Inner Productivity Introduction

PRAISE FOR INNER PRODUCTIVITY

“Why, in spite of good intentions, organizational skills, and productivity tools,
do we still tend to avoid and resist actually doing stuff? Chris Edgar has taken
an exploratory dive into the procrastination pit and come up with a cogent
explanation of this phenomenon as well as an elegant set of techniques to
transcend it. It’s a great read and a useful guidebook for turning the daily grind
into something much more interesting and engaging.”

— DAVID ALLEN, bestselling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of
Stress-Free Productivity

“Inner Productivity will show you how to clear your inner clutter and create a
pathway to success!”

— MARSHALL GOLDSMITH, bestselling author of What Got You Here
Won’t Get You There

“Real productivity doesn’t come from forced behaviors. Inner Productivity
can help you connect with the inner state of being that can empower you to act
in new ways, choose new perspectives and have a different experience. There
is no greater productivity than connecting with your true self.”

— TAMA J. KIEVES, bestselling author of THIS TIME I DANCE!: Creating
the Work You Love (How One Harvard Lawyer Left It All to Have It All)

“Inner Productivity is packed with practical examples of how to achieve
greater results and peace of mind at work.”

— LAURA STACK, bestselling author of Leave the Office Earlier: The
Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time . . . and Feel Great
About It

“A wonderful guide for organizing both your physical and your head space.”

— PETER WALSH, bestselling author of Enough Already!: Clearing Mental
Clutter to Become the Best You

Copyright © 2009 by Christopher R. Edgar. All rights reserved.

Limitation of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the author
has used his best efforts in preparing this book, he makes no
representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or
completeness of the contents of this book, and specifically
disclaims the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness
for a particular purpose. This work is provided with the
understanding that the author is not providing medical,
psychological, or other professional services. The advice and
strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation.
You should consult with a professional where appropriate.

For more information about Chris Edgar’s
writing and coaching practice, visit
www.InnerProductivity.com.

ISBN 978-0-615-30496-0

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

I. YOUR INNER EXPERIENCE OF WORKING 29

II. ATTENTION
1. Being the Space for Your Thoughts 45
2. Anchoring Yourself in the Present 53
3. Cultivating Attention Through Curiosity 61

III. INTENTION
4. Peering into the Abyss 69
5. Moving from Product to Process 79
6. It’s Okay to Have Wants 91
7. Reopening Our Bodies to Inspiration 101
8. Learning to Be With Blankness 117
9. Notice How You Drain Your Energy 125

IV. FOUNDATION
10. Loving Yourself Really Can Help Pay the Bills 137
11. The Power of Admitting Where You’re At 145
12. Are You Withholding Your Gifts? 167
13. Breathing Through Your Fear 175

V. SUCCESS THROUGH SELF-KNOWLEDGE 187

INNER PRODUCTIVITY

A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your
Work

CHRISTOPHER R. EDGAR

INTRODUCTION

“If your mind becomes pure, your surroundings will also become
pure.”

— Buddha

This book is about cultivating what I call inner
productivity—the mental and emotional state that allows you to
get the most done and find the most enjoyment in your work.
While most productivity techniques focus on arranging your
external environment to become more efficient—reorganizing
your e-mail inbox, color-coding your folders, holding shorter
meetings, and so on—inner productivity is about becoming aware
of and transforming the way you think and feel about what you
do.
Why is it important to develop inner productivity? I’ll
illustrate with a story I suspect will resonate with you. My friend
Dan, in the language of some productivity-oriented websites,
would easily qualify as a “productivity ninja.” He unfailingly
follows the latest books, articles and blog posts on organization
and time management.
Dan’s latest goal is to reduce the time he spends checking
e-mail so he can focus on more important tasks. His plan for
achieving this goal sounds promising in theory: check his e-mail
only twice a day, at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Unfortunately, despite
about a month of trying, he’s never been able to stick to this

