Recovery

There is a very strong parallel between Agile practice and meditation. For example, in meditation:

• You start meditating.

• Your mind wanders.

• You notice that your mind has wandered, and resume meditating.

• Your mind wanders again...

Novice meditators typically misunderstand this wandering as a failure. So experienced teachers take pains to emphasize that mind-wandering is not failure - it’s just the nature of a human mind to wander. 

Because it is the nature of the mind to wander, there is no need to resist or feel bad about getting distracted. When your mind wanders, all you have to do is notice that your attention has wandered and go back to meditating.

That’s all. That’s it.

The key to successful meditation is not resistance to distraction, but recovery. And therefore each instance of wandering-and-return is a successful increment of practice. You have not “failed” by becoming distracted during meditation, any more than you have “failed” each time you return a weight to its resting point between reps in strength-training. Each increment of practice brings a meditator one step closer to their goal, just as each rep with the weight brings an athlete closer to their goal. Building mental strength is very similar to building physical strength.

No matter how bad your meditation or workout went, it was a good thing. You don’t have to be perfect at meditation to benefit from meditating, any more than you need to be perfect at exercise to benefit from exercising. And just as you grow stronger the more reps you do, the better you get at meditating by accumulating experience with returning to your point of focus when your mind wanders. Over time, the gap between noticing this wandering and resuming meditation gets smaller and smaller, until you hardly notice it at all. 

This is the inevitable result of any practice. In a way, getting good at meditation is just getting good at recovery.  

Agile works in much the same way. Many of my clients begin their journey with the “getting started” tutorial. And when they begin coaching with me, they often arrive carrying a bucket of guilt for not doing the “homework” of their daily backlog maintenance.

The truth is that in two years I have only had ONE client (who was already an advanced practitioner) maintain a daily backlog. So the second session usually involves a fair amount of reassuring, and explaining the iterative nature of recovery. People have to start where they are, and (for most novices) just showing up for the next session is enough.

Agile4ADHD, like meditation, is not about preventing distraction or attempting to create a neurotypical experience. It is about shortening the gap between distraction and refocus, planning and adapting, what “should” work and what works for you. It's about strengthening your innate ability to observe and understand yourself, then iterating your way into a way of working with your inherent nature instead of trying to overcome it.

In Agile4ADHD, every backlog refinement, retrospective, and check-in is less about “staying on track” and more about learning how to return to what matters - with patience and compassion. The work is not to reformat your spicy brain or stifle its creative, interest-driven attention; but to practice recovery—again and again. And developing methods that work with your nature, instead of against it.

Agile and meditation are both disciplines of resilience. They remind us that when we embrace recovery as the true measure of progress, we come to understand that distraction is not failure, just part of the cycle; that every return is an increment of strength; and that, over time, these small recoveries compound into lasting clarity, momentum, and growth.