Last week, we started to rewrite the cultural myth of productivity: the lie that says your work is your worth so if you want to earn the right to feel good in your own skin, you’d better perform better, conform yourself, and produce more and more and more and more and more. 

Know this: Productivity culture is slavery culture. 

I’m not exaggerating.

When you look back at the overseer’s books for measuring the value of their “human assets”, they tracked how much cotton each enslaved human picked every day of the week and extrapolated each enslaved person’s value from there. 

Those plantation logbooks looked just like every productivity planner on the market today.

Exhibit A: Thomas Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book from the 1800s.

Note: You do need to have images turned on in your email system to see the above image. 

During slavery, the goal of all this tracking was to get more and more and more “productivity” out of each human “asset” every day, every week and every year. 

And this is still the goal of productivity culture, which is toxic, extractive, and not even that effective, when you consider the data that says most corporate employees are only “productive” for a couple hours a day.

It’s savage and inhuman to treat people (including you) as assets whose work determines their value. 

It’s soul-killing to expect ever-increasing output from any sentient being. Again, including you.

To track and measure and obsessively optimize your monetary “value” contradicts the Divine realities of who you are, how you best work and why you’re here. 

And on top of all of that, productivity culture feeds your Inner Critic, which will tell you that:

…productivity is success, even when it’s making you miserable

…you’re not getting enough done

…if you keep it up you’ll lose your job

…you’re falling behind (again), and in fact

…you’re just generally behind in life, because I mean look at HER life and she’s SO organized AND she’s way younger than you.

Your Inner Critic will make it hard to rest when it’s time to rest, causing you to feel like some vague, catastrophic shoe will drop if you don’t get up and do something. Start with the dishes, your Inner Critic will say.

Catch this principle: Productivity culture is burnout culture, powered by fear. 

The antidote is fruitfulness: a natural rhythm of creation that aligns with how the world works and how humans operate in a best case, best life scenario. 

Fruitfulness is the rhythm of inspired action, collaboration, and rest. 

Fruitfulness aligns with the truth that human energies ebb and flow. 

Fruitfulness is seasonal, just like this Universe. There’s a time for sowing seeds. There’s a time for cultivating. There’s a time to let the sun and the rain and the soil and the bees take over and do their part, while the farmer takes a break. There’s a time to let the field lie fallow, be tilled by the hooves of the goats (and the pugs) and be replenished.

There’s a time to harvest your fruits.

And by the way, it’s not always harvest season 100% of the time. (That’s a lie of productivity culture, too.)

Fruitfulness makes great use of the shit and the compost of life, your past disappointments and traumas providing nutrition and preparation for your fruitful, juicy now.

Fruitfulness gracefully grows what you want to grow, in Divine Timing. 

Fruitful people know that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is be still.

Stand down. 

Sit down.

Take a moment. 

Get quiet. 

Get still so you can hear with the ears of Spirit and see with the eyes of Spirit.

Listen. 

Be still so you can perceive and receive your Divine Downloads. 

Be still so you can see your own patterns of hiding and holding back. Know that your patterns might look like superheroic action, but underneath all that activity you might find patterns of chronic reaction, distraction, perfectionism and self-sabotaging your own passion projects and dreams in exchange for the dopamine hit of external validation and the false soothing of staying in your comfort zone.

Be still so you can see how you habitually blow up or complicate relationships with the people that want to help you. 

Be still so you can see the opportunities right in front of you to have what you want right now.

Be still so you can see what in your life is not in alignment with where you want to go.

Be still so you can discern what your Inner Guidance Committee is saying from what your Inner Critic is saying.

Let me tell you something: If you’re actively engaged in commerce in western culture in 2021, you probably need more quiet time than you are giving yourself.

You think that action is how things get done. 

But you’re not here just to get things done. 

And the biggest, best things get done through alignment, not through sheer action. 

You can accelerate your progress by taking a freaking break. 

Give yourself some space for the dots to connect.

Give yourself time for your brain to work in the background.

Be like the plum tree I planted and forgot… the tree that bore hundreds of plums last year. 

Give yourself time for the collaborative components to show up and help you out, like the rain and the sun helped the tree.

Stop rushing all the damn time. 

Stand down.

Make your life a place where natural rhythms and seasons of fruitfulness are respected and even revered.

Make your soul an environment in which fruitfulness thrives.  

Fruitfulness thrives where there is radical trust and radical acceptance of how life and this world works, especially these truths:

• small things grow
• seasons change
• some endings are necessary and
• things take the time they take.

Fruitfulness requires that you stop the madness of “I’ll do it myself” and begin tapping into the power of other people and other forces.

And fruitfulness requires rest, which gives those other people and forces a chance to show up and do what they do. 

It’s time to liberate yourself from the lies of productivity culture. 

I give you permission to begin noticing when and where your Inner Critic is telling you that your value is based on your output, busy-ness or activity and just see that thought for what it is: false.

Don’t believe everything you think.

Instead, let’s get fruitful.

Fruitful people plant seeds. 

Fruitful people create when they’re inspired.

Fruitful people rest without judging themselves for resting. 

And fruitful people radically trust that everything will come together and light up and line up, so they have a whole lot more fun in life x. 

Fruit doesn’t grow overnight, and neither do the most soul-satisfying books, projects, businesses, or careers.  

There’s a process. It takes time. And it’s co-creative.

Thanks for co-creating my vision with me. 

Know that across time, across distance… I’m co-creating yours with you, too, Brilliant One.

Head up + heart out,
 

The Inner Critic Coach™
Spiritual Strategist for smart, successful people

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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