moment’, so we don’t realize just how much it can contribute to exhaustion.
Sometimes it’s essential, like when you’re cooking a meal and you’re paying attention to multiple different factors within the process.
We can do it for short periods of time, but making it the core of a working day, that’s not sustainable, and it’s the enemy of joy, so we want to make sure we’re aware of any points in the day where we might habitually be trying to multitask, instead of giving our brain the gift of a single focus.
And it can be tricky because we’ve been so rewarded. We’ve been made to feel soooooo special, because ‘women are so good at multitasking’, that sometimes we can resent any attempt to kind of take it away from us; we can resent a suggestion to do things differently.
But a single focus is our friend.
You might have heard about the concept of flow. This is a phenomenon described by social theorist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, described as being ‘completely absorbed in an activity in a way that leads to deep enjoyment, peak performance, and a loss of self-consciousness and time perception’.
It’s this feeling of being in the zone, or in the groove, where we are so focused that we are enjoying whatever we’re doing. And we usually enjoy it regardless of how much we’re being paid for it, what else is happening around us, what else might be going on in the world.
If we can find these moments of flow, it’s so valuable - but it’s fragile.
There’s more research that shows that when we are in flow, if we get interrupted, say by a phone call, a phone notification, a phone pinging all day, or by a colleague who wants to chat about last night’s episode of Stranger Things, it takes 23 minutes on average to get back to the depth of flow, the immersion that you were previously in.
And if your brain is the least bit neuro-spicy, your relationship with flow and task hopping and focus can be even more challenging, because how you do focus might not look like so-called ‘normal’.
The good news is that when your brain is supported to choose focus, rather than being pulled in 20 different directions, we can reliably predict that you’ll experience some of the following outcomes:
* better productivity
* faster mental processing
* enhanced memory processing
* more access to creativity
* increased problem solving abilities
* less exhaustion
* stabilized energy
Each one of those increases our capacity for joy.
And here’s the thing, focus isn’t about discipline or willpower, and it isn’t about how one is ‘supposed to’ do it, especially if your brain is neuro-spicy.
It means a process of experimentation and learning, and while this is not my area of expertise - all the different possible ways to get focused - there is a ton of help out there. And I do know that one person’s ideal aid to focus is another person’s anathema.
For example, when I want to get focused on particular tasks, I have to leave my home and go work in a place where there’s a bit of background hum: a cafe with carpet on the floor so it’s a background hum, or the local library. Complete silence makes me really tense, and it distracts me if I feel on edge all the time.
Being at home is full of domestic distractions. My eye lands on the curtains that need laundering, or I notice the pantry door that I forgot to close, so my brain has to stop and make a decision: do I go and close the pantry door or do I finish this task I’m on?
Whether I get up and go and close the door or not, it’s still a distraction. It’s a cognitive load for my brain. So for those particular tasks, I leave home so that I can stay focused.
But there are some other tasks that I have to be at home for, because there are certain comforts within my home environment that make it easy for me to focus on those tasks.
It took me years to figure this out. Most of that time was taken with me getting off the myth that someone else would have my perfect solution for focus, and then it took some trial and error to play with what works and what doesn’t: some observation, and some playing with different solutions, and letting go of any judgment.
Because I remember years ago when I first discovered that for a particular task, I did it best in a noisy-ish cafe. I was sharing this with a colleague and she poo-pooed the idea. She was really against it!
She said, ‘no, no, no, you can’t possibly concentrate like that!’ She was so sure of herself that I second-guessed myself and decided ‘I must be wrong, it can’t possibly be a good way to focus, what’s wrong with me?’
And of course, what’s wrong was that I was listening to her instead of listening to my guidance.
So … focus, this sense of self-authored constraint, is all about how the brain allocates energy.
Your brain is expensive to run. It uses about 20% of your body’s total energy, so it has evolved to be highly, highly efficient. That means it likes to prioritize, to filter, to create sequence, to observe, to notice patterns very quickly, and it likes to complete things.
When your brain knows what matters right now, the part that is responsible for planning and insight and creativity and meaning - the prefrontal cortex here at the front of the brain - comes online more fully.
But when everything around you feels equally important or equally urgent, your brain struggles to prioritize, so it defaults to threat management as the highest priority; and that puts you on edge.
What focus does is to tell your brain ‘we are safe enough right now to concentrate on this thing’.
And that feeling of safety is an essential ingredient in joy; feeling that sense of, ‘oh, I know what I’m focusing on right now’ - that’s a gateway to joy.
And context matters a lot.
