#109: Productivity, golden eggs, and inner critics

What's your reaction when your inner critic tells you that what you're doing is not good enough? If you think she's right, and that it's only thanks to her that you're getting anything done at all, you're not alone. But while you're busy listening to your inner critic, you're overlooking the fact that she's not helping you. In fact, she's making things worse. She's so greedy and impatient to get more from you that she's hurting your ability to get things done. She's killing your productivity, just like the farmer killed the goose that laid the golden eggs in Aesop's fable. Join your imperfect friend for an important fairytale lesson on the importance of self-acceptance.

Transcript

You’re the goose. Your inner critic is the farmer.

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

Hi chums, nice to be back with you again. I wonder where you’re listening to this? I had a listener send me an email from Texas recently. They got in touch to let me know how much they enjoy the podcast (which, by the way, I was delighted to hear). They’d discovered it only fairly recently and have been making their way through the now-considerable collection of past episodes during their commute to and from work. I replied to say thanks for letting me know and that it’s surreal to think of my disembodied voice doing a daily commute in Texas. It made me think of how much I enjoy occasionally looking at the podcast stats, which include information about which countries and cities people are in when they download the episodes. (That’s about as detailed as it gets, by the way - rest assured that I have no idea who you are or where you live, unless you get in touch to tell me, of course.) And I have to say that I’m pretty envious of how well-travelled my voice is. It’s living the dream. It seems to get everywhere, and it’s visited more countries than the rest of me can ever hope to visit. So, thanks, beloved listeners, for taking me on these free travels. 

Anyway. As I type, I’m cooking up some exciting new interview episodes for you. I have an interview scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, and I’m working on fixing a time for another couple of guests. They’re all people I’m really excited to learn from, which means I’m really looking forward to sharing the conversations with you. So, stay tuned for those - but for now, it’s just you and me.

On to this episode’s topic. How’s your knowledge of Aesop’s fables? If you’re like me, you’ll need to think back a few years for this. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on one of the fables - The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs - and how it relates to productivity. Hear me out. If you need a refresher, the story is about a poor farmer who has lost his farm and everything else he owns except for a goose. Then, one day, the goose lays a golden egg, which the farmer is able to sell for a lot of money. There’s another golden egg the next day, and one the day after that too. Soon, the farmer is rich, but it occurs to him that if he kills the goose and cuts her open, he can get his hands on all the gold all at once and be even richer. So, that’s what he does. But when he cuts open the goose, he finds that there’s no gold - on the inside, she’s just the same as any other goose. With no more golden eggs to look forward to, the farmer is soon back to being poor, which serves him right if you ask me. Poor goose. The moral, of course, is that you should take care, in your quest to get more of something, that you don’t end up destroying what you already have, and which might be far more valuable than you recognise. The farmer, in this fable, was foolish. Greedy. Impatient. What ought he to have done instead of killing the goose? Well, he ought to have counted himself lucky that he was getting any golden eggs, right? He ought to have accepted and appreciated the valuable thing he already had, rather than trying to get more. 

I mentioned a moment ago that I’d been thinking about this fable in relation to productivity, and at this point you’re probably wondering what on earth the link is here. This is actually something that came up for me in a therapy session. I was taking stock of how far I’d come over the past few years, with my writing. I’ve spoken about this before on this podcast, but for the longest time I had such a dysfunctional relationship with writing that business-as-usual for me on a writing day - by which I mean, a day I’d set aside to focus on writing - was to do absolutely no writing at all, despite my intentions. It seems incredible now, but the entire day would be lost in avoidance activities. I’d promise myself that I’d get started after my coffee. I’d get started after breakfast. I’d get started after checking my emails and social media and reading reviews for this thing I’m thinking of buying and looking at this Wikipedia site that I’ve somehow stumbled across and which turns out to be irresistibly interesting despite being on a topic I’ve never cared about before. At some point, the day would just be lost, and I’d feel so bad about it (and myself) that I’d stop pretending that I was about to start writing and instead vow to try again tomorrow, and I’d allow myself to buy into the fantasy that I’d wake up tomorrow super motivated and productive, rather than racked with guilt about having wasted so much time. There were all sorts of things going on that made it difficult to write, but a big part was the unrealistic standards I was setting for myself. If I’d been sensible, I would have set myself a target of writing for just 5 minutes on the first day, then 10 minutes the next, then 15 minutes, and so on. But that just wasn’t enough, especially given how far behind I was. Only hours and hours of writing was good enough for my very busy and very vocal inner critic. But that was a ridiculously unattainable target, so what was the point in even trying? 

