Have you ever heard about the Golden Rule, and its reverse, the Silver Rule? I´m sure you have, though perhaps you were not aware this is what they´re called.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (treat others the same way you would like to bet treated). Does this sound familiar? Well, this is the Golden Rule, a moral principle that´s present in virtually every culture, philosophy and religion in the history of Humanity.
And if we formulate this same idea in a negative form, it becomes the Silver Rule: do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you..
It makes sense, doesn´t it? It´s a very simple rule, really easy to understand even for small children, especially in this second version. "OK sweetie, do you like it when the other kids hit you or take away your toys? Then don´t do it to them..." (typical parent´s speech, it never goes out of fashion).
Using videogames as a metaphor, it just came to my mind that the so-called Silver Rule would be the most basic level of "doing good deeds", the beginners level: do no harm to your neighbour.
Later on, as we grow and mature, we can proceed to the intermediate level: the Golden Rule, where the goal is no longer just not to leave the other person worse than you found them, but to leave them in a better state. Do you want people to value you, listen to you, help you? Then, behave the same way when you´re interacting with others (regardless of the result).
But, did you know there´s an even more advanced level of this metaphorical "doing good deeds" videogame? I bumped into it this week, it´s called the Platinum Rule: treat others the way THEY would like to be treated..
They. Not you.
That´s a very high standard, isn´t it? Because, how am I supposed to know how the other wants to be treated? I´m going to have to make an effort to get to know them well, snapping out of my own self-centeredness, leaving aside my preconceived ideas and truly tuning into what they consider important. That´s the only way.
What do you think? What level do you see yourself at right now? Do you accept the challenge of following the Platinum Rule?
This week I´m rescuing a book that´s over thirty years old, and that I read over twenty years ago; I remember it had a huge impact on me back then. The title is The way to Love, it´s a compilation of Anthony de Mello´s last reflections written in the form of meditations.
I´ve just started to re-read it, and I´m realizing a few things. On the one hand, I confirm my belief that there´s nothing new under the sun: everything is already said and done, multiple times and in multiple ways, at least the great truths that wise men and women have been showing to us for millennia.
What happens is that those teachings either sink in or go over our heads depending on whether we´re prepared to receive them or not, and once we receive them, they can only help us to make real changes if we´re willing to work on integrating them into our lives.
On the other hand, I´m surprised to find that many of the things I thought I had learned recently through coaching, NLP, stoicism, etc. have been inside of me for many years now, progressively taking shape and making more and more sense. That´s why I´m not able to pinpoint a single discipline, technique or personal development training course as the thing that "changed my life", as I´ve heard so many people say... My case is more of an accumulation of ideas, concepts and hypotheses I´ve been picking up throughout my life; some of them have puzzled and confused me a lot (like this book´s reflections), only to put me back together again, bit by bit, helping me to grow in awareness and internal alignment.
As an example, here´s a copy of the second meditation in full, as it appears in the book, as I think it´s very fitting given the subtitle of this blog: Reprogram your life. It´s a bit long, but I believe it´s worth the read; I hope you both enjoy it and get a little puzzled by it.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Luke 14:26
Take a look at the world and see the unhappiness around you and in you. Do you know what causes this unhappiness? You will probably say loneliness or oppression or war or hatred or atheism. And you will be wrong. There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. Because of these false beliefs you see the world and yourself in a distorted way. Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way. There is no way out, because you do not even have a suspicion that your perception is distorted, your thinking is wrong, and your beliefs are false.
Look around and see if you can find a single genuinely happy person - fearless, free from insecurities, anxieties, tensions, worries. You would be lucky if you found one in a hundred thousand. This should lead you to be suspicious of the programming and the beliefs that you and they hold in common. But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion. And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs. What makes it even worse is the fact that most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are - like the man in a dream who has no idea he is dreaming.
