Productivity for Whole-Ass Humans

As creative humans—entrepreneurs and leaders alike—we find ourselves coming around to the pressures of productivity again and again.

The more you progress in your career and express your talent, the more challenges you may encounter.

I hope today’s episode expands your thinking again and reminds you to embrace self-care, honor your creative instincts, and model a holistic approach to productivity for a more fulfilling and sustainable way of being.

Subscribe! Apple | Pandora | Spotify | TuneIn | YouTube

Make Magic:

To honor our own creative journey and contribute to a sustainable, respectful way of being in this world, we must prioritize activities that nourish our creativity and well-being, trusting that productivity thrives in an environment of self-care and natural rhythms.

Transcript: Productivity for Whole-Ass Humans

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my loves. Today I am excited to talk to you about productivity. So this is something that has been coming up a lot for my clients, for a couple of my one-on-one clients, and also a couple of the people who are in my new witchy business group coaching program for entrepreneurs. And I think it's coming up particularly for these people because the people with whom I tend to work are very creative people. Even if they aren't necessarily artists or novelists or actors, all of whom I love to work with, they are very creative in their approach to entrepreneurship. 

I'll tell you in a minute why I think that's important. But, for now, let's get into the basic premise of this. I talk a lot about productivity on this podcast. I talk a lot about our cultural obsession with productivity. And it is, of course, largely a feature of capitalist culture. We love to produce in a profitable way in capitalist culture. 

But I think there is something just human about enjoying making things [laugh], right? Like, I think it feels good to make things. It feels good to produce often. It feels good to bring something into the world or to improve something or to begin a day with many things undone, and end the day with the things taken care of. 

Of course, I think that we've been culturally conditioned to like that and, at the same time, especially, you know, I'm thinking about my creators, it does feel good to get an idea out of our heads or even, you know, it does feel good to exercise our agency and power to do. Yeah?

So maybe, I'm thinking lately, instead of rejecting the idea of productivity or trying to turn away from it, maybe it would be more helpful to redefine it, to redefine our notion of what productivity is. And, shocker, I'm going to use a metaphor to talk about this. [laugh] 

So let's think about the popular conception of productivity as kind of factory-like, right? When we are productive, we are efficient, we are in active production mode, and we're churning out whatever it is that we think we should be churning out. We're churning out the pages. We're churning out the designs. We're churning out the work product. Yeah?

And when you think about a factory, it is so focused on speed, consistency, right? I mean, the factory is where you clock in, and you work for eight hours, and you clock out. And you are afforded tiny, little breaks inside of that. [laugh] We're so reluctant to take a break, we actually have to make laws about how the breaks are required. And, of course, you and I both know there's fuck tons of factories who don't allow these breaks to actually happen. We're both very sure of that, aren't we? Yeah.

So, anyway, what we're looking at is like consistency, speed, efficiency, and just this kind of grind. When I am being productive, it means I am actively producing. And I would like to offer that a more expansive, evolutionary, and ultimately kind of the only sustainable way of thinking about productivity is to think about it less as a factory and more as a garden—as a garden, right? 

So even just in an initial comparison between a factory and a garden, what do you see in your own mind? I see that a garden is alive. [laugh] It's organic. A garden is more essentially co-creative, right? And what I mean by essentially co-creative is like a garden is responding to the light, the weather, the amount of rainfall. 

A garden is responding to the change of seasons, and because we can see how a garden is co-creative, we don't expect the same kind of consistency from it. We don't expect a garden to be producing in the same kind of predictable and nonstop sort of way. 

A garden also is alive. [laugh] A garden is teeming with life. And while when I think of factory, I think cogs in a machine; when I think of a garden, I think of it more like—I don't know—it's more orchestral. It's more symphonic. 

It's like, oh, there are all of these different elements at play here, and they're, again, they're not predictable, right? There are times in the garden where certain plants are really blooming and blossoming, and times in the garden where others are dying back. And with all of these different elements, when we are thinking about productivity in a gardening sense, we aren't expecting the same output every time. Yeah?

OK. Even deeper than that, when we think about productivity in a gardening sense, I think we're much more aware of and respectful of the need for supportive conditions. I mean, factories are notoriously unsupportive of good working conditions. 

Gardens require good working conditions in order for them to be productive. You can't take water away or take fertilizer away or take light away from the garden. We understand at a very basic level, oh no, all of this life force is helpful. It's requisite. It feeds the ability of the garden to produce. Yeah?

