Take Back Your Attention
2025 is the Year to Be More You
I’m doing a lot of listening to learn right now.
Not just to learn from others & the world, but also to learn from myself about how I feel, what I think and what I might choose to do about any given piece of information.
And so far 2025 is already way too much.
I don’t want to “check out”. That’s never been my answer. I also don’t want to rush to conclusions or jump into actions that aren’t really my own.
In other words, social autonomy is hard.
But I have found clarity on one idea in particular:
If we want to stay true to ourselves this year, we need to take back our attention.
Autonomy is a Social Skill
Being ourselves means exercising our autonomy.
Maintaining ownership over our choices. Remembering that we have agency to shift our attention at any moment.
Self-determination theory proposes that autonomy is a psychological need. We need to feel capable of and connected to thoughts & actions that feel like our own to fully engage in our lives & feel self-motivated.
A paradox of autonomy, though, is that to be truly autonomous, we need to be diversely social.
We need access to a variety of people, ideas & experiences in order to determine which most align & belong with us.
And we need opportunities to have our beliefs challenged or we can easily get stuck within a small facet of mind or identity.
We learn who we are by living, connecting & exploring with others and, if we’re lucky, along the way we recognize our capacity to choose & act for ourselves.
Perhaps some people are able to do this and consciously deny another person’s right to their own choices, but I contend that it takes a feat of mind (and perhaps a touch of narcissism) to decide that you should get to be you, but other people shouldn’t get to be who they are.
You want your autonomy and so does everyone else. So to ask others to respect your freedom of expression goes hand in hand with expecting to respect theirs.
It turns out that autonomy is an important social skill.
“Social autonomy” is the term I use to describe being yourself around people being themselves.
Ideally, by bringing emotional intelligence, clear boundaries & self-ownership into shared spaces while honoring others’ truths & perspectives.
And the internet is the boss level of all shared spaces.
It has flooded us with more people & content than we could engage with in a thousand lifetimes. Much of it from small businesses, hard working organizations & close friends just seeking connection & support, but too often surrounded by toxic cesspools of ignorance, misinformation & greed.
I mean really, the Quarter Quell of it all is genuinely terrifying right now.
AND we don’t have to let that be the end of our story.
Autonomy is always valuable, but especially when so much feels out of our control.
We can choose to be a part of society, while also being true to ourselves, and find a role that we fit well into, without sacrificing any of our core values.
Social Autonomy is a pathway to taking back our attention.
It’s a practice available to us all.
And it starts with learning to drive your own “car”.
Taking the Wheel
One way I think about autonomy is becoming aware of & embracing the following idea as a truth about the human experience:
You are the only one with the power to choose your actions.
Your “operating systems” belong to you. You have metacognition, so you can think about your thinking, choose to change it & act on new information.
Which is not to say that we can’t be influenced or that we’re all capable of being fully present for every decision.
But no one can get inside of us and operate the controls.
The first time I remember becoming aware of this, I was in my late 20s and it was a car metaphor that made the most sense to me.
I realized that I had spent most of my life in the passenger seat of my own “car”.
Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me that I held all the power to drive my life forward. I always had the ability to take the wheel, I just didn’t have full awareness of my agency to choose where I went.
I wonder if this sounds more or less familiar to many adults?
My take is that it’s common to come to this realization later in life, because the awareness & use of our autonomy really is something that has to be consciously cultivated & practiced.
For many of us, our beliefs & identity are developed “underneath the hood of our cars” so to speak. Before we learn what a brain is, the involuntary processes within it begin to build the frameworks that our sense of self will be built upon.
Ideas quietly work their way into our brains when we’re little. Who & what we see while growing up creates the set of “possibility models” in our minds available to us as we shift into full ownership of our “vehicles”.
This is one of the reasons why what we do matters more than what we say.
We can ask kids who they want to be when they grow up.
We can tell them to be themselves and dream big.
But if the vast majority of their day is spent being told & shown a different reality by the adults around them — a reality of faces in phones and pressure to do what they’re told without complaint and good grades being what matters most — they will be conditioned to be obedient, follow societies’ norms and look outside of themselves for answers.
It’s hard to navigate toward what you can't see.
What you observe consistently or intensely embeds your young neural pathways with stories about how things are in the world.
And what you continue to pay attention to has the ability to either reinforce or rewrite those stories throughout your life.
Taking time to intentionally choose, curate & cull the stories we’re attending to may be the most worthwhile endeavor there is in 2025.
Be the Driving Force of Your Attention
Why do you believe what you believe?
Do you feel ownership over your thoughts & actions or does your life feel heavily influenced by others’ values, dreams, beliefs, experiences and so forth?
No one makes it out of childhood without some other people driving their “car” from time to time. But as soon as we can, I believe that it is in all of our best interest to begin learning how to navigate the world ourselves.