What are these false beliefs that block you from happiness? Here are some examples. First: Your cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to and that you consider so precious. False. There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy. Think of that for a minute. The reason why you are unhappy is because you are focusing on what you do not have rather than on what you have right now.
Another belief: Happiness is in the future. Not true. Right here and now you are happy and you do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt and a host of games that you are programmed to play. If you would see through this you would realize that you are happy and do not know it.
Yet another belief: Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world. If changing the world is your vocation in life, go right ahead and change it, but do not harbor the illusion that this is going to make you happy. What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. As well search for an eagle´s nest on the bed of an ocean, as search for happiness in the world outside of you. So if it is happiness that you seek you can stop wasting your energy trying to cure your baldness or build up an attractive body or change your residence or job or community or lifestyle or even your personality. Do you realize that you could change every one of these things, you could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy? And deep down you know this is true but still you waste your effort and energy trying to get what you know cannot make you happy.
Another false belief: If all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure and fearful. Make a list of all your attachments and desires and to each of them say these words: "Deep down in my heart I know that even after I have got you I will not get happiness." And ponder on the truth of those words. The fulfillment of desire can, at the most, bring flashes of pleasure and excitement. Don´t mistake that for happiness.
What then is happiness? Very few people know and no one can tell you, because happiness cannot be described. Can you describe light to people who have been sitting in darkness all their lives? Can you describe reality to someone in a dream? Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.
If people want happiness so badly, why don´t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed. Second, because they are scared to lose the only world they know: the world of desires, attachments, fears, social pressures, tensions, ambitions, worries, guilt, with flashes of the pleasure and relief and excitement which these things bring. Think of someone who is afraid to let go of a nightmare because, after all, this is the only world he knows. There you have a picture of yourself and of other people.
If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. How? Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.
So spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other.
Father and mother: nightmare. Wife and children, brothers and sisters: nightmare. All your possessions: nightmare. Your life as it is now: nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself you cannot be happy without: nightmare. Then you will hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters and even your own life. And you will so easily take leave of all your possessions, that is, you will stop clinging and thus have destroyed their capacity to hurt you. Then at last you will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or uttered - the state of abiding happiness and peace. And you will understand how true it is that everyone who stops clinging to brothers or sisters, father, mother or children, land or houses... is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life.
A few days ago I did a comparison of Easter traditions with my friend Stephanie, who´s from Ronamia, and we realised there were big differences, starting with the fact that the dates for Catholic Easter and Orthodox Easter are calculated differently, as the former follows the Gregorian calendar, and the latter, the Julian calendar.
But even between countries with a Christian non-Orthodox majority of population (Catholics, Anglicans and other Protestant groups), traditions also vary widely, and I get the impression that those variations have more to do with geography and history than the specific flavour of Christianism practiced there.
For example, when I moved to Ireland, I remember being really surprised at the fact that there were no processions here, despite this being a traditionally Catholic country, like Spain. Out of curiosity, I just asked Google what other countries apart from Spain do processions (parades carrying sculptures of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Saints, etc.), and the answer was Italy (where we probably got them from, as we did with Nativity scenes), Israel (probably where the original processions took place, in the Holy Places) and several Latin American countries (exported by us Spaniards).
In other locations around the world, like the rest of Europe and the English speaking countries, Easter eggs are the most popular feature, and that´s also true here in Ireland. However, rather than painting real eggs in colourful tones as they do in Romania and many other places, the Irish are more prone to spending their time eating chocolate eggs, after having given up on chocolate and sweets during Lent.
Which brings me to the other question I had to ask Google today: why eggs, precisely? Well, it turns out eggs were always a symbol of fertility and new life, since the old times of Greeks and Egyptians, and from there, they became a symbol of spring. Then, with the arrival of Christianity, eggs became a symbol of Christ´s resurrection, and given that the Church forbade eating eggs during Holy Week, people started decorating them, so that enjoying them on Easter Sunday was an even bigger celebration.