So this is what's coming up with my clients right now. So many of them are creatives, and what they are finding is that the more they progress in their careers, the more fully expressed their talents are, the more they are doing the kinds of projects that challenge them, they need more and more and more space and fuel in order to be able to do that work. 

So they'll find that they need time to walk, to daydream, to roll around on the floor stretching. They need time to visit museums, to travel. They need time to be in the world, and to expose themselves to co-creative elements. Like, they need time to read poetry. They need time to take a watercolor class. They need time to bake. Because their work is so creative, they need time to be in active co-creativity, or even sometimes just be in a receiving mode to get inspiration, to get input, right? 

I think about that as like fertilizer in the garden. We know that when we give our garden fertilizer or when we give our garden compost even, we are going to produce better vegetables, brighter flowers. We get that that food and fuel is requisite to making a better product. Right?

And, yet, when it comes to our own selves, when we find ourselves called to just daydream or just—I don't know—like watch a Golden Age of Television show, or to take a road trip instead of sitting at our computer all day, we imagine that that is like slacking off. We imagine that that is not being productive. 

But what I have certainly learned, and what my clients are learning, and what I want to convey to you is that those are among the most productive things that we do. Being in active co-creation with this world, and receiving inspiration, receiving that food and fuel for our soul, for our creative minds, that is so productive. And I hope that this garden metaphor for productivity helps us to see that. 

I do also want to touch on the component of the gardening metaphor that talks about seasons and cycles. We don't expect our garden to be in bloom at all times. We don't expect constantly to be harvesting from our gardens. 

We understand that gardens move in cycles, that there are times where we are planting seeds. There are times when we are weeding a lot, [laugh] like, constant weeding. There are times when it's amazing the bumper crop that we're receiving. And there are times when the thing to do is to till all of the dead stuff back into the earth, and just wait, and just wait before we ask our garden to produce something new.

I have been in business for decades now, in creative business. And I know for myself, certainly, this is true. We are human beings, not machines. We are not meant to be in constant output mode, right? And just think about the examples of constant output mode, and they're gross. It's like a puppy mill, where a dog is bred again and again and again, or an Amazon warehouse that never fucking stops. The enormous factory farms, where we never pause to replenish the soil; we just keep demanding more. 

We don't want that. Right? A, that is so just counter to the way that this planet works. It's exploitative. It's unsustainable. And those, I think, are perfect words to characterize the way that we generally are conditioned to think about productivity. It's exploitative, and it's unsustainable.

And something that I certainly have experienced, and that I coach a lot of people through, is that when we are aspiring to this model of productivity, this nonstop, like, go, go, go, make, make, make, do, do, do, when we cannot sustain it, or when it's not yielding anything great, we blame ourselves because the conditioning says, you know, a good worker doesn't need to stop. 

The conditioning says, if you are disciplined, if you are devoted, if you really care, if you're really actually good, then you should be able to be constantly in production mode and, indeed, your product should be bigger and better and faster and more efficient all the time. 

So what happens is we deny ourselves the walk, the daydreaming, the visit to the museum, the weekend off, the time doing nothing, or the time tending a literal garden, or baking, or whatever, right, all of the things that I talked about that nurture a co-creative relationship with the world. We deny ourselves all of that food and fuel. We don't allow for input, and then we blame ourselves when we're unable to output. We think there must be something wrong with us. 

This concept makes so much sense, doesn't it? It totally does. And to go against, to reject the conditioning that we've been getting this since grade school, right, this idea that we just should be able to make do with 15 minutes of recess and 30 minutes of lunch in a day and, otherwise, be in active production mode, to reject that conditioning, it's scary. It's hard. It's still hard for me. 

When we've got something that we want to make, we want to produce, it is so hard to trust that that product will come in the right moment, under the right conditions, that it will be better and stronger and more vibrant. If we are creating it from a place of being well-fed and well-cared for, like, I promise you it always works that way. I know from tons of my own experience, tons of my clients' experience, I know it works that way. And/but that conditioning is so strong, it is hard to trust. Yeah?

So, again, that's why I wanted to give us this garden metaphor, because we trust that that's how gardens work, and we are ourselves so much more garden-like than we are factory-like, right? We are organic creatures. We are so co-creative with the conditions around us. 

We, ourselves, move in cycles. We ebb and we flow. We have moments where we deeply need rest and recharge and recalibration, and then we also have moments where it's time to blossom and grow.

