On agitating with intention
There’s a toy in our house that I’ve had to ask the kids to keep away from me.
It’s a handheld water game — a sealed unit filled with water, with two little tubes inside and a collection of coloured balls sitting at the bottom. The aim is simple: press the buttons on the sides, agitate the water, and try to land the balls in the tubes.
When you press the buttons, the water churns. The balls shoot upward. They swirl. They drift. And then they settle — but not where they were before. Sometimes a ball lands in a tube. Sometimes it lands somewhere new that makes the next shot easier. Sometimes it lands somewhere that opens up an angle you couldn’t see from the previous position.
The agitation doesn’t guarantee the outcome. But without it, nothing moves.
The problem with this toy is I cannot put it down until every ball is in a tube - hence the ban.
But it also beautifully describes something I’ve been thinking about this week.
Fuzzled
If you’re someone juggling many things at once — parent and worker, student and volunteer, business owner and community member, adult child with ageing parents — you’ll know the feeling I’m about to describe.
Everything is in the air. The balls are all moving. And at some point, you can't really make sense of what's happening in each sphere - you simply can’t see things clearly. You can’t think straight. The options blur into each other. You become, for want of a better word, fuzzled.
And the instinct — understandably — is to stop. To wait for things to settle on their own. To step back and hope the clarity arrives.
Sometimes that’s exactly right. This afternoon, my daughter was making lemonade. After exhausting our fresh lemon supply, she went for the bottled stuff - and squeezed out more juice than needed. She was trying to get it back in — funnel, various angles, increasing frustration — while tired from a long day and about to start an online class. I suggested she walk away, go to her class and come back to it after.
Twenty minutes later she finished her class, came back calm, and the solution was obvious: pour the excess into a separate glass for later use. Done.
Sometimes the answer is to reduce the agitation. To let things settle. To walk away.
But sometimes — and this is what the water game knows — the answer is the opposite.
Sometimes you need to press the button.
What intentional agitation actually does
Agitation, done deliberately, doesn’t create chaos. It disrupts a settled but unhelpful arrangement and creates new positions worth examining.
The balls weren’t going to land in the tubes by themselves. They needed movement. Specific, purposeful movement — not random thrashing, not pressing every button at once, but a considered application of pressure that gives things the chance to land somewhere new.
As a coach and facilitator, this is one of the most useful things I do — and also one of the least comfortable.
It might look like asking the question that's been avoided. Naming what’s present but unspoken. Holding the silence just a beat longer than is comfortable, so those I’m working with have to fill it — and in filling it, hear something they didn’t know they were carrying.
It might look like surfacing a concept that challenges a comfortable assumption. Recently, in a leadership conversation, a group of leaders were questioning whether a particular label accurately described what their people were experiencing. I had to gently challenge them to consider that they might not recognise the label precisely because they’d been fortunate enough not to experience it. That wasn't an accusation. It was an agitation. A deliberate disruption of a settled position so something truer could surface.
It might look like working through something that isn’t quite landing — sitting with the fuzziness, turning it over, pressing the button — until something simpler emerges. A colleague and I were developing an approach for an upcoming workshop this week. We were building something elaborate. She went away to think. Ten minutes later: “I got it.” A simple delegations matrix. The agitation of thinking-together had cleared the path to something cleaner than either of us had been reaching for.
In each case, the movement preceded the clarity. The agitation wasn’t the problem. It was the mechanism.
Agitation or irritation?
Let's just be clear: agitation without good intention is just irritation.
Pressing buttons to watch things move — without caring where they land — isn’t agitation. It’s likely disruption for its own sake (or maybe it's for attention). At best, it's simply annoying. What's worse is it damages trust, wastes energy and leaves people worse off than before you arrived.
So, before you agitate — in a room, in a relationship, in your own thinking — it’s worth asking:
What am I hoping this movement reveals?
Is this the right moment for disruption, or would stability actually serve better right now?
Am I doing this to serve — or for the performance of being the one who shakes things up?
Because intentional agitation is a form of care. You disturb something because you believe that what settles will be truer, clearer or more useful than what was there before. That’s a meaningful act. And it deserves to be treated as one.
Final thought
So here are the questions I’m sitting with this week — and I’d invite you to sit with them too:
Where in your life are you fuzzled right now — and is the answer to let things settle, or to press a button?
Where might you need to be the agitator — asking the question, naming the thing, holding the silence — in service of someone else’s clarity?
And what settled arrangement in your own thinking might need some deliberate movement before you can see your options clearly?
If you’re carrying something that feels stuck — not broken, just settled in the wrong position — sometimes what’s needed isn’t more time or more information. It’s a conversation that moves things.
That’s what I do. And if you’d like to experience it, I’m offering a complimentary agitation session — a focused conversation designed to shift what’s fuzzled and see what lands.
Reach out and let’s press the button together.
Go on. Take the Next Step.