After all, the world does not wait until we are 18 to start hooking our attention. And attention is the most valuable resource on the planet these days.
The attention capitalism that runs social media platforms is becoming impossible to ignore, but that doesn’t mean we’re all capable of just unplugging ourselves in an instant & walking away.
Setting aside our distinct lack of Trinity & Morpheus style heroes at the moment, and the obvious addiction most of us have to our phones, there are some real benefits to social media beyond just staying in touch with the people we care about.
The internet has absolutely become a place for caring citizens to engage in the public squares of the 21st century.
Unfortunately, those public squares are noisier than ever.
On the best days, you feel a bit of connection and encouragement before you’re reminded that half of your feed is ads.
On its worst days, it feels like a sadistic algorithm is playing a game of how many oversimplified, entrenched problems it can hit you in the eyeballs with before your hope budget for the week is drained.
Problems are still a sure fire way to grab most of our attention.
It makes sense that we’re drawn to problems in our society and want to find solutions. But not every problem bears the same weight.
And if we only ever pay attention to what’s wrong, we won’t see what’s right. So we’ll feel like everything’s wrong all the time.
Another way to understand this is as the headwinds & tailwinds asymmetry or the idea that we’re much more likely to focus on the “winds in our face” pushing against our progress than we are to notice the lift we’re receiving from the positive “winds of momentum” pushing us from behind.
With this in mind, here’s a bunch of ideas for getting your vehicle ready to leverage life’s favorable flurries & gracious gusts. Browse for what’s relevant to you right now & breeze on past anything that’s not currently a good fit:
SLOW YOUR ROLL | Ease off the gas, exit the attention highway and do less while you recalibrate.
Noticing what hooks your attention.
Stories drive how we feel & behave which leads to more stories about who we are & what we should do. But these stories are fallible. Improve their accuracy by getting curious about the stories you tell yourself, why you tell them & if they truly belong.
Asking better questions.
A good question can take a little longer to form, but pays off when it fills our answers with clarity rooted in deep understanding. Chart paths out of internal roadblocks with questions like, “Is this actually a problem?” & “What might I choose to do about it?”.
Nothing.
It can be hard to notice success when it’s the absence of something going wrong or the lack of having to do something. Taking stock of victories, like a problem not occurring or the “invisible labor” of others’ around us, can help us see what’s been silently working in our favor.
FIND YOUR LANES | Build a personal expressway of relevant roads & intersections to guide your travel.
Exposure to a variety of people & ideas.
With all that’s going on (and wrong) in the world today, isn’t it in all of our best interests to diversify our efforts? Don’t put all of your identity eggs in one ideologue’s basket I always say. 😉 Consider your values, interests & strengths and the causes, goals, & communities they may align with. Then, try “fit experiments” to decide where you belong.
Your real voice.
Without autonomy, we focus our attention on others and leave little time to listen to ourselves. It’s easy to lose your true identity in other people’s needs & expectations. Authenticity comes from fine-tuning & refreshing the thoughts, words & ideas that matter to us.
Freedom.
Self-ownership & personal agency don’t require a lot of external resources. Being more you is an exercise in unburdening your heart & mind from “shoulds” to free your honest self expression. It’s the weight of the world lifted & replaced with the power to choose your unique role in it.
SCHEDULE REGULAR MAINTENANCE | Keep your systems & machinery in good condition to improve their performance.
Tracking your progress.
Lasting shifts in self-ownership come from focusing on a practice, not specific outcomes. Getting into a simple habit of marking your small wins & using them to inform your next tiny experiments can make change more enjoyable & undeniable.
A healthy inner dialog.
In case you hadn’t heard, mental health care is health care. Speak Friend to yourself & enter a world of self- compassion. If we want to be confident in how we show up in the world, we need to prioritize keeping our innermost systems in good working order.
Exploration that widens your field of success.
What’s your car capable of in peak condition? Opportunities to explore, fail & learn are like preventative maintenance for our internal “motors”. A willingness to play & get creative can greatly expand what success might look like and lead to confident & enthusiastic choices rather than fear-fueled limitations.
If we don’t learn how to put ourselves at the center of our own attention & choices, we are letting other people “drive our car” through life.
Realizing you have autonomy and the personal power it infers is like noticing you’re not getting anywhere because you had the parking brake on. You’re not likely to do that to yourself again.
But practicing autonomy is a life-long endeavor. I call it Iterative Autonomy or IA.
IA Practices are uniquely personal, fitting your needs as they grow & change with time. You can’t go wrong as long as your path belongs to you.
Many educational settings & the vast majority of social media posts suggest subconsciously that there’s some perfect right way to do everything & be a good person and that mostly everyone’s got that all figured out.
They don’t. Life is challenging for anyone who’s trying.