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schedule.
Dan’s recurring problem works like this. When he arrives
in the office in the morning, he’s usually able to get in about half
an hour of fully-focused work. For that brief period, he manages
to hold out even if he’s nagged by curiosity about what’s waiting
for him in his inbox.
But when that half-hour mark rolls around, Dan’s
curiosity about his e-mail starts becoming so intense that it
actually begins to cause physical discomfort. His shoulders start
tensing up, and if he tries to keep working, the tension intensifies
into an ache, and sometimes even a sense of shortness of breath.
At this point, he can only endure a few more minutes of work
before fleeing for the safety of his inbox to relieve the tension.
In short, even though Dan knows all the “rules” of time
management and organization, uncomfortable thoughts and
sensations effectively keep him from following those rules, or at
least from following them consistently.
Dan’s story certainly isn’t unique. I worked with a client
a while back, Gail, who was one of the most organized people I
knew. Gail’s desk was always immaculate, she had about 50
subfolders in her e-mail inbox, and she made a list of what she’d
do each day on an index card she carried around at all times.
Unfortunately, none of this stopped her from procrastinating—
she’d find herself spending hours each day surfing the Web,
checking e-mail and instant messaging with friends.
The reason was that, whenever Gail sat down to work by
herself, she’d start feeling painfully alone, and she’d feel
compelled to turn to e-mail or instant messaging to remind herself
there were people out there who cared about her. No matter how
organized she got, it seemed, she couldn’t stay productive in the
face of her own thoughts and emotions.
Of course, these are only a few examples of the myriad
ways our mental and emotional “clutter” can disrupt our
motivation and focus. In my work coaching people in finding
productivity and satisfaction in what they do, I’ve come across—
and I’m sure from time to time you’ve experienced some of—the

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following issues:

• A concern that it would be “selfish” for you to achieve
your goals;
• A lack of motivation because you’re convinced no one
will care about your work;
• Anxiety about whether you “have what it takes” to reach
your career objectives;
• Your attention jumping between tasks and issues in a way
that seems beyond your control;
• A paralyzing obsession over the risk that you’ll disappoint
your boss or someone else with your work;
• A worry that you’re missing out on other opportunities by
staying on your current career path; and
• A reluctance to fully devote yourself to your work, out of
fear that others might steal or take credit for what you’ve
done.

As I suspect you know from experience, the list goes on and on.

WHAT’S MISSING FROM MOST PRODUCTIVITY ADVICE?

The stories I offered vividly illustrate why, despite the
number of articles, CDs, seminars, and other information out
there about productivity, more of that kind of literature keeps
coming out. I suspect people are still hungry for organization and
time management techniques because the usual advice doesn’t
address the biggest obstacles to our productivity: our own minds
and bodies. If our attention is scattered all over the place, or our
bodies are tense and uncomfortable, learning more creative ways
to rearrange our workspace won’t do much to help us get our
work done.
This is a theme I consistently see in my personal coaching
practice. Like the people I mentioned earlier, most of the clients
I’ve worked with are well-versed in making to-do lists,
decluttering their offices, writing terser e-mails, and all the other

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techniques productivity writers usually recommend.
These people’s problem isn’t that they don’t know enough
“tips and tricks.” Instead, the problem they almost always face is
that some persistent pattern of thinking or feeling is making it
hard to stay focused on their work. As psychologists Jane B.
Burka and Lenora M. Yuen write in Procrastination: Why You Do
It, What To Do About It, “if you don’t understand why you’re
putting things off, then all the practical suggestions in the world
aren’t likely to help, because you won’t let yourself use them.”
How do we change our ways of thinking and feeling so
they help rather than hinder us in our work? I see this process as
having two basic steps.
The first is to start getting conscious of what I call your
inner experience of working—the thoughts, emotions and
sensations that tend to come up as you move through your daily
routine. We can’t begin to work with our inner experience until
we’re actually aware of it and how it’s limiting what we can
accomplish. The second step is to transform that experience in a
way that has you feel more focused and motivated, and even
actually enjoy what you do.