Another detail I find interesting is the origin of the words we use to name this festivity. In Spanish we call it Pascua, in reference to the Jewish festival of Passover, "the passing of the Lord", marking the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Jesus´s last dinner with his disciples on Holy Thursday was a celebration of the Jewish Passover, so the word got transferred to our Resurrection celebration as well, through Latin and Greek.
But in English, in contrast, the word Easter has a completely different origin: the Christianization of the pagan festival of spring, dedicated to goddess Eostre. Eostre was a goddess worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons, and when the Christian missionaries arrived a the British Isles at the beginning of the Middle Ages, they thought it would be easier to evangelise the land if they adopted the existing religious celebrations, giving them a new Christian meaning.
As you can see, some celebrations originate from others, but at the end of the day, all of them (including the Jewish Passover) were, and still are, celebrations of spring. And they´re not the only ones: about a week ago, we celebrated the Hindu festival of Holi; the festival of colour, love and spring, an explosion of laughter and colour.
And so, we confirm once again that in this life, some themes are universal, and the different cultures and nations express them in different ways: if back in the autumn, when the days were getting shorter, traditions spoke to us about spirits, ghosts and the triumph of light over darkness, now in spring, when the days finally star getting longer again, we celebrate the return of life and the triumph of good over evil.
What about you? What traditions do you follow at this time of the year? How do you celebrate the arrival of spring?
Once again, Sunday comes along and I sit down to write the article of the week, mentally going over the past seven days. To be honest, this last work week was extremely busy with travelling, going to the office and doing various tasks, plus dealing with a passing virus at home, so I was very much looking forward to Saturday and Sunday, to have the chance to "laze around".
Although, as it happens, there were things to do also during the weekend, starting with a 6 AM trip to the airport on Saturday morning to give my eldest daughter a lift...
Under normal circumstances, I would have taken advantage of the early morning start and continued doing "productive" things all day, but given that I know this often leads me to ending up feeling as tired on weekends as I am on weekdays (if not more), this time I intentionally decided to take breaks throughout the day to rest and relax. And I remembered once again that question my friend Marilyn asked me a couple of years ago, not long after we first met:
Hey, when do you usually stop?
I remember being really surprised by this, as I was completely unaware of this behaviour of mine. But her question was an eye opener; from that moment on, I started watching myself, and I discovered that she was spot on: very often I would go the whole day without stopping. How could I not end up tired? I my head there was always a long list of to-do´s, even if I reduced it to what I considered the bare minimum.
Once we become aware of a certain behaviour, we have the power to change it if we want, for example if it´s going to have damaging consequences in the long term, like working too much, or not resting enough.
And how do we go about changing it? Well, by digging a bit to find out what beliefs are hiding behind that behaviour, based on clues from the language we use, from the way we talk to ourselves.
In the specific example from above, the clue is in the words "laze around". Unconsciously, my mind thinks: if I´m lazying around, it´s because I´m a lazy person. But I don´t want to be a lazy person! I want to be productive, and useful to society. So I mentally kick myself, I tell myself: "do something useful", and then that´s what I do, "productive" and "useful" things, one after the other, one day after another, until I reach my limit.
Does that help me? Not at all, because even though I´m achieving things in the short term, it´s not a sustainable approach in the long term. At some point one has to rest, switch off and enjoy life a little, otherwise there can be very serious consequences. So here´s where I have to change my mindset and realise that rest is not laziness, it´s self-care, and self-care is absolutely indispensable in order to have a good life.
Furthermore, it´s only when we take care of ourselves (through diet, exercise, rest, connecting to ourselves and others...) that we have enough energy to keep going and help those around us, so my initial goal of being a productive person, useful to society, ends up being achieved in a much better way with this indirect approach, and with the added bonus of enjoyment along the way.
What about you? How good are you at taking a well deserved break every now and then? I hope you find time during this Easter/Spring break to switch off and take care of yourself, in whichever way you see fit.
