Redefining productivity

Welcome to another Made for More Monday on the Made for More podcast.

In this episode, we’re redefining what productivity actually means. Because productivity was never meant to be measured by exhaustion, overflowing to-do lists, or the pressure to do more just to feel worthy. Instead, we’re exploring a healthier standard—one where productivity is guided by intention, presence, and alignment with your real life, not an impossible pace.

If you’ve been feeling stretched thin, stuck in “never enough,” or like your worth is tied to how much you can get done, this conversation is your reset. You were made for more than burnout—you were made for a life that feels full, not just busy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to the Made for More podcast. Today's episode most definitely builds straight off of our last couple of episodes together where we had conversations where we talked about having this ability to allow our goals to shift and to change, and then actually living our lives while placing healthy boundaries within and around our workspaces. So today we are taking a closer look at something many of us carry, which is having a highly productive mindset. And while this mindset can drive us and keep us moving forward, it can also become this double-edged sword, one that convinces us that we have to earn things. We have to earn our rest, we have to earn our time off or earn the right to do things differently. And a lot of people are led to believe that if we chase productivity like it's a speed or a volume, then we are productive. And I want to give us permission to just have a different point of view. So today, as we are stepping into our more, I want to invite you into a conversation where we are going to unpack what it looks like to live a life where we can be people who value productivity without allowing it to define our worth. Productivity at its core is simply just using your time and energy in a way that creates progress or meaningful results. And someone with a highly productivity personality is usually someone that is driven and disciplined and always looking for ways to move forward and do more within their lives. But sometimes that drive can leave you feeling like you always have to be doing something in order to feel simply okay. Or it can leave you feeling that you have to earn something, such as your rest, your rewards, your downtime, your vacation, your time off or time away from whatever you do that makes you productive. And the reason that I'm even having this conversation here with you today is because throughout the years of my life, I have realized that I have a highly productive personality trait. And if I had to guess, you probably feel very similar. And that's why you're here, right? Because you care about growth, you care and want to move forward in your life, you want to be intentional with your life and your time, and you want more for yourself. You're highly productive too. And let me say that there is nothing wrong with any of that. And because you think and live like this, you are actually more rare and more uncommon than you think. Because while most people simply do the bare minimum, you are out there doing the most. And while most people settle for average, your personality just goes all in on everything that you do. So here's the deal: productivity is a beautiful and very powerful thing. It can lead us to really meaningful places in our lives and within who we are. It gives us amazing, great things like having structure, purpose, momentum, and even our success. But when you're somebody who naturally leans this way, productivity can also become something that can also leave you empty and drain you. It can quietly turn into pressure. It can turn into expectation and into this feeling that you always have to be doing something. So, what I want for us is to find a healthy middle ground where we can continue to live productively, we can have intentional lives, but we also understand that we are absolutely allowed to rest, we are allowed to be still. We are allowed to take breaks, we're allowed to do absolutely nothing without feeling like we first had to earn it. And if you think about it, from a very young age, we were actually taught this without anyone actually saying it to us. We were taught that productivity is what gets you rewarded. Productivity equals the applause and the celebration. It's what gets attention. It's what gets praise and what gets celebrated. So over time, we don't just learn how to be productive, but we start to believe that being productive is what makes us valuable. It starts to become part of our identity. And when that belief follows us into our adulthood, it can make rest feel very unfamiliar and sometimes even uncomfortable to the point where you have no rest, you have no chill. And for me, I've seen this play out in a lot of areas within my life. Whether I've placed the pressure on myself or maybe I've let the world tell me, in order to be productive, I have to do the most, I have to max myself out. And if I'm not careful, the reward to all of that is actually just exhaustion. I've seen this so very clearly within the hair industry. And if you're not careful, this industry will quietly teach you something. It'll teach you that your success looks like working the longest hours and taking the most clients. I have watched this for years as stylists publicly celebrate their 10 to 12 plus hour days with beyond packed schedules, seeing as many people as possible in a day or in a week, as if the numbers become some kind of game to earn a prize to do the absolute most. And without even realizing it, it creates this false underlying narrative that turns into an internal belief that leads you to live a life where you have to believe and perform in this way. If you want to be successful, if you want to be productive, you need to do more. You need to take on more and you need to push harder and longer than everyone else around you. But I have