In this article:
√ The Shame of Productivity
√ The Spiral of Desire
√ The Dis-ease of Now
√ The Roots of Shame
√ 3 Healing Strategies
I remember coaching several senior executives who all struggled with productivity. They had too much to do, too little time, and it caused a lot of stress.
However, their challenges were not unique. In fact, I can only think of a handful of people at their level who didn’t feel the burdens of workplace stress, and for a very simple reason: they didn’t define themselves by their to do list. Their self-worth was fixed because they found it within (themselves), whereas the others—the walking, talking, corporate stress balls—derived their self-worth upon others’ opinions of them which made their self-worth external and therefore unstable.
This is the shame of productivity. It’s the feeling that arises when one feels like they’re not doing enough, which comes from a deeper layer of not feeling like they are enough.
Shame-based productivity says, “My self-worth depends on what I do, not who I am.”
And so it goes, the shame cycle of productivity, as subconscious mental garbage bounces around in one’s mind, following a false matrix like this: