I’m pleased to announce that I’ve contributed an article to the latest Productive Magazine, “What Yoga Can Teach Us About Productivity.”  As you can probably tell from the title, this is a different take on getting work done than what we usually see in the popular literature, and I’m grateful to the magazine staff for their willingness to “explore strange new worlds” with me as far as this type of material is concerned.

By the way, you can read previous articles of mine in Productive Magazine here:

* “3 Keys to Developing Inner Productivity,” Productive Magazine Issue #9

* “How Getting Used to Silence Can Help Your Productivity,” Productive Magazine Issue #8

* “Three Ways Your Breathing Can Help Your Productivity,” Productive Magazine Issue #7

Enjoy!

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Recent Guest Posts

I was excited to recently contribute two guest posts to Lifehack.org:  “What Meditation Can Teach Us About Productivity” and “What Yoga Can Teach Us About Productivity.”

I didn’t announce these posts here earlier, because they are meant as introductions to my work, and I know this blog is only read by my advanced, graduate-level students.    But seriously, I thought I’d mention them here in the hope that my regular readers might get some value out of them.  I hope you are among those value-getting readers! 

Upcoming Talk and Workshop at EastWest Bookstore

Also, I wanted to mention that I and yoga instructor Rosy Moon will be offering an interactive talk on July 1, and a full-day workshop on July 2, at EastWest Bookstore in Mountain View, California.  If you’re in the Bay Area and you’re interested in finding more focus, peace and motivation in your work, this is definitely the place to be.  Looking forward to meeting you in person if I haven’t done so yet.

Best, Chris

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Here’s something that doesn’t make much logical sense.

I imagine that, at some point in your life, you worked on a task that felt really “make or break” to you.  Maybe it was a project for an important client at work, or perhaps you were a student and preparing to take a test worth a big share of your grade.  Whatever it was, your whole career seemed to depend on your success at it, and “failure was not an option.”

When Starting Is Not An Option

Have you ever noticed that these “make or break” projects are actually the ones you have the most trouble starting?  That, the more that seems to be “riding” on the outcome, the harder it is to make progress?

From a rational perspective, this is hard to understand.  You’d think we’d dive headfirst into a task we see as “mission critical.”  Isn’t that what all the motivational bestsellers tell us — that we need to “chase success as if our lives depend on it”?

But when we look at this issue from an emotional perspective, it starts to make sense.  After all, if I really believe that making a mistake in my project could “break” me or my career, that probably means I’m basing my sense of self-worth on how well I perform.

If my self-worth depends on how my work is received, of course I’m not going to start my project.  This is because, if I finish my task and present it to the world, I’ll run the risk that people will see what I’ve done as inadequate, and then I’ll have to feel inadequate.

I think this is one reason so many people seem to have a book they’ve been “meaning” to write, or a business they’ve been “planning” to start, for the last ten years.  They’re worried that, if they come out with a final product and others don’t appreciate it, they’ll stop appreciating themselves.

Being Okay With Our Non-Okayness

Now, it would be easy for me to say that “the solution is to be okay with yourself no matter what.”  But as I think you know, that’s not so easy in practice.  Building up our basic sense of “okayness,” in my experience, takes work, and there’s no “30-day miracle cure.”

One practice I’ve found simple and effective, though, is to watch carefully for moments when you’re basing your sense of self-worth on the results you get in your work.  When you notice yourself thinking this way, just acknowledge what’s going on, without trying to change it.  Simply admit to yourself:  “I’m worrying that, if people don’t approve of my work, I won’t approve of myself.”

When I do this, I often feel the sense of heaviness in my body dropping away, and find myself chuckling out loud.  When I look directly at the painful story I’m telling myself, rather than trying to push it aside or pretend it isn’t there, the light of my awareness tends to burn it away, like the sun burning off the clouds.

On a practical level, when I let go of the sense that a project can “make or break me,” and see it more as a chance to play and experiment, I find concentrating and finishing my work so much easier.

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I do something kind of unusual when I’m writing.  (I know, shockingly enough.)  I keep a journal of what I’m feeling and thinking when I’m faced with writer’s block.

To an outside reader, this journal would probably seem painfully repetitive, because it talks about the same worries again and again.  Some common themes are:

* “I think I had the last decent idea of my life a few days ago, and the well has officially run dry.”

* “I’m not sure I have the brain cells left to do this kind of piece anymore.”

* “I’m never going to finish this article — I might as well delete it.”

Why would I want to keep an angst-filled journal like this?  Because I’m a masochist?

I’ve Been Through It All Before

Actually, this has been one of the most helpful techniques I’ve discovered in a while for staying focused and motivated as I write.  The fact that the journal sounds like such a broken record is really what makes it so helpful.

Why?  Because the goal of this journal is to remind me that, no matter how much hand-wringing I may be doing as I’m writing something, I’ve been through it before.  There’s no moment of blankness, doubt about the originality of what I’m saying, or concern that I’ve “lost my mojo” that I haven’t experienced in the past.

And yet, even in the face of those doubts and fears, I’ve managed to finish my piece.

On one level, this is simply a reminder that I have the strength to handle whatever writing-induced suffering I’m going through.  But at a deeper level, it’s a way to keep in mind that, just like every experience we have as human beings, that creative blankness we call writer’s block is fleeting.  It passes away quickly.

From Black Hole to Break Time

My sense, from looking inside myself and talking to people, is that a lot of the suffering we do around writer’s block happens when we worry that it will never go away.  That sense that we’re empty of ideas can actually be kind of scary — almost as if the emptiness might grow and swallow us up if we let it.

Naturally, many of us tend to write in fits and starts, running off to fold our socks or play Solitaire when the emptiness arises.  Unfortunately, when we write this way, we usually don’t make as much progress as we’d like.

But when we keep in mind that the emptiness is fleeting, those blank moments become so much easier to be with.  Instead of looking like a black hole threatening to devour us, that blankness starts to seem more like a welcome moment of rest before we unleash our creative energies again — just as our bodies naturally cycle between waking and sleeping.

I think “this too shall pass” is a great mantra for moments when we’re feeling creatively empty, just as it is in other parts of life.

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A common idea in personal development circles is that “what you focus on expands.”  For instance, if you’re feeling sad, focusing your attention on your sadness will only make you sadder.  Instead, you need to distract yourself from your sadness by visualizing rainbows, playing with your cat, or doing something else to take your mind off what you’re feeling.

In my experience, the opposite is actually true.  I’ve found that, when I turn my attention toward an uncomfortable emotion, or a place in my body that’s tense, I actually find myself relaxing, and starting to put the discomfort into perspective.

Getting To Know My Back Pain

For example, as with many people, my lower back sometimes tightens up.  I used to buy the conventional wisdom that people just get “back pain” from time to time, and nothing much can be done about it short of taking medication.

Today, however, I have a practice for dealing with tension in my lower back that’s worked wonders.  I just focus my attention on the discomfort.  I get familiar with where it is, whether it’s sharp or dull, whether the painful area has a shape, and so on.  You could say I get intimate with it.

Does this practice “attract” more pain?  Not at all.  Instead, I usually find that the sensation I’m feeling begins to shift, and the tight spot begins to loosen.  By probing around in that area with my awareness, I get a sense of how I’m creating the tension, and often that’s enough to have the discomfort fall away.

Feeling Into “Bad Feelings”

I’ve had the same kind of experience when it comes to “negative” or “uncomfortable” emotions.  In our culture, we’re conditioned to think that, when we’re “feeling bad,” we should do something to push the feeling away — taking a warm bath, drinking alcohol, saying affirmations, or something else.

The trouble with running from an emotion we don’t like, in my experience, is that pushing it away actually puts it in control of our lives.  The “bad” emotion, not us, ends up in the driver’s seat.

Why?  Take boredom, for example.  When we’re working on a task and we start feeling the discomfort we call boredom, many of us are in the habit of automatically doing something to “take the edge off” — playing Solitaire on the computer, Twittering, or something else.