decided to make a cautious and different decision for myself and how I cur I handle my career. I had decided that I wanted productivity to look and feel different for me behind the chair. I wanted a different story. For me, the chase of the pace of long hours and squeezing in as many clients as possible honestly leads me to burnout. It leads me to overexhaustion. It leads me to a place where I'm juggling so much that I lose the ability to be fully present. And my clients start to feel more like revolving numbers than actual real people right in front of me. So I chose something different for myself. I chose that I wanted to see productivity in a different light. Instead of maxing out some unimpressive number of clients each day, I chose to just see around three to six clients a day max. Why? Because I decided that I personally chose that my productivity looks like valuing people and valuing impact over pressure. I value being intentional over volume. I want to be fully present with each person that's right in front of me, not just focus on how many people I can fit into a day. And I know what you're probably thinking. Okay, but what about income? What about cash flow? Because when you're maxed out on hours, services, or sales, you've tied that directly to a number, right? And that number is often your income. And it makes sense to think of it like this. Like if I do less, then I make less. And for a lot of people, that feels like something you simply cannot afford. And again, that goes back to finding your value within your productivity of doing the most. And I want to say this very clearly. I understand all of that, that this is a very real thought. And what works for me isn't automatically going to work for you. And what works for me within the career field that I am in might not fit the mold for your career path. But what I do want to offer you is an opportunity to see maybe a different perspective. When I chose to shift the way that I work, I didn't just do less. I just became more intentional with what I was offering. At my salon Evolve Studio, I don't say that you are getting a service by me. I have branded myself as a stylist who delivers an experience, not just a service, an overall experience that feels individualized to each client. My clients get my full attention. They are not competing for my time. They're not being rushed. They're not being shuffled between other clients in the chair, and they're definitely not being treated like a number. Because for me, I had to decipher if productivity meant having the most amount of clients in my chair in a day, or if productivity actually meant creating a space of impact. The option was mine, and I got to choose what productivity felt and looked like, regardless of what the world and the industry silently teaches me. And while yes, this is important in the hair world, people's time is important. And above all of that, I care more about the human heart and in the condition of the heart that is sitting right here in front of me in my chair. And for that reason, I have chosen to see productivity by using my gifts and my talents and my skills and not missing crucial moments of impacting their lives every single time I come in contact with somebody. Once my clients have experienced what I've created, it led me to a clientele that honestly became way more loyal. There were way fewer cancellations, fewer no-shows, and I was able to raise my prices because of the overall value of the experience that my clients were getting within my chair. So instead of doing more to earn more, I just focused on doing things differently. What actually felt productive to me? And what I've found is that I can create a similar level of income without doubling my workload, missing opportunities to truly see and to listen to people. And for that, I can feel productive without running myself into the ground and without doing the most. So I am still very productive, not because I'm doing any more than what I was doing, but because I'm doing it with more intention, more impact, more presence, and more value. And the reality is this false sense of productivity does not just exist in the hair industry. It actually can happen anywhere. We are taught that more clients, more accounts, more numbers, more sales equals more productivity. The bigger and wider the number automatically means we win for doing the most. But what if that's not actually true? What if you can be productive and still be very intentional? What if real productivity isn't about how much you do, but how well you actually show up for what you're choosing to do? And what if doing less but with more presence is actually the kind of productivity that changes everything for you? And you want to know what's interesting. We talk so much about productivity within our work and our work lives, but we rarely talk about how it follows us into our day-to-day lives. So, do you ever find yourself doing this same thing too, where you tell yourself, I'll sit down once the entire house is clean? Or maybe you don't let yourself watch a show unless you're doing something productive at the same time, like folding laundry or walking on a walking pad. And on the surface, it feels very productive, right? It feels disciplined. But if we are being honest underneath it all, that is exhausting because, again, it's the mindset of having to earn something. Because somewhere along the way, we started to believe that our rest needs to be justified, that we're only allowed to slow down once everything else around us is done, once we've done the most chores or the hardest and longest workout. And the problem is everything is never going to be done and it never will be. There will always be another load of laundry waiting for you. There will always be another area of the house that needs to be clean or reorganized, always another task that you should be doing. But if your ability to rest is dependent on finishing everything first, then you've now created a life where you never actually