Derived from a client interaction last week:
He came in trying to “get back on track” with building his product because he thought he was distracted and lacking discipline. What was he doing instead? Building the roadmap until the next raise for his startup. He hit flow doing something that was productive and also necessary. But then he got in his own way, and casted self-judgment that he’s being a “bad founder.” He knocked himself out of flow and wound up building neither product nor roadmap.
I reflected and learned that not just this client but many people I work with assume that oscillating between modes or tasks is inherently suboptimal or bad. They assume that it’s better to stick to one thing without deviation until the mission is accomplished.
I think these assumptions are rooted in the belief that we can exert complete control over ourselves. Although we can argue that we have influence over our thinking and behaviour, we can humbly admit that we are dependent or at the mercy of what we feel and think.
Oscillating feels suboptimal in accomplishing a large goal because it threatens the consistency and therefore compounding that we know leads to powerful results. Baked into our planning is some agenda or bias of how we should be operating.
The core tension created with the assumption that oscillating is bad, is between how we think we should feel and how we actually feel. There is dissonance between the world in our head and reality.
We end up fighting reality when we don’t listen to what our feelings are trying to tell us. This fight, this tension, is extremely energy draining and is the thing that actually leads to the suboptimal state we were worried would be caused by oscillating between modes.
The people I work with are both high functioning and deeply creative. They strive to produce excellent work, meaning work that is rigorous (which involves single-minded focus) and unique (which involves creativity).
What makes this tricky is that creativity is strongly based on feeling, and feelings are dynamic. They change in a way that seasons change, where there is a particular theme for a period of time, but then they move on and transform into what is relevant based on its new reality both inwards and outwards.
What if we listen to what our feelings are trying to guide us toward? Following our feelings can take us into deep work that matters, but we didn’t think mattered until our feelings took us there.
Harnessing my feelings is how I got around to writing this.
Last time I wrote on Substack? Oh man, I legit can’t remember. Maybe last winter. I was really enjoying writing at that time, but then that feeling vanished. I was confused and worried that I may never feel like writing again, which means I’ll have to effort my way into it. But for the last few years, my whole experiment has been to replace effortful discipline with effortless intuition, so I let it be.
I oscillated between writing about the work and doing the actual work. I got obsessed with finding patterns within each client’s work, but also across clients. I’ve been formalizing specific methods and tactics that were previously undefined. It’s been fun.
And then suddenly this week, I’ve been really been feeling like writing. What that actually means is my mind has naturally gravitated toward writing ideas, like my thoughts have increasingly been in a “writing” type format.
Letting myself oscillate between modes well beyond writing and coaching has meant less friction, and therefore more energy efficiency and joy.
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