He told me he wanted to get better at time blocking but that wasn’t the real issue.
It was his first coaching call ever. I asked him, “If I had a magic lamp and could grant you one wish for today’s call, what would it be?”
He thought about it. Then he said: “I want to get better at following my schedule. Can you help me get better at time blocking?”
This isn’t an uncommon answer. I’ve heard a version of this hundreds of times. And I’ve learned that when someone says they need help following their schedule, they actually want something else. Control.
They want to feel in control of their thoughts, their emotional states, their actions. They want to feel like they’re living their own life. In a word, they want agency. Agency is the degree of control we feel we possess over our decisions, our behaviors, and our emotional states. When someone says they’re struggling with time, they’re almost always describing a loss of agency. The calendar is a symptom.
I asked him a series of questions and we eventually landed on the root cause.
“Do you mind if I share with you what I think you’re really dealing with here?”
“Sure.”
“I understand you struggle with following your schedule but that’s just the symptom. What you really struggle with is impulse control. Any truth to that?”
“I mean, I would say that, yes… That’s probably part of my whole life. You nailed it. I don’t just shut it down and do what I know is the right path. I do what I want to do for that quick dopamine hit.”
Here’s what I’ve found after years of these conversations. People don’t have a focus problem. They have an impulse control problem. We must learn to develop impulse control. But here’s where people get it wrong all the time. We think it’s willpower. It’s not. It’s our environment.
We have built lives where distraction is the default, notifications, social media, the constant pull of whatever is loudest, and then we wonder why we can’t stay with anything long enough for it to matter.
The world is not neutral about your attention. Every app, every platform, every notification is engineered by some of the smartest people alive with one goal: interrupt you. And they’re good at it.
I told him that later in our call.
“The thing is, there’s always a moment. You sit down with the intention to lead generate, to reach out to your sphere. There’s a moment right there where your intention becomes an instead. Instead I’m on the phone with a current client. Instead I’m down the hall helping an agent. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yeah… you’ve seen this before.”
“Even lived it a little bit.”
That moment, the space between intention and instead, is where focus either lives or dies. Trying to do the most important work when you have a million tabs, your phone ringing, and checking social media is planting a cucumber seed in concrete. Your focus can’t survive in that environment.
Focus isn’t something you summon. It’s something you protect. And protection requires design.
You cannot plant a seed in cement and be surprised when nothing grows. At some point you have to look down and ask whether the ground itself is the problem.
So before you download another app or build another morning routine, do one thing. Audit your environment. Look at where you work, when you work, what’s within reach when you sit down. Ask what your space is actually rewarding.
Most people never ask that question.
Your attention is the most valuable thing you own. The world knows that. Do you?
live freed,
Jordan
Comments +