Focus can often seem more difficult for women to acquire, because we have been socially conditioned to attend to the needs of others, we get rewarded for emotional labor, we get punished for saying no, or for having too many demands (how dare we?!), and we get criticized for being selfish or single-minded.
Women who are single-minded are often categorized as cold or relentless, which is good in a man, bad in a woman, apparently [insert sarcastic tone here!]
As a result, many of us have never learned to protect our focus - not because we’re incapable of it, but because it’s been socially dangerous to do so.
We have to become really gentle with ourselves, if we feel that focus is difficult. We have to remember that this is not inherently a character flaw in us, we are not broken.
It’s just that we’ve been trained to step away from focus, because focus might be dangerous.
I want us to think about something really important here.
We tend to think of focus as being a productivity hack, something that makes us more useful and makes us achieve things faster. And that concept feeds into this whole capitalist b******t culture, that says a human being’s value is based on how useful they can be and how much profit they can produce for themselves, or more often for the boss.
I want us to come from a much more compassionate and self-valuing mindset.
I want us to think about focus as being an act of glorious sovereignty: deliberate focus, because I can. And it starts with making some foundational decisions such as:
* I decide what matters to me. Nobody else gets to decide that. That in itself is a powerful expression of sovereignty.
* I decide what gets the precious resource of my energy, and how much. This one was incredibly useful to me in managing my relationship with social media, because I began to notice more and more how social media platforms were so powerfully designed to capture my attention and I had lost my sovereignty. These days, it’s much easier for me to say, absolutely no, I am not coming to play with you, Mark Zuckerberg or whoever, because I get to decide this is a precious resource and I’m here to protect it.
* I decide what I am and am not responsible for.
Those three decisions give your nervous system permission to kind of settle in and then decide where your focus is going to lie.
And of course, if you’ve spent a long time stuck inside these old patterns of not feeling like you could say no, or not knowing how to allocate your energy, these decisions can feel a little tricky; so you wanna be really kind to yourself as you’re bringing them online.
Within the container of these three overarching decisions, inside of that container, you get to make a whole bunch of other decisions about what is a match for who you are and how your life is right now.
For example, if you’re responsible for a brand new tiny infant, of course her thriving matters to you! That means she will most likely get the bulk of your energy for a time, and you will interrupt yourself to attend to her needs.
If you have a client who wants to get your attention outside the terms of your agreement with them, you get to decide on a case-by-case basis whether you want to provide your energy in that way for that particular person.
If you’re seeing too much out there calling for your attention in the world, you can choose how you focus your energy to support those causes that you care about the most, because that focus makes you more potent towards that particular cause. There are going to be millions of people bringing their focus to the other causes that you care about as well, and trusting in that is part of this work as well.
If your phone keeps pinging, with notifications, you can choose differently. You can delete social media apps from your phone. You can decide how you’re going to manage this.
And here’s a really juicy bit of brain science to help make the idea of focus even more enjoyable.
The research shows that when we give our brains time to chew over something - a problem, a task, a line of thought - the brain releases dopamine not at the start, but during the engagement.
It doesn’t have to wait for the end.
This explains why task hopping can feel really flat, because it’s shallow. When we don’t allow ourselves to get fully into flow, it feels flat.
It’s why doom scrolling is ultimately unsatisfying. We do get a dopamine hit, but not the kind that our brains are craving.
And it also explains why deep work, even when it’s challenging, can feel really nourishing because we immerse ourselves in it.
Joy is not only found in the celebration of an accomplishment, which is what we talked about in the last episode; joy is also a byproduct of giving ourselves permission to carve out the time to go into flow, into immersion.
And immersion requires boundaries, which brings us to this concept of constraint.
Not all limits are the same, obviously. There is a huge difference between constraints imposed upon us by unjust systems, and constraints that we choose in order to protect what matters.
These self-authored constraints tell your brain, ‘I know where we’re going and you can trust me’, and your brain loves that. Your brain will go, ‘oh, what a relief! I’m not having to make endless decisions all day, we’ve made the decision already and I know what I’m doing’.
Here are some examples of self-authored constraint:
Dropping some things from your basket of things that you’re going to care about this year or this month. You can let them wait, or you may even decide that eventually that they’re not for you anyway
When you’re setting up your plans for the day, your to-do list, stick to the maximum three key things you’re going to do. I really like to try and limit myself to 1 or 2 core priorities, and then I can add extras if I have the time and the energy. That feels much better than having a list that’s long enough to choke a horse, and looking at it and managing to only pick off 2 things and feeling completely inadequate by the end of it.