It may be motivating to focus on some idyllic end result, but I think many of us are tired of the repetitive cycles that cause us to continuously rebuild hope in people & systems only to be consistently let down by them.
Iterative Autonomy is about growing that consistency & hope within yourself.
It's about finding the agency to make changes in your own life and home and family and community that will improve your overall well being today, not hopefully down the road.
And along the way, an IA practice encourages you to find & create spaces of belonging, where you can engage with communities & topics that are meaningful to you, and support projects that address the problems that hold your attention.
Start Taking Back Your Attention Today
Confession time. I have to work to pull my attention back from the breaking news abyss on the regular. I absolutely wrote this post for me and my husband and everyone we know who seems to be feeling the same way.
I’ve also been on my own Iterative Autonomy (IA) Journey for a while now and one of the things that I’ve learned about myself again and again in different ways is that I am a bridge.
I’m at home at the intersection of ideas that positively impact real people now.
In that spirit, you’ll find a variety of simple missions below to bridge the gap between the ideas in this article & putting them to use in your own life. And below that you’ll find a way to take these ideas further by joining a group of Autonomy Adventurers.
The “not so secret” secret to success: Choose anywhere to start & keep going.
Set up a personal or team capture vessel (here’s some ideas).
Scroll with intention by defining your social media plan each day, literally writing down what you are looking for & why. It may take some practice to avoid getting off track, but try to remember “Pause. Pay Attention. Pivot.”
Next time the internet bums you out, check out a hopeful podcast connected to a topic that sparks your curiosity. Ezra Klein & Chris Hayes recently caught my attention with the idea that this may be one of the few spaces where doom is not required for success.
Support a small business or nonprofit in your feed with an uplifting message online that’s trying to get your attention through the noise.
Time box the news (we don’t need as much of it as we think) and use a service like Ground News* to get a more well-rounded picture. (*not an affiliate, just think they’re cool)
Would you try one of these or do you have a question about any of them?
What things have you found to help you take back your attention?
And what do you think about the idea of autonomy as an important social skill?
Let me know in a comment below.
Practice is Better in Community
Want to take advantage of this former educator’s creative connection skills long term?
Consider Joining Me & Other Autonomy Adventurers Online This Summer!
Members will have access to Quarterly Quests where…
Families will have 3 months to explore missions within each quest (a variety of prompts, guides, modifications, & extensions to make your own).
Quests will be seasonal & they'll involve cohorts of families embarking upon similar missions & sharing their experiences.
Each quest will come with a passport to let families jump right into some missions in a fun & playful way.
Right now I’m offering my Make Your Family a Team Quest Basics for FREE!
PLUS, you can also download a fun, pocket-sized passport companion to prompt ideas and keep track of your first family team adventure.
Use the link buttons below to sign up for the Autonomy Adventurers Quarterly Quests Pre-Membership waitlist OR to join my email updates list and you’ll get the free code to download them in your confirmation email.
Oh, and one more thing, please keep in mind that this whole thing is at the very beginning & that means 3 really beneficial things for your family team:
More offers are on the way & I want to hear from your family about what you’d like to see & what would be most useful to your team.
Members have direct access to a former teacher to ask questions and make requests, which is something that I won’t be able to promise forever.
This is a passion project for me & I want to design something your family will really use & get value out of, so I’ll always be open to hearing about how it can be improved.
*Another huge thank you to my M&M teammate for reviewing this blog post & putting up with funky schedules while I stayed up late to write. 🫶
Meet the Author
Melody Baran | Iterative Autonomy LLC | Owner. Creator. Curator.
Iterative Autonomy is a practice of self-discovery based on my experience as an educator.
It’s my answer to the question: What can we do to set ALL people up to succeed?
I'm Melody, creator & curator of Iterative Autonomy, and trust me I DO know it's a mouthful, but it's also a way to define both the entire human experience AND how to live life to the fullest in just two words. This is why I feel so strongly about their value and potential to effect positive change.
Without iteration, we are denying the truth of change, the one thing that we can depend on to happen in this world. Without autonomy, we aren't really a world of individuals, we are a finite collection of echo chambers.
I've been a classroom teacher and I've owned & operated two education-based companies. For the last several years, I've had the privilege of stepping away from all of that & researching, from every angle I can think of, how we might approach education differently, so that EVERY child becomes an adult who knows themselves well & knows how to achieve any goal that they choose to pursue.
Iterative Autonomy is my answer.
My practice of autonomy allyship & advocacy is an iterative one as well. I welcome constructive feedback from those who have knowledge, experiences, perspectives and ideas to offer that are different from my own whether they align with my viewpoints or not.
I want to get this right and the only way to do that in my open is to always stay open to better ideas and deeper understanding. In addition to sharing feedback in the comments below, my About page has several forms for sharing ideas with me 1-1 and/or anonymously. Thank you for helping me to grow!