But here’s the problem:  if we, like Pavlov’s dogs, automatically surf the web every time we feel bored, that means our boredom gets to control our work schedule.  If we don’t have the ability to keep making progress in our work, even when boredom is coming up, we’re basically slaves to our boredom.

The solution for me has been, instead of turning my attention away from boredom, to turn toward it.  Just as I do with back pain, I get conscious of where the boredom is in my body, what it feels like (perhaps aching, itching, or tightness), and so on.

The more familiar I get with my boredom, the more comfortable I become with it.  It no longer feels so weird and disturbing — instead, it’s just another sensation I feel in my body from time to time.  And the more comfortable I get with being bored, the more I can choose to move forward in my work, even when boredom is arising.

I think it’s amazing how much we can do just by shifting the focus of our attention.

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My focus used to be on helping people find fulfilling careers.  Like many of us, I assumed that, as soon as we find the “right” career — something we’re passionate about, that pays the bills, that gives us a flexible schedule, or has whatever else we’re looking for in a “dream job” — we’ll get the joy we want out of our work.

After spending more time talking and working with people, I noticed something that changed my mind.  What I saw was that, after they changed careers, people tended to gripe about their new jobs or businesses in exactly the same ways they once complained about their old ones.

Back when a friend of mine was working a 9-to-5 job, he used to say, when asked about his work, that he “didn’t want to talk about it.”  Eventually, he started his own business, hoping to “do something that didn’t feel like a job.”  Unfortunately, a few months into his entrepreneurial stint, he began noticing himself telling people he “didn’t want to talk about” how his business was doing.

Wherever You Work, There You Are

Examples like this taught me that, while we usually think we dislike our work because we have a bad job, often the problem has more to do with our relationship with ourselves.  My sense with the friend I mentioned, for instance, is that, on some level, he simply doesn’t see himself and what he does as worth talking about.  It’s no wonder, then, that he keeps “not wanting to talk about” everything he takes part in.

Perhaps you’ve heard this kind of talk before — “wherever you go, there you are,” and all that.  What we don’t usually hear, however, are suggestions for how to become aware of, and transform, these habits of thinking and feeling.  I’ll talk about an approach I’ve found useful.

An Awareness-Building Exercise

Believe it or not, in the productivity workshop I lead with a yoga teacher, one of the exercises involves sitting in front of a wall, and staring at a piece of tape for half an hour.  The only thing the participants have to do is, whenever their minds wander away, simply bring their attention back to the tape.

After the exercise, we ask people what they experienced as they did it.  We usually find that they had a wide range of thoughts and sensations — some felt antsy, some got sleepy, some were annoyed at me for “making them” go through this process, and so on.

But we almost always learn that, no matter what a person feels while staring at the wall, it’ll be a feeling they’ve had before.  For example, if they notice themselves internally griping “there’s no point in doing this” during the exercise, that’s probably something they often think while they’re doing a project at work.

In other words, what this exercise teaches people is that they – not their jobs, their bosses, the office furniture or anything else — are the ones creating the suffering they’re going through in their work.

Just getting conscious of this, I’ve found, can create a big shift in perspective.  In my experience, when we become aware of how much power we have over the way we experience the world, we often find ourselves spontaneously using that power to let go of ways of thinking that have troubled us in the past.

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(This piece was inspired by one of the many heart-opening conversations I had with Robin in the comments to an earlier post.)

There’s a lot of advice out there about “how to be creative.”  On the surface, this sounds great — everybody wants to come up with useful and profitable ideas, right?  But when I look more closely at this kind of advice, and what drives us to seek it out, I feel concerned.

On one level, none of us needs to be taught how to create. In every moment, we’re creating (or, at least, playing a part in creating) our lives.  We’re choosing where to go, what to eat, what to say in a conversation, and so on.  We make many of these choices unconsciously, but that doesn’t change the fact that we make them.

Yet, somehow, I doubt this would satisfy most people looking for creativity tips.  As someone I know who often complains about her “lack of creativity” put it:  “sure, I choose the words I use when I’m talking, but so what?  Everybody does that.”