[One tip that I find incredibly useful, which is more about managing to-do lists than about constraint, but I want to give it to you anyway, because it’s a really good one: when you put something on your to-do list, instead of writing the thing itself, like write a new webpage or make a new offer, put ‘work on…’ at the front of it. For example: ‘work on writing a new webpage’, ‘work on creating the new offer’ - when you’re working on something, you don’t have to complete it, and that also brings a sense of relief]
Say no to work that dilutes your energy. Be awake to those moments where you’re likely to find yourself doing an enormous amount of work for very little outcome - for example, the very lengthy reply to an email that doesn’t really advance the conversation in any way, shape or form. Or the lengthy reply to a troll on Facebook - there’s no point, just delete and block.
And if you can’t say no to something, embrace the possibility of doing it less perfectly. There’s a favourite saying from one of my mentors, Lisa Hayes, which is ‘launch at 80%’. We are so habituated to doing things at 120%, because we’ve got to constantly prove ourselves, we forget that we’re allowed to do it at less. Our 80% is quite honestly, some other people’s 120%. So trust that your 80% is not just good enough, it is excellent.
Choose to focus on incoming information that actually matters to you. This is where being very alert to how we manage our incoming social media information and news information is really, really critical. We can either create a container of time (I will spend 20 minutes checking the news and that’s it), or we can limit the number of platforms (instead of having 6 social media platforms, I will just have one), however it works for you. It’s your energy that is being sucked into places like social media platforms and news outlets, because they’re all doing it in order to sell advertising to you. Instead of allowing your energy to be simply kind of hoovered up by all of these platforms, create a finite container for your attention.
This isn’t restriction. This is orientation.
You are not restricting yourself. You are orienting yourself.
And this is where our old friend from the last episode, Saturn, comes into his own.
If you remember in the last episode, he’s a fabulous ally for celebration. He is also a fabulous ally for constraint.
He’s known as the Lord of Limitations.
And in our freedom loving world, he’s been mythologized as harsh or punitive or joyless, but Saturn’s genius at constraint represents structure: structure that makes mastery possible.
And your self-authored constraint is made out of this energy; that’s what it’s built from.
It functions like the concrete launch pad beneath a Saturn V rocket. Without that concrete pad, the rocket doesn’t fly at all; it just sprays fire and fuel all over the ground and probably falls over.
It’s the pad that allows the rocket to escape Earth’s gravity.
This structure that we see embodied in Saturn is not about limiting freedoms, it’s about enabling escape velocity.
And your brain will respond to that kind of structure with relief.
Here’s a simple practice you can try this week.
* Choose one small area of your work and notice how you feel in your body when you think about doing it
* First of all, ask yourself, what would focus look like here? What would I include and what would I exclude? And then ask, what am I willing to stop doing in order to protect that focus? Not forever, maybe just for now. So it might be, I’m willing to put my phone in airplane mode while I focus on getting that podcast recorded. Or it might be, I’m willing to snooze that very distracting Facebook user that keeps getting my attention. Or it might be, I’m willing to have the awkward conversation with that colleague who keeps wanting to chatter all day long.
* Spend a moment imagining that you’ve already made the decision to be the authority in your life and that you have committed to that focused care, that tending of your focus, your attention.
* Notice what it feels like in your body when you make that decision and you know it’s made and there’s no more second guessing. Many women will report feeling calmer or clearer, lighter, less resentful, more in control, even a sense of eager anticipation, even before you’ve made any concrete physical changes. Just imagine what it might be like to have that constraint, that self-authored constraint at play protecting you. Just imagine what it feels like.
If you felt any of those positive things, welcome to your nervous system responding to coherence.
And if you felt a sense of, ‘oh, but how on earth could I ever do any of this?’, we’ll be talking more about these kinds of things in later episodes. For now, you can try practicing the mantra, ‘it is safe for me to be the authority in my life’.
It is safe for me to be the authority in my life. Keep practicing it until it really sinks into your bones.
Liberation doesn’t come from doing everything or from constantly having to decide between a whole big smorgasbord of stuff. It comes from choosing what matters most and letting the rest fall away.
Focus is not a failure of ambition; it’s the structure that allows ambition to become really satisfying.
Constraint, when chosen, is not oppression; it is self-authority.
And Saturn can be one of your best allies for the joy that lives inside that self-authority.
Thank you for spending this time with me. In the next episode, we’ll continue exploring how women can reclaim joy, agency, and sustainability in our working lives without losing ourselves in the process.
Until then, shiny ones, I’m sending you all the good vibes for protecting your focus, trusting your chosen limits, and boosting your joy.
PS if you want to experience Saturn as your ally for celebration and joy, be sure to check out Rekindle Ep 3 and enjoy! - https://janettedalgliesh.substack.com/p/rekindle-ep-3-the-joy-of-excellence
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