Today I'm bringing you a selection of sayings and blessings from the vast repertoire of Irish tradition, some of which are better known than others.
Here's the most widely known blessing, to begin with:
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your fields, And, until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Given Ireland's religious history, it's not surprising to see God appearing as a recurring theme, in combination with beautiful metaphors and a good dose of humour:
May the Lord keep you in His hand and never close His fist too tight.
If God sends you down a stony path, may He give you strong shoes.
God is good, but never dance in a small boat.
Continuing with the metaphors...
When the roaring flames of your love have burned down to embers, may you find that you’ve married your best friend.
As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way.
May the hinges of our friendship never grow rusty.
Friendship is another main theme, highly valued by the Irish:
May your home always be too small to hold all your friends.
May you always find three welcomes in life. In a garden during summer, At a hearth during winter, And in the hearts of friends throughout all your years.
Then there are these sayings I love for their timeless wisdom dressed in simplicity:
May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for.
Here's to a fellow who smiles when life runs along like a song. And here's to the lad who can smile when everything goes dead wrong.
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
When a twig grows hard it is difficult to twist it. Every beginning is weak.
And my favourite phrase:
I complained that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.
Irish saying
Well, I hope that you liked these sayings, and that you enjoyed the most Irish day of the year. Here are two bonus blessings to wrap it all up:
May you always have work for your hands to do. May your pockets hold always a coin or two. May the sun shine bright on your windowpane. May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near you. And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you're going and the insight to know when you're going too far.
Today we´ve had a double celebration at home: my birthday and Mother´s day, which here in Ireland is held on the fourth Sunday in Lent. It´s been a lovely day (thanks a million guys!)
How old am I now, you say? Weeeell, they say age is just a number, right? Following this blog´s tradition , I´ll write it in binary: 101110.
Speaking of numbers, BinaryWords is also celebrating today: this is the 150th post! Feel free to take this opportunity and visit the blog´s archive page, to check out the new "highlighted articles" section.
Today I was reflecting on this thing we have with numbers, and how sometimes we pay too much attention to them, age being just an example, and I remembered a passage from The Little Prince that speaks about that:
If I´ve told you these details about Asteroid B-612 and if I´ve given you its number, it is on account of the grown-ups. Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: "What does his voice sound like?" "What games does he like best?" "Does he collect butterflies?" They ask: "How old is he?" "How many brothers does he have?" "How much does he weigh?" "How much money does his father make?" Only then do they think they know him. If you tell grown-ups, "I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof..." they won´t be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, "I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs." Then they exclaim, "What a pretty house!"
Antoine the Saint-Exupéry
What about you? How much do you care about numbers? I´ve realized I care about them less and less...
No, this article is not about William Shakespeare, although I may end up writing about him someday...
Todays article is about that question we all ask ourselves (or should) at some point in our lives, and which, depending on the circumstances, can be either really easy or really difficult to answer:
Who are you?
I´ve mentioned before in this blog that each person is like an iceberg; this metaphor is often used to explain the neurological levels model created by Robert Dilts, which I briefly describe in this article.
And it´s at one of the deepest levels, deep down the iceberg, where we find the concept of identity.
Who we are. Or who we believe to be, just like the title of that TV programme (an excellent one, by the way) where different celebrities traced the steps of their ancestors: Who do you think you are?
The truth is that this topic of identity is quite complex. Or I should say identities, plural, because we don´t have only one, we have many, and some of them change over time. For example: I am Beatriz, I´m Galindo and I´m García. I´m BinaryBea, female, forty-something, European, Spanish, Extremaduran (from the Extremadura region), from Cáceres (no translation for "cacereña"!), expat, Spaniard in Ireland, Dublin based, computer engineer, coach, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, niece, friend, workmate, classmate, neighbour, student, homeowner, divorcee, reader, blogger... And so on and so forth.