TRANSCENDING THE “WORK/LIFE” SPLIT

Becoming conscious of the thoughts and feelings that tend
to disrupt our work is more complicated than it sounds. Paying
attention to our inner experience runs counter to the conventional
wisdom in our culture.
The common belief seems to be that we should ignore or
push away the thoughts and sensations that come up while we’re
working, and “deal with them,” if at all, “on our own time.” Take
a break, listen to music to distract yourself, numb yourself to
what you’re feeling with drugs or alcohol—whatever you need to
do, just keep your inner experience out of the workplace and to
yourself.
Here’s an example you’re probably familiar with. At
some point, you’ve probably had to go to work while you were

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feeling overcome with grief or despair—perhaps over the loss of
a loved one, or the end of a relationship. If you worked around
other people, I imagine you were expected to work and interact
with others as if everything was “okay.” If you had customers or
clients, you were expected to offer them “service with a smile,”
even though smiling felt inauthentic.
Even if no one explicitly said you had to be this way, you
felt the pressure nonetheless. Somehow, you got the message that
you were supposed to cut yourself off from your inner experience
while at work, and “deal with it on your own time.”
But there’s a weirder side to the conventional wisdom.
We aren’t just expected to repress our so-called “negative”
emotions and thoughts—we’re supposed to hold back our passion
for what we do as well. In our culture, the excitement and joy we
experience in our work are often considered too “impolite,”
“personal” or “childish” to share with others.
For example, I once worked with a client, Debbie, who
genuinely enjoyed her job at a nonprofit organization. You’d
think people would see Debbie’s enthusiasm for her work as
ideal.
But when Debbie told her coworkers how much she liked
her job, and how wonderful it felt to help people, they gave her
funny looks. “Yeah, I like my job too, but I don’t wear it on my
sleeve,” one of them said with a nervous chuckle, as if Debbie
had done something socially inappropriate. Although gossiping
about coworkers and celebrities was considered okay and even
encouraged in her workplace, revealing her passion for what she
did was seen as a breach of etiquette.
It’s considered unusual today to really like what you do
for work, and if you’re strange enough to get excited about it,
you’re expected to at least keep it to yourself so that nobody else
gets uncomfortable. This mentality is reflected in phrases like
“work/life balance,” “it’s called work because it isn’t fun,” and “I
work to live—I don’t live to work,” as if work, being the opposite
of “life,” is by definition miserable, and we have to be less than
fully alive while we’re doing it.

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We can also see this common mode of thinking in the way
we tend to distinguish between “business” literature, on one hand,
and “psychological” and “spiritual” writing on the other.
Psychological and spiritual authors work in the realm of our inner
experience, teaching us how to clear up or change the lens
through which we view the world in a way that brings us peace or
happiness. Business, management and sales “gurus,” by contrast,
usually offer us techniques for rearranging our outer
circumstances—doing the most important project first each day,
holding shorter meetings, building brand equity, and so on.
Business writers don’t usually look at the impact our inner
experience of working can have on what we achieve in, and how
much we enjoy, our work. Either that, or they assume the only
way to transform our inner experience is to “change from the
outside in”—that altering your external environment, perhaps by
reorganizing your desk or making a different kind of to-do list, is
the only way to find focus and contentment in your work.
Many popular writers make reference to spiritual
traditions like Zen Buddhism, but they tend to associate Zen with
outer simplicity—having a decluttered closet, for instance—
without addressing its focus on simplifying your inner life.
Occasionally, you may even find yourself making the
same kinds of assumptions about this book. For example,
perhaps you’ll read a passage where I talk about how your
breathing, or your level of comfort with yourself, has an impact
on your productivity, and find yourself instinctively rejecting
what I say. “What touchy-feely, New Age nonsense,” you may
find your mind scoffing. “I want results in my business—my
‘feelings’ are irrelevant.”
If you find yourself having this kind of reaction, take a
moment and inquire into the way of thinking that’s creating it.
You may become aware of a deep-seated, unexamined
assumption that your inner experience “obviously” has no place
in a book about business or productivity. And perhaps noticing
this belief will also prompt you to question whether it’s really so
obvious. Is how inspired you feel about your work, for example,

