This is the exciting conclusion to the “inner productivity” series of posts—unless there’s massive demand for more, of course, as I always seem to have more to say about it.  Feel free to let me know if there’s a topic in this area you’d like to see covered.

In my last post, I talked about getting in touch with our “inner experience”—learning to pay attention to, instead of running from, the thoughts and feelings that come up in our work.  Almost inevitably, when we start listening to our inner experience more closely, we start feeling some fear and shame that we may have been shutting out before.  In other words, we start to notice some painful beliefs we have about ourselves that we’re normally pushing out of our awareness.

Some Common Examples

I’ll give you a few examples of what I mean by this fear and shame, so you can both understand what I’m talking about and start to get familiar with the sensations that tend to disrupt your own work.  Of course, this isn’t a list of all possible forms of fear that can interfere with our work—the shape it takes is deeply personal to each of us.

1. I’ll be a “fraud.”  Many of us, particularly when we’re working on something that uses our creative energies or will be seen by many people, experience the nagging doubt that we don’t “have the right” to do what we’re doing.  We need more education, experience, powerful friends or something else to be “worthy” of completing our project.  If we “put ourselves out there” before becoming worthy, we’d be “frauds” or “fakes.”

2. I’ll be alone.  I’ve worked with people who have trouble focusing when doing a project that requires them to work by themselves.  When they’re alone, they find anxieties arising that don’t normally bother them in everyday life.  Because something about being alone feels unsafe, they find themselves constantly interrupting their work to call or e-mail others.  Or perhaps they feel strangely lost or confused when no one’s around, and unable to access their creativity and attention.

3. I’ll get smothered.  Others have trouble staying focused because they fear that working will somehow cause others to get uncomfortably close to them.  Perhaps they worry that, if they produce good work, others will take credit for what they’ve done, or otherwise take advantage of them.  Or maybe others will shower them with attention and appreciation—and they feel unworthy of the spotlight, or concerned that others will take up all their time and they won’t have a moment’s peace.

Diving Into Our Inner Experience

Okay, three of those examples was probably depressing enough—I’ll stop the list.  Just by reading those few paragraphs, I imagine you got some idea of how shame and fear keep you from meeting your goals in your work and elsewhere—and why you may be making so much effort to avoid experiencing it.

Given how troubling many of our ideas about ourselves are, it makes perfect sense that we’ve developed so many ingenious ways to keep them out of our awareness—from switching on the iPod to abusing drugs.  As Neil Fiore sagely writes in The Now Habit, “people don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or because they’re irrational.  They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.”

And now for some good news:  what I’ve found, in working with clients and in my own inner work, is that it’s possible to get more comfortable with these thoughts and sensations, so they don’t seem as frightening and threatening.  Instead of fleeing from them, we can try simply holding our attention on them, breathing deeply, and waiting until they pass away.

Consciously or otherwise, we tend to act as though, if we fully let ourselves experience the fear and shame that arise in our work, we’d keep feeling those sensations for the rest of our lives.  It’s as if we’d be plunged into an eternal abyss of fear.  But as it happens, the heat and tension these feelings create in our bodies fade away, maybe within a few seconds or minutes.  When we let the sensations move through our bodies and we emerge safe and unharmed, we dispel the myth that they’ll last forever.

What I think you’ll find is that, the more you get accustomed to experiencing the thoughts and feelings that come up in your work, the more you’ll be able to hold your attention on your task.  As you keep practicing just sitting there and breathing through what you’re feeling, the urge to run away from your work feels less and less compelling.

To illustrate, suppose that, when you sit at your desk to work, you start getting this nagging sense that you’re alone, and that being alone is dangerous to you.  Most of us would respond to this feeling by immediately calling our friends or doing something else to remind ourselves others are around.  But just once, if this example resonates with you, I invite you to try just staying where you are and focusing on your breathing, until the feeling fades away and you can gently return your attention to your task.

Beyond just letting ourselves experience our fear, we can learn to get curious about what it has to teach us—treating it like a message from the “inner guru” I talked about earlier, rather than as a problem to be fixed.

For example, if you notice yourself running away from your work for fear of being alone, perhaps you are carefully avoiding solitude in other areas of your life as well.  Becoming aware of this may prompt you to try spending a little time alone with yourself, and see if getting closer to yourself this way actually helps you grow as a person.

If you enjoyed this post, check out the others in this series:

Inner Productivity, Part I: 3 Keys To Developing “Inner Productivity”
Inner Productivity, Part II: Reuniting “Work” And “Life”
Inner Productivity, Part III: Listening To Ourselves
Inner Productivity, Part IV: Some Exercises For Self-Listening

Related posts:

1. Inner Productivity, Part Three: Listening To Ourselves
2. Your Inner Productivity Questions Answered
3. Inner Productivity (My New Book) Is Now Available
4. Guest Post at The Change Blog: 3 Ways Your Breathing Can Improve Your Productivity
5. Sample From The Work Consciously Audio Course