So. Back then, I was getting next to no writing done. By contrast, these days I no longer have much of a problem with writing. I don’t try to avoid it like I used to, and I don’t procrastinate anywhere as much as I used to either. I was reflecting on all this with my therapist, and it struck me that a huge part of what enabled me to overcome the problems I was having was acceptance. I came to accept the way I write. I’m just not someone who can write for hours on end without a break. These days, I consider it a good day if I can get 45 minutes of solid writing done, and by ‘writing’ I mean not just actual writing or typing but also with pauses to think and look relevant things up. If I’m up against a deadline I can squeeze out more, of course, but can’t we all. If, on a given day, I’ve done somewhere in the region of 30 to 60 minutes of writing and then I start to find my attention wandering, I accept that that’s all I’m getting. Maybe I can get a bit more done later, after a break, but probably not. I’ve learnt the hard way that it’s counterproductive to try to force more out of myself or to say mean things to myself about how lazy or inadequate I am. I get more done by accepting the reality of the way I work. Accepting that means I get around 30 minutes of writing done on most days when I have writing time available. 30 minutes of writing is my golden egg, if you will. But when I demanded more of myself, when I refused to accept anything less than hours and hours of writing, I got nothing. By being too greedy, my inner critic killed my productivity. Just as that farmer killed the goose. 

And it’s not just me. I’ve seen analogues of this crop up in coaching sessions, again and again. When people demand too much of themselves, they get nothing. But when they set realistic expectations of themselves, they make progress. For some of the clients I’ve seen, this relates to writing, as it did with me. But this pattern can manifest in any area of life where people are unrealistically demanding of themselves: raising children, making headway with home improvement projects, applying for grants, teaching. You get the picture. 

I think it’s interesting to compare our attitudes towards the farmer who killed the goose with our attitudes towards ourselves when we’re not writing or otherwise producing as much or as fast as we’d like. When we think of the farmer, we have thoughts like: he was too greedy, he should have appreciated that he was getting any golden eggs at all, he shouldn’t have killed that poor goose. We’re not having thoughts like, why was the goose so lazy? Why only one golden egg per day? Couldn’t she have striven for excellence and popped out two, or even three? Where was her performance roadmap, and why wasn’t anyone holding her to it? Instead, we accept that the goose was going to lay eggs at the rate that she was already laying them. But when it comes to our attitudes towards ourselves, things are different. The idea of accepting our level of productivity strikes many of you as horrifying. I know, because you’ve told me. There’s no way you’re going to let yourself off the hook like that! If you accept that you’re unable to produce at the rate that you think you ought to be producing just to be adequate, you’re just going to kick back and do nothing. Your slobby self will take over. You need to keep beating yourself up. You need to keep reminding yourself of how what you’re doing is just not good enough. Admittedly, being mean to yourself in these ways isn’t helping you meet the productivity standards that you think you should be meeting - it’s actually inhibiting your ability to make progress. But you can’t just … stop, surely?

Yes. You can, and you should. You’re thinking of yourself in the way the farmer thought of the goose. Just as he’d have been better off accepting his one golden egg per day, you’d be better off if you learn to accept the rate at which you’re able to work. 

But there’s a problem with this. Do you know the rate at which you’re able to work? If you’re prone to self-criticism, then you probably don’t, because - as my own case demonstrates - bitching at yourself makes it difficult for you to work. You work less when you’re bitching at yourself than when you’re accepting of and compassionate towards yourself. To accept the way you’re able to work, you first need to recognise and understand the way you work - and that means spending some time observing your work habits, without judging. If you’re willing to give that a go - and I realise that for many of you, that’s quite scary - it might involve doing something like the following. Take whatever activity you’re having trouble with - let’s stick with the example of writing. For some reason, you’re not making the progress you’d like. Part of that lack of progress - you don’t yet know how much - might be because ‘the progress you’d like’ involves impossible standards which you’d never be able to meet even if you had an unlimited supply of willpower and discipline. And part of it - again, you don’t yet know how much - might be because the mean things you say to yourself are making you feel bad and driving you to avoid the task in hand, which inhibits your ability to get things done. So, you need to familiarise yourself with what progress looks like for you without carrying the burden of unrealistic expectations and trying not to trigger your inner critic. How do you do this? Experiment. Start small. If demanding of yourself that you churn out 3000 words per day results in you avoiding writing altogether, radically lower your expectations. Play the long game. You can slow down now in order to speed up later. If writing for 5 minutes, or writing a single sentence, strikes you as achievable, do that. If you easily manage it today, you can increase the target tomorrow or next week, and increase it again the next day or the next month. But as you’re increasing it, pay attention to how it’s going, and avoid being judgmental. Perhaps you might notice that it’s much easier for you to write in the morning than in the afternoon, or vice versa. Perhaps you notice that at some point your attention starts to wander to things like what’s for lunch, and that it’s difficult to bring yourself back to the task after that. These are observations that your inner critic might have weaponised against you in the past, but try your best to ignore her as she yaps away, and instead use these things to build a picture of what your working practices look like. Your job is to observe, not to judge. Eventually, you might get to a stage where you have an idea of what a good writing day - a realistically good writing day - looks like for you. Your inner critic will tell you it’s not good enough, but your inner critic is the farmer who kills the goose. Both are foolish. Both are greedy. Both are impatient.