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really “irrelevant” to how well you perform in it?
In fact, although we don’t often hear about it in business
literature, there is plenty of concrete evidence that doing “inner
work,” or transforming your patterns of thinking and feeling
around your work, can make a difference in your productivity.
For instance, there have been many academic studies on the
effects of meditation on our ability to pay attention, our
motivation, and our creativity. Here are some examples:

• Attention. A 2005 Massachusetts General Hospital study
reported that meditation thickens parts of the brain’s
cerebral cortex responsible for decisionmaking, attention
and memory.
• Motivation. A 2006 study at the University of Wisconsin
showed that regular meditation leads to significantly
increased levels of activity in the left prefrontal cortex of
the brain, which is associated with “positive emotions and
goal-seeking behaviors.”
• Efficiency. Three years after it implemented a meditation
program for its employees, a Detroit chemical plant
reported that productivity at the facility had increased by
120%, and absenteeism had decreased by 80%.
• Freedom From Distractions. A 2008 Emory University
study reported that meditation enhances the brain’s
capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts.
• Stress Reduction. A 2006 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
study suggested that meditation reduces blood pressure
levels, reducing worker absenteeism due to stress-related
medical problems.

Despite this evidence, most of us continue to unconsciously buy
into the conventional wisdom that our inner experience is
irrelevant to our work performance, and that spiritual practices
are only for achieving “intangible” goals like becoming
enlightened or seeking the ultimate truth.

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THE ROOTS OF THE RECEIVED WISDOM

Why does our culture generally consider our inner
experience irrelevant or dangerous to our working lives? I
suspect that, at a deeper level, it stems from conventional thinking
about the differences between children and adults.
Young children are naturally emotionally expressive—if
they’re joyful, angry, sad, or something else, they make no bones
about telling you. The same is true of children’s thoughts—
whatever they’re thinking, even if it happens to be unflattering
toward someone, they don’t hesitate to let you know. In other
words, children’s inner experience is basically on loudspeaker.
Adults usually tolerate this kind of expression by very
young children. As children mature, however, they gradually
learn they’re supposed to keep what they’re thinking and feeling
to themselves. They come to associate voicing their thoughts and
emotions with embarrassing or angering their parents, and with
behaving “childishly.”
As psychologist Robert Bolton puts it in People Skills,
“from an early age, children are taught to distort or repress their
feelings. ‘Be nice to your sister,’ ‘stop crying,’ ‘how many times
have I told you not to get angry,’” and so on. Thus, they learn to
be quiet and compliant, and to see their inner experience of
working, and of other aspects of their lives, as unimportant.
I think this is a key reason so few of us are doing
something that inspires us in our careers. We’ve been
conditioned to believe that our passion, and sense of what’s
meaningful in life, are basically irrelevant, at least in the work
context. Work is a means of surviving and gaining social status,
not a way to fulfill our purpose in life.
In fact, to many of us, the idea of “following our bliss” in
our work and elsewhere seems weak, selfish or childish—and
“acting like a child” is considered one of the worst, most
embarrassing things you can do in our society. If we want to act
like adults, we must chin up, grit our teeth and accept that work
needs to be a dismal chore.

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Given this mindset, it’s no surprise that we tend to see the
ideal worker as emotionless, and to experience work as boring.
And when thoughts and emotions unrelated to our work creep
into our consciousness while we’re doing our tasks, it’s also
unsurprising that we do our best to ignore them or push them
away.
I’ve gone into all this detail about the conventional
wisdom on our relationship to our work in order to plant the seeds
of a new way of thinking. We tend to assume, without even
realizing it, that our inner experience is irrelevant or a threat to
our work performance. It’s as if we’re wearing blue-tinted
contact lenses, but we’ve forgotten we put them in, so we’ve
started to assume that the whole world is blue.
But when we become conscious that we’re making these
assumptions, we become able to start seriously examining them
and considering other possibilities. It’s as if we can remove our
blue contacts and begin seeing the world in all its color and
vibrance.

