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 broke