For what it's worth, I do believe that just like you can look at a garden and you can say, oh wow, I think it needs water. The sun has been extra hot lately and scorchy. I think this garden needs water. Maybe it needs a bit of shade. Or these new sprouts are a little puny. I think I ought to test the pH of the soil, and see what I need to add to the soil in order to support them. Yeah?

So just like we can do that with a garden, we can also do that with ourselves, and it's actually so much easier [laugh]. The way we do it with ourselves is we just ask ourselves, hey, what do you want? What do you want to do? 

And maybe yourself is like, all I want to do is take the day off, and go to the coast, and sit with my journal, and look at the ocean. Or maybe it'll say, all I want to do is make lentil soup. [laugh] That's all I want to do. I want to go to the market. I want to buy fresh vegetables. I want to make lentil soup. 

And then we just trust that that is the absolutely most productive thing we can do. Even if it's all I want to do is binge watch this show, OK, you know what? I'm trusting there's something we're getting out of this. I can trust myself. 

And then seeing, again and again and again, I'm still myself. [laugh] I am still collecting this proof. But, again and again, when we are doing what we want to do, what we feel like doing, there will come a moment when all we want to do is write, or all we want to do is sit down and record the podcast, or all we want to do is take the idea that just burst into our minds and get it out into the world. It really truly does work that way. 

OK. There are two more things we are producing when we approach productivity in this more expansive way. One of them is self-trust—self-trust—because, again, when we are forcing ourselves into productivity against our own inclination, it's going to be hard. It's not going to work well. The product won't delight us. 

Conversely, when we trust that productivity is itself organic, and that it does us good to make productivity co-creative and sustainable, when we think of it in that garden way rather than in that factory way, and then we begin to practice productivity in that more humane way, we will find that what we come up with, what we produce is so much better, is evolutionary, is delicious, and feels good.

As we do that, we will be feeding self-trust. We will be feeding honor of and respect for our creativity and productivity. So rather than giving ourselves occasion [laugh] to judge and berate and be disappointed in our productivity, instead we're nurturing it in this whole self-honoring way. So that's one thing we're producing is self-trust. 

The second thing we're producing—and I think this one is difficult to overstate—we are producing a better example. We are producing a model of productivity that is very different from the one we've been conditioned into. So we are showing our colleagues, we are showing our partners, we are showing our children a more sustainable, self-honoring, respectful, organic approach to productivity. 

I really believe that this is requisite to existing on this planet. Right now, our planet is responding to and co-creating with our exploitative definition of productivity. Right? The planet is responding to that exploitation. 

If we want to turn this shit around, it really does begin with us, because as we adopt a less rushed, less demanding way of being in the world, we not only exploit ourselves less, we also exploit the planet less. By doing this ourselves and, even more importantly, by showing this as a different way, we can, I believe, create a whole movement toward a more sustainable, respectful way of being. 

All right, my love, there you have it, an expanded definition of productivity. I hope it helps you to give yourself permission to experiment with this different, more whole self-honoring ebbing and flowing way of being productive. 

I hope it helps you understand that you cannot make something from nothing, that you've got to receive in order to give, that co-creativity is the most magical, easeful, organic kind of creativity, and that in order to be co-creative, we've got to open up to the way all of this actually works, which is in an ebbing and flowing, receiving and giving sort of way. 

And speaking of this kind of respect for ebb and flow, and respect for seasons, I want to acknowledge that, you know, for two and a half years, I released a Mind Witchery episode every single Thursday, and there was a season in which that felt so good. 

I was building—I don't know—creative stamina, I think. And I had so many ideas, like—I don't know [laugh]—I had a bumper crop. I had a bumper crop of all of these things I was always coming up with to share with you.

And the season for me has shifted, and I know you've noticed. So I've been replaying episodes more often, or not releasing episodes more often. While there's a part of me that wants to apologize for that, I won't. Instead, what I want to say is that this is me walking my talk. This is me saying, hmm, I'm in a different season. I'm definitely in a mode where I'm receiving lots of input, and I'm creating different things. 

My coaching practice has become much more squarely focused on helping entrepreneurs. I have a couple of new initiatives that are just starting to take shape. And so, yeah, that's where I am now. 

You may even have noticed. I don't know, have you? [laugh] You may even have noticed I'm not calling my episodes spells right now because it just feels—I don't know—forced. It doesn't feel in full integrity.

So this is me over here with the podcast, really trying to practice what I preach, and hoping that when I do release an episode, you can feel the potency of it. You can feel that it wasn't an episode just for Thursday's sake; it was something that I've given myself time and space to consider and to share. All right, honeybun, thanks so much for listening, and bye for now. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

End of recording