get to be in it. And that's where this shift in this mindset is going to matter the most because a healthy productivity mindset in your life doesn't mean squeezing output and max effort into every single moment and every single area. It means recognizing that your rest, enjoyment, and stillness are not rewards. They are part of a very well-lived life. And actually, if you want to be productive, you need to allow yourself the downtime, the recovery, and honestly, the mindlessness so that you can just re-energize yourself. Allow yourself to know that you are productive and be able to sit down in a not perfectly kept house. Watch a show without feeling this need to multitask. Go on a walk without turning it into some kind of intense workout that you have to check off the list. Not every moment needs to be optimized to be valuable. The tricky part of this is being overly productive is often really praised, right? Nobody pulls you to the side and says, hey, I think you might be overdoing it. So you have to be the one to put the cap on that intentionally. And that starts by exposing what's really underneath it all. And a lot of times it's not just productivity, it's the belief that we have within ourselves that if I do enough, I am finally enough. Enough peace, enough control, enough permission to rest. So let me ask you something honestly. Are you trying to max out your time, your energy, and your effort for a goal that you've never actually defined? Are you trying to get through every email, clean every corner, book every client, hit every workout just to feel like you've finally done enough for that day? And what does enough even look like to you? Because if you do not have a clear answer, there's a good chance that you've been chasing something that is honestly invisible. It's an invisible chase. So could you get to a place where productivity doesn't have to look like you're doing the most? Where it's not about how much you can fit into a day, but about how much intentional effort was met with you there, with the time that you had. Could productivity look like completing three things that actually deeply mattered and then allowing yourself to rest without the guilt attached to it, without trying to earn it with one more task or one more thing? Could you shift the way that you have defined productivity altogether? Because maybe productivity isn't measured by max effort to exhaustion. Maybe it's more measured by alignment. Maybe it's not about squeezing in more, but maybe it's about knowing that what you've done is enough and having the discipline to allow yourself to stop. And I know that this sounds simple, but for a lot of us, this is the hard part because doing more feels safe. It feels more valuable within your mind. And slowing down, stopping, or pressing pause can feel very uncomfortable or even unproductive to you. But if your version in your mind of productivity never includes space to better manage your life so that you can live a life you actually enjoy and not overly work yourself to some invisible endless goal, then what are you actually really being productive for, anyways? So before you move on from this episode, I want you to ask yourself, what am I really chasing beneath this desire for this productivity? Am I actually really just wanting to be seen? Maybe I'm wanting to be celebrated or known or championed by others? What is the need under the drive for the productivity and how can I get to the core of those needs without exhausting myself and doing the most? Have you ever clearly defined what done would look like for you? Like what your definition of productivity even looks like. Does that mean you're productive if you finally do 10 clients in a day or 20? Is that spotless house or maxed calories burned enough? Ask yourself, would you finally feel productive if you hit that number of clients a day? Or would you just continue to push for more? Where is the goal? And is that goal never ending? Because if you haven't figured out what you're doing and why you're doing it that way, you might be living in a cycle where nothing will ever feel like enough. It never will. So this week, I want you to decide to try something different. I want you to figure out how you can feel productive, but in a very different way. I want you to choose what matters. I want you to do it well and then stop. Not because everything is finished and finally finished, but because you've decided that you're just done. Remember that the world has taught us doing the most for the longest is what makes us productive. But you get to decide what productivity looks like for you in your life. You are the navigator of your own internal belief systems. You are the one shaping your beliefs, your rhythms, and your pace when it comes to your productivity. So maybe it's time to unlearn some of what you've been carrying as your standard for productivity. That unachievable pressure to do more, to prove more, and to be more. Even if the world keeps moving in that direction, you are allowed to choose something different for your life. You're allowed to choose a different story. You're allowed to pick up a new way of thinking and put down one that has actually been unachievable and exhausting you on this pursuit to a very invisible goal and an invisible reward. Because you were not created to live in a state of constant output. You weren't meant to measure your life by how much you can get done and how long you can go for. So here's the permission to do a little less, permission to redefine what productivity even means to you. Permission to leave a couple of things undone. Permission to call a 20-minute workout success and complete, and permission to stop living like you have something to prove. Because productivity shouldn't feel like chasing some unreachable goal. It should feel like clarity where you define the standard and then you give yourself permission to live by that standard and call it productive. Because you were made for more and you always have been.