I’m launching Attentional Copiloting sessions! tldr: Within an hour, go from stuckness to flow to joy on your most important work Origin story: In 2023, I was in an intense period of burnout, and I was procrastinating much more than usual. I had this one project - important but not urgent - that I'd been putting off for literal months. It was generating constant background anxiety, eating away at me. I'd tried my usual tools. Focusmate gave me accountability but I could still find ways to avoid during the session - checking email, doing "research," anything but the actual task. The emotional resistance was still there underneath, and there were “good” reasons to justify doing other work. My IFS therapist helped me see and even clear the underlying patterns, but it didn’t translate to actually doing the work days later. Out of desperation, I paid an IFS coach friend to simply sit on Zoom with me to do IFS while I actually pulled up the Google doc and did it. We started by outlining the task, and I vocalized my sense of dread as it came up. She helped me work with and regulate each wave of resistance. When I got stuck or wanted to pull up twitter, I paused and vocalized my sensations. When shame came up, we worked with the parts. By the end of the hour, I actually finished the thing with far more flow, far less suffering, and (surprisingly) a sense of joy! That experience gave me an unlock: skilled emotional attunement during the actual work was key, not simply talking about it before or after. By actually applying my contemplative practice while working, I could catch and work with patterns as they emerged. I’ve simmered on this idea for the last year and a half. I ran a bunch of experiments on doing this myself and with groups. I co-wrote an essay about “emotions and knowledge work” and ran a workshop at the SF Commons. Surprisingly, I leveled up my work ethic, overall conscientiousness, agency. As a result, I became an early hire at @jhanatech and @odysseypbc ! Intermittently, I've experimented with this modality by guiding people into flow on the hardest things they've been avoiding: responding to that one fucking email they've let sit for weeks; preparing for a big pitch that filled them with dread; even filing taxes (which turned into a deeper conversation about commitment to libertarian ideals). They’ve all repeatedly said I helped them reduce their suffering on work they would’ve continued delaying without me. I’m now on sabbatical and offering this to others! We'll settle into more somatic presence and bring up the task. We’ll outline the steps, tracking any resistance and nervous system activation throughout. I’ll work with it in real-time in a way informed by IFS and Motivational Interviewing. You’ll verbally “note” your experience, bringing up whenever you’d like to move from the task’s content to untangling emotional context. By the end, you’ll have much more done with much less suffering. More info and booking link in the next tweet!