As you can see, some identities may contain others, overlap with them, or even contradict them, which can originate situations of internal conflict, existential dilemmas and self sabotage. It can also happen that, when one of those identities changes or disappears, we find ourselves lost and disorientated, like for example, going through a divorce or being laid off: if I can no longer define myself as X person´s spouse / Y company´s employee / you name it, then, who am I? It´s as if our chair had become wobbly, having lost one of its supporting legs, and we need to invest time and effort in stabilizing it again.
All of this is on my mind today because last Friday I heard a beautiful poem from Erin Hanson, entitled: Not:
You are not your age, nor the size of clothes you wear, You are not a weight, or the color of your hair. You are not your name, or the dimples in your cheeks. You are all the books you read, and all the words you speak. You are your croaky morning voice, and the smiles you try to hide. You’re the sweetness in your laughter, and every tear you’ve cried. You’re the songs you sing so loudly when you know you’re all alone. You’re the places that you’ve been to, and the one that you call home. You’re the things that you believe in, and the people whom you love. You’re the photos in your bedroom, and the future you dream of. You’re made of so much beauty, but it seems that you forgot When you decided that you were defined by all the things you’re not.
And the following day, on Saturday, the Universe played this song for me on the radio, to follow along with the theme: The Logical Songby Supertramp - here it is with subtitles in English and Spanish.
What about you? Do you already know who you are, or do you need someone to tell you?
Do you consider yourself a person of habit, used to always doing things the same way?
If the answer is yes, I have a quote for you:
Until you change how you get things done, you’ll never know what works best.
Roy T. Bennet
This is something that took me a long time to learn: over the years, I slowly came to realize that behind my perfectionism and my willingness to do everything "right" there was an unconscious belief that there was only ONE "right" way to do each thing, and that if I wasn´t able to do it exactly that way, then I was making a mistake, I was doing it "wrong". Moreover, every time I tried a new activity and didn´t get it right at the first try, I automatically assumed I was always going to be bad at it, and I rarely gave it a second chance.
Just imagine how incredibly limiting this thought can be... When in our minds there´s only one way of getting it right among a thousand ways of screwing up, it´s no surprise that the fear of getting it wrong causes us to feel tense, or even paralyzed.
But what if we could turn this around? What if there were a thousand ways of getting it right, or at least, a thousand ways of gathering information to guide us towards a better result?
Here´s where that famous quote from the inventor or the light bulb comes to mind:
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
That´s precisely the value of experimentation: learning from each try in order to find a better solution. Or several ones, as problems rarely have only a single solution.
But, to be able to try other ways of doing things, first we need to be able to come up with them, and our brain gets a bit lazy when it comes to blazing new trails... It´s much better at going back to the beaten tracks, as they´re easier to traverse and require far less energy.
One of the main benefits of coaching and self-discovery is that they help us to overcome that cognitive rigidity, that resistance we have to getting out of auto-pilot mode. This way, by realizing that the way we see things is just another perspective, as valid as many others, we can allow ourselves to consider other possibilities and viewpoints, and from there, expand our options range and find more adaptive solutions.
And while we´re in the process of trying new strategies and designing solutions that work better for us, we learn to trust that others can also find their own. Because, once the "single perfect solution" myth has been busted, we realize there´s no point in imposing our judgement on others: we each have our own style, our own worldview and our particular set of circumstances, and something that works for one person may not necessarily work for another.
So then, what can we do? Well, we can share our learnings and experiences with other people, explain what works for us, what doesn´t work, and why, compare strategies and points of view, and be open to trying new ways of obtaining what we need or want.
We can even take it as an experiment: if I change this variable, what happens? What changes? Does the result improve, or get worse? All of this knowing that your own result is personal and untransferable, and that the winning formula will probably be different for each of us.
So, with Mr. Benet´s permission, I´m going to slightly modify his quote:
Until you change how you get things done, you’ll never know what works best FOR YOU.