MOVING BEYOND THE “FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT REACTION”

As I said, in our culture, we’re generally expected to push
away or refuse to acknowledge our inner experience of working.
So, instead of accepting the thoughts and emotions that come up
for us when we’re doing our tasks—whether they’re feelings of
boredom or anxiety, painful memories from the past, wishes that
we could go home early today, or something else—we usually
react to them by doing what I call fighting or fleeing.
We fight against our inner experience when we punish or
shame ourselves for thinking and feeling the way we do, or we try
to convince ourselves we “should” feel differently. If we start
feeling resentful and resistant when we’re working, for example,
perhaps we tell ourselves “come on, get back to work, there’s
nothing to be angry about,” or “you don’t get to play video games
tonight if you don’t get this project done today.”
Going to war with ourselves like this takes energy, and

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causes us to tire quickly and lose our ability to focus. As Kay
Gilley writes in The Alchemy of Fear, “denying and ignoring
emotions will not make them go away—it simply establishes a
conflictual relationship within ourselves.”
Unfortunately, much productivity advice urges us to fight
against our inner experience, giving us pointers like “force
yourself to do the toughest task first,” “tell that lazy part of you to
shut up,” “kick your fear in the rear,” and so on. We need to be
our own strict parents or drill sergeants, coming down like a ton
of bricks on internal dissent.
This attitude encourages us to hate and ridicule parts of
ourselves, rather than treating them with compassion or trying to
understand where they’re coming from. I suspect one reason
you’re reading this book is that you’re tired of beating yourself
into submission in order to be productive, and you have the
intuition that there’s a better way.
We flee from our experience when we turn our attention to
something else to take our minds off what we’re feeling. Some of
us do this with activities we normally think of as frivolous—when
we start feeling bored, perhaps we turn to playing Solitaire on the
computer, pacing around the room, calling our friends, and so on.
Or maybe we try to keep working, but with some source of
distraction in the background—the radio, TV, iPod or something
similar—to drown out the mental and emotional noise we’re
experiencing.
Others turn to a less important task—going, perhaps, from
drafting tomorrow’s board presentation to tidying their shelves.
Still other people I know literally flee from their work—their
feelings of loneliness, or some other kind of discomfort, get so
intense when they’re alone at their desks that they feel the need to
leave the room for a while to talk to somebody and regain their
composure.
Fighting or fleeing may offer temporary relief from
whatever emotion or thought is troubling us, but it also, of course,
makes it hard to stay on task. Devoting all this energy to keeping
our experience at bay is distracting and draining. In fact, I think

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it’s even fair to say that fighting and fleeing from our inner
experience are essentially what procrastination is. We
procrastinate when we aren’t willing to be with what’s arising
inside us, and we turn to some diversion—whether it’s e-mail,
Minesweeper, the iPod, or something else—to take our attention
off what’s really going on.
We tend to assume that we’re “saving time” when we
push away our inner experience as we work—that letting
ourselves feel the anger, sadness or whatever else is coming up
for us would draw our attention away from the task we’re trying
to do. But in fact—and this is an important paradox to
understand—the very things we do to escape from our inner
experience also prevent us from getting our work done. Thus,
fighting or fleeing our thoughts and emotions actually wastes
time instead of saving it.
What’s more, when we deny ourselves permission to feel
intense sensation, we also cut off our access to the joy,
compassion and drive that could otherwise empower us in our
work. Forcing ourselves to stay “on an even keel” all the time
gives working a dull, lifeless quality. Our posture begins to
slouch, we start speaking in a monotone, and the muffled,
deadened feeling that pervades many corporate environments sets
in.
And there’s another, more serious, potential consequence
of fighting or fleeing from our inner experience of working. As
Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone put it in Embracing Our Selves, the
patterns of thinking and feeling we push away, if we keep them at
bay long enough, become “demonic” and start sabotaging our
efforts to accomplish our goals. For example, you’ve probably
known someone who refused to admit or experience their anger
for a long time, until one day they lost control and screamed at
someone or acted violently—with consequences for their careers
and other parts of their lives.