Being Creative and Being “Special”

I think my friend’s words illustrate the real concern that often motivates people to seek creativity advice.  They aren’t actually interested in being creative — what they really want is to be special and unique. What’s more, they worry that, without outside help, they’ll always be mediocre and average.

In my experience, this need to be special, and self-loathing for being “average,” causes people a lot of suffering.  Ironically, I’ve found, it also hampers our progress in our work.

Speaking for myself, it’s hard to move forward in a project when I’m demanding that my work be brilliant and 100% original.  With that kind of mentality, I’m likely to second-guess, and probably delete, every line I write, and be left with a blank screen after hours of effort.  Worse still, perhaps, I won’t have fun, and I won’t feel inspired to keep writing.

It’s only when I drop my need for “uniqueness” that I start making headway again.  In other words, it’s only when I’m willing to take the risk of “being average” that I’m able to produce anything at all.

Who’s Afraid of Averageness?

And when you think about it, is “being average” really such a huge risk? What would happen if someone told you that your work was average?  Would you spontaneously combust?  Or maybe dissolve into a pile of steaming protoplasm?

I’m no expert on spontaneous combustion, but I can tell you that some people have said far worse things about my writing, and somehow I’m in one piece.  I’m still writing, to boot, and — for better or worse — showing no signs of stopping.

So, when someone comes to me bemoaning their lack of creativity, I often invite them to try this exercise.  For a moment, consider the possibility that you don’t have to try to be creative.  You are creating your life, through the choices you make, in every moment.  Imagine what you would and could do if you fully accepted that.

If we could let go of our draining struggle to “be creative,” and trust that creativity is already and always ours, I think we’d free up a lot of energy to accomplish what we want, and give the gifts we want to give, in our work.

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I used to believe that I shouldn’t sit down to write unless I had a compelling vision of what I’d say.  Unfortunately, this attitude was the reason why, for many years, I didn’t do any creative writing.  Sure, I wrote a lot, but only when somebody else (1) gave me a subject to write about and (2) was willing to pay me a bunch of money or give me a good grade.

Eventually, I started taking a look at why I had this mindset.  Why was I reluctant to just sit down and see whether any interesting ideas came up?

What I ultimately saw was that I lacked faith in my creativity.  I was assuming that, if I tried to write without an airtight plan, I’d squander hours at my desk, and end up with nothing but frustration to show for it.

My Emptiness Experiment

Armed with this knowledge, I decided to experiment with simply sitting, and trusting that inspiration would arise.  I committed to myself that, if necessary, I’d sit there all night.  I’d only give up if I woke up facedown on my desk in front of an empty computer screen.

My prediction that I’d get frustrated proved to be right.  I labored mightily to fill the blank screen with words, but none of my ideas or sentences seemed to satisfy me.  My shoulders grew painfully rigid, as if I were trying to physically push the emptiness away.

After an hour or two of helpless thrashing, it dawned on me that I wasn’t following the spirit of my experiment.  Instead of having faith that my creative energies would emerge on their own timetable, I was trying to force them to work.

Dropping The Need To “Just Do It”

I began making progress only when I dropped the struggle.  I sighed deeply, let my shoulders relax, erased the words I’d written just to fill space, and simply stared into the creative vacuum on my monitor.

In the moment when my flailing ceased, the emptiness in my mind, and on the screen, began to dissipate.  Effortlessly, fluidly, another article began taking shape.  Within twenty minutes, the new piece was ready for editing.

As it turned out, the physical act of typing the article wasn’t the hard part of the writing process.  The difficult part was trusting that, eventually, my creativity would come out to play — letting go of my need to fill the emptiness, and having faith that it would pass away on its own.

In other words, I see the emptiness we encounter when we’re writing, or doing some other creative pursuit, as a test of our faith in ourselves.  We pass the test when we end our thrashing and trust that, in its own time, and in its own unpredictable way, inspiration will show up.

Many people see writing as a matter of “just doing it” — of forcing ourselves to write something, no matter how much pushing, fighting or flailing it takes.  This “beat yourself into submission” strategy seems to work for some people.  But if it’s wearing thin for you, I invite you to try simply sitting, relaxing, and waiting on your muse.

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