What about you? Do you already know what works best for you? What aspects of your life would benefit from some experimentation?
Today´s post is going to be quick, without thinking too much 😀
This term is included on my list of untranslatable, not for having a particularly complex meaning, but for being such a simple, clear and elegant word in English:
Overthinking.
The Spanish version would be something along the lines of "pensar demasiado", "pasarse de pensar", or if we want to summarize in a single word, "sobrepensar"... All of these sound much clumsier to me than the original, but you get the idea, right?
This word fills my mind with memories from years ago: long evenings and nights playing board games, and almost every time, there was a friend (or it could be two, or three) taking foreeeeeeeeever to decide their next move... The rest of us would quickly start to sing "OOOOOO-VER-THIN-KER" following the notes from Movierecord, to hurry them up.
Well, this week Instagram showed me a phrase on this topic that I thought was absolutely brilliant:
OVERTHINKING = UNDERACTING
So true. When we devote ourselves to thinking too much, we inevitably end up doing too little... Or nothing at all, which is even worse.
And that approach prevents us from moving forward. Going over a problem in our head doesn´t solve anything; it's only by taking action that we can change things and make real progress. So let's take action once and for all, and whatever happens, happens.
What about you, what's been on your mind lately? What's that thing you've been thinking too much and doing too little about? And when are you going to wake up and take action?
I´ve realized I frequently judge how well my day went based on how productive it was... Or rather, on how productive I was. Does this sound familiar?
Productivity is a topic I´ve always been interested in; in fact, it´s what first brought me to the personal development world. I remember the old times when I used to search for tips and strategies to stay on top of my never-ending to-do list. And I did find a few tools that helped me, but only to a certain extent.
Because in reality, what was happening to me was much more complex than I thought. As it's usually the case.
That´s why in coaching we like probing and digging a bit beneath the surface, because often times the "problem" our client is coming with is just a symptom of a deeper conflict or imbalance, which they themselves are unaware of. For example, time management issues tend to reflect underlying priority management issues, and procrastination may be caused by conflicting values or priorities.
A widely used coaching technique consists of asking questions like the one at the beginning of this article: "What does X mean to you?" This may seem silly, but at the end of the day, words are symbols we use to represent things, and when we´re discussing relatively abstract terms, our thoughts are much more complex than the words we use to describe them. Breaking down the word´s meaning and explaining it out loud (or in writing) can help us to make very interesting discoveries.
For example, the concept of productivity is linked to the action of "producing", and I´ve realized I used to believe that a person could only be productive when they were "producing" something tangible, something measurable. When I started my professional career, first as a programmer and later on as a systems analyst, it was easy for me to determine whether I was being productive or not, for I had documents, diagrams and lines of code as proof. Then as I progressed to a different kind of role, the game rules suddenly changed: there were more meetings and less defined tasks, and I found myself a bit lost; very often I would get to the end of the day with a feeling of not having contributed at all.
Then slowly but surely, I started adapting and evolving my definition of productivity. It took me years to get rid of the idea that the time I spent "chatting with people" (= at meetings, especially 1:1s) didn't count as work, because I wasn't producing anything. Now I know that talking to my colleagues and fostering work relationships not only it's not a waste of time, it's actually an essential part of my job, and it makes a huge difference in terms of pushing projects forward. Now that I know the transformational power of a good conversation, it's one of the things I enjoy the most.
And what about outside of work? Well, I've realized that this constant need to produce has a lot of weight in my personal life as well, so I still find it difficult to prioritize rest, leisure and self-care at the same level of importance as other things that "must be done". Without even noticing, I fill up my evenings and weekends with tasks to be completed, so that at bedtime I can say it was a productive day... But the good news is that now I'm aware of it, and I'm working on balancing it out, also being careful not to fall into the guilt trap.
What do you think? Is productivity important to you? And how do you measure it?
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