I’ve worked with many managers and leaders searching for the same thing: they want to feel locked in, absorbed and focused (sometimes obsessively). They want that version of themselves that loses track of time, that solves problems effortlessly, that is “in the zone”.
I was talking with a client recently who described her frustration somewhat in this way:
“I know I can do deep work. I’ve felt it. There are days when I’m completely in it, totally absorbed, and at the end of the day I realise I’ve done more good thinking in three hours than I usually do in a week. I want more of that. So I’ve been reading about it, trying to create the conditions for it, protecting my calendar, using focus apps. But if anything, I feel less focused than before. It’s like I’m trying to catch something that only shows up when I’m not looking.”
She’s not alone. More and more people now are chasing this focus/deep/flow state, often through biohacking, morning routines or by changing their environment. And I get it, people want to feel lit up by their work. Fully present and undistracted. Me too!
But the challenge is: why does it seem so hard to get there on purpose?
What that state actually is
When you look at those moments when you are genuinely absorbed, what’s actually happening in your mind?
I bet you’re not trying harder. You’re not forcing your attention or plowing through with more work. If you look at it, you might notice that actually, the noise in your head (the list of things you haven’t done, the worry about making a mistake, the sense of urgency) has quietened. And in that quieter space, something else starts to bubble up. Ideas connect, creativity comes, and you start to feel inspired and pulled by what’s right in front of you, rather than feeling like you have to push it forward.
This is what I call a clear state of mind. Not a completely empty mind, but a mind less cluttered by the noise of its own self-conscious narrations. Your thinking is still happening, better than ever, actually, but the layer of thinking about your thinking (or about anything, really) has stepped back. And in that clearing, your innate intelligence has room to show up. You are wiser without even trying.
The misunderstanding
Here’s where things get interesting – and humbling. Most people who want more focus assume they need to manage it. You have a certain amount of attention, and the task is to defend it: block distractions, optimise your environment and train your willpower. We think the enemy is outside of us: the notifications, the constant interruptions in the office or the demanding boss.
But this is the outside-in misunderstanding again.
Your experience of focus (or the absence of it) is not created by your environment. It is created by thought. Only always.
When you’re scattered and distracted, that experience is not being caused by your overflowing inbox. It is being generated by a busy mind, a mind producing a high volume of noise, much of it about the very problem of feeling distracted.
In the same way, when you’re absorbed and flowing, nothing external caused that either. Your mind has simple gone quieter and your innate intelligence has taken the wheel.
The moment we believe focus is like a scarce resource that we must protect from the outside threats, we become alerted to anything that might distract us. And that alertness itself is a form of noise, keeping the mind busy. It makes the very state we’re seeking harder to reach.
When I stopped chasing it
A while ago I had a breakthrough around this. At the time it was not what I expected. I stopped trying to engineer the focus state and started noticing when it naturally happened.
What I realised is that this state shows up when I’m genuinely curious and reflective. The minute I’m pushing work on something because I think I should be productive, it disappears.
So I noticed that being absorbed isn’t a discipline, it’s a consequence of having a quieter mind, open for exploration. That makes me genuinely engaged and caring about something for its own sake. And this is also not something I manufacture with a technique. It arises naturally, from the inside, when thought settles down.
It’s counter intuitive because when the mind is busy, all it thinks about is getting through things and speeding up. When actually what’s needed is to slow down.
The irony is that what I was trying so hard to do – with a pomodoro app, the protected calendar blocks, or working on my willpower – was adding more thinking to my already busy mind. More planning about focus. More self-monitoring during the work. More judgment afterwards about how not focused I was. My mind got busier trying to be less busy.
What this actually points to
I am actually not suggesting you abandon structure or ignore your environment. Being in a quiet room can help and some tasks genuinely require uninterrupted time.
But the source of your focus, the capacity for you to be genuinely absorbed, is not in those things. It’s in the built-in intelligence of your own mind, available when your thinking settles enough for it to come through.
When you understand this, really see it, not just intellectually, something starts to change. For example, you may stop fighting for your attention and start trusting your mind’s natural capacity to settle. You may notice when you’re caught up in busy thinking without blaming the circumstances, as in, you start to see your thinking creating your stress in real time. You may also find that the moments of being genuinely absorbed arrive more often because you’re no longer obsessing to reach for them.
The state you’re looking for isn’t something to add to your life, it’s what happens when you subtract that busy thinking and start to slow down to listen for something deeper.
And the really good news is that the mind knows how to settle. It has always known. You were born with it.
Think about the last time when you were naturally focused. What was going on in your mind?
