How often have you found yourself here? You need to act, but can’t make yourself start—so you wait for the pressure to build. Force becomes the only tool in your kit.

Force: The Usual Suspects

Force shows up in many disguises:

• Waiting for real deadlines

• Creating fake ones

• Over-scheduling

• Shaming yourself

• Making public declarations to “raise the stakes”

• Waiting (or pretending) to “feel like it”

• Relying on others to remind you—again and again

Whatever the method, the message is the same: “I can’t do this on my own. I don’t trust myself.”

Still, once the momentum is there from whatever means we got there, once we “just start”, sometimes we can keep going. But at what cost?

We can even support this with our tendency to conflate morality with sacrifice. Maybe our desire to be a good person requires pain? Now we have a recipe for an ever worsening spiral, a malignant spirit, an awful torrential wind that creates a swing between tremendous effort and terrible collapse, back and forth, sometimes destroying our sails, until we build them again and do the same.

Or maybe we wait for deadlines, locking us into fight or flight, a chronic cycle of frenzy and crash, you may know all too well.

Every time we use force, we reinforce the belief that force is necessary:

• That our sense of agency–our ability to decide and engage–cannot be trusted.
• That to get work done, emotion should be ignored, considered an obstacle rather than signal.

Agency is injured

“I don’t wanna!” is a cry of injured agency.

It might sound strange, but when agency is injured, some part of us rebels, resenting being told what to do, even if the order comes from ourselves.

And every attempt to force ourselves makes this rejecting part of us stronger, if not louder. But with no other option seemingly available, we double down on the things we can count on, maybe the next deadline will light the fire in that fickle and dangerous fuel of anxiety. Maybe.

If any of this sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone. The cycle of force and collapse is not a personal failing—it’s a sign that your relationship with your own agency needs nurturing, not more punishment.

• Kourosh

PS Consider, when was the last time you relied on force to get something done? How did it feel—during and after? Sometime this week, if you notice yourself using force, pause and consider, “What would it feel like to trust myself, even a little, right now?”

PS. This newsletter is part of an “Injured Agency” series, which is read through in its entirety in ​Episode 9 of the Rhythms of Focus podcast​.