I think this is a helpful perspective, because the idea that our inner critic is greedy or impatient or foolish for expecting more is pretty novel. Admit it: your inner critic might be making you miserable, but you still think she’s right, don’t you? Or at least, you’re afraid she might be right? And that you deserve the beatings you get from her? For some reason, this is a really pervasive view, even for those of us who are being made not only miserable by our inner critics, but also underproductive. For many of us, when we don’t work as fast as our inner critic tells us we should work, all we see is our below-par performance: the missed deadlines, the hours lost to procrastination. And the conclusion we draw from that is that our inner critic is right and that we are lazy and inadequate. But what if your inner critic is making things worse? What if she’s too greedy for progress, and in her attempt to get it by reminding you how awful you are, she makes you so anxious about the whole thing that far from speeding up, you slow down? When that happens, your inner critic has killed your productivity by wanting more, just like the farmer killed the goose. 

Now, there’s a big positive here. The farmer couldn’t bring back the goose when he realised his mistake, but you can definitely resurrect your ability to get things done. Things will get better for you if you ditch your inner critic on this. You can’t completely mute her, I’m afraid, but you can certainly take her out of the driving seat when it comes to making decisions. Stick her in the passenger seat instead and let her yap away while you make sensible decisions. She’s just a noise - you don’t have to do or believe what she’s telling you - go and listen to episode #24: Your inner critic is not a video game boss, if you want more on this. Recognise what works and doesn’t work for you when it comes to getting things done, respect that, and adapt to it. Just as the farmer in the fable would have been better off if he’d accepted his one golden egg per day and worked with that, you’ll be better off when you learn to work with your capacity to produce. When I learnt to stop telling myself that only hours of writing in a single day was good enough, and learnt to accept that 45 minutes was good enough, I ended up getting a lot more done. 45 minutes on most days adds up a lot faster than the nothing I was getting done when my inner critic’s harsh words were sending me running for the hills, or for the nearest completely irrelevant Wikipedia page. Every coaching client I’ve had who has experimented with trying to ignore their inner critic has ended up better off - more productive and efficient, but also - and way more importantly - happier. None of them has had their worst fears realised - by which I mean, nobody who has ‘let themselves off the hook’ has dissolved into a lazy puddle, destined never to do anything useful ever again. 

I know it’s scary to contemplate ignoring your inner critic. You might believe that it’s only thanks to her that you’re still on the straight and narrow. But I want you to try a little experiment. Next time she tells you that you’re not doing enough, think of her the way you think of the farmer in the fable: as greedy, foolish, impatient, and short-sighted. Just like the farmer, she’s so fixated on trying to get more that she hasn’t noticed that, in the process, she’s destroying something that’s already there - something that’s far more valuable than she’s willing to admit. Next time you hear her say, ‘You’ve only been working on this for 30 minutes and already you’re thinking about what to have for lunch? Not good enough!’, tell her to stop being so greedy. Then go and get your lunch, if you want. Maybe you won’t make any more progress today. But that’s fine, because over the next 6 months, the next year, the next few years, you’ll do better if you can work on dialling down the anxiety and the guilt. And once you start doing better without your inner critic’s influence, it will get much easier. You’ll start to trust the process once you see the results. It’s hardest at the start. But I know you’re brave, and I know you’re invested in doing the work - that’s why you’re here, listening to this, wherever in the world you’re listening. Until next time.

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at www.patreon.com/AcademicImperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - www.academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!