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RESPONDING INSTEAD OF REACTING

So it seems that, if we want to get the most out of the time
we spend working, we need to take a different approach to our
mental and emotional “clutter.” What we usually don’t consider
is that we can simply sit, breathe, relax our bodies, and allow
whatever thoughts and sensations are arising to be, just as they
are.
If you start feeling resentful as you’re working and your
shoulders begin to feel hot and uncomfortable, for example, keep
breathing and just let that heat and discomfort persist until they
pass away. If you find yourself mentally replaying an argument
you had with an intimate partner ten years ago while you’re
trying to get a project done, simply allow the mental movie of the
argument to play and then fade to black.
When I make this suggestion, some people object “but the
problem for me isn’t what I’m feeling—I just don’t want to do my
work.” However, the desire to be somewhere else or to stop
doing what you’re doing is also a form of inner experience, and
you can actually breathe through that sensation and allow it to
fade away, as in the other examples I’ve discussed.
The very idea that the kinds of thoughts and feelings that
assault us in our work will fade away in time, if we let them, is
novel to many of us. Consciously or otherwise, we tend to
assume, when we’re confronted by fear, anger or some other
intense emotion while we’re working, that the feeling could
potentially stay with us forever unless we “do something about
it.” In other words, if we don’t fight or flee from our inner
experience, we’ll be stuck in the same mental rut for eternity.
For example, we usually assume that, if we let ourselves
fully experience our anxiety, we’ll be plunged into an eternal
abyss of fear, and the rest of our lives will be a nonstop
nightmare. As Judith Bemis and Amr Barrada sagely write in
Embracing the Fear, “we’re afraid that if we allow ourselves to
be anxious, the anxiety will become unmanageable; we’ll panic,
and the panic might last forever.”

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In fact, however, most thoughts and emotions we
experience ultimately pass away, and they often do so quickly—
within minutes or seconds—when we allow them to flow through
us without running away from them or shutting them off.
For example, if you notice yourself feeling angry and you
allow yourself to fully experience that emotion, without turning
your mind to something else, you usually don’t remain angry for
the rest of your life. The feeling eventually subsides, and you
return to a calm, focused place. In fact, you don’t have to “do
something about it” at all, and often trying to do something about
it is actually counterproductive, for the reasons we’ve talked
about.
When the thoughts and sensations we were feeling have
passed, we can gently return our attention to our work, without
the need to punish, convince or coax ourselves into getting back
on task. This way of relating to our inner experience at work—
which I call acceptance—consumes far less time and energy than
fighting or fleeing, and can do much to increase our productivity.
Many exercises in this book are based on this theme of accepting,
rather than avoiding, our inner experience.
The more we practice accepting what’s coming up inside
as we go through our routine, the more comfortable and familiar
our inner experience starts to seem, and the more we find
ourselves able to stay on task in the face of thoughts, memories,
and bodily sensations that used to occur as dangerous or
threatening.
Another advantage of learning to be with our thoughts and
sensations, as opposed to running from them, is that it helps us
assume more and more control over how we live our lives. If
we’re constantly fighting or fleeing our inner experience, there’s a
sense in which we aren’t really in control of our behavior—
instead, our stray thoughts and feelings are.
For example, if I habitually put off my work and start
instant messaging with friends every time I start feeling a
tightness in my lower back, I’m not really in charge of creating
my work schedule. In fact, that tight sensation in my back is

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calling the shots, because every time it comes up I automatically
flee from my work. My back pain is deciding what and how
much I get done, not me. If I learn to accept and breathe through
that tight sensation, relax my back muscles, and continue with my
work when that sensation arises, I expand my capacity to choose
what I do with my time.
Some spiritual teachers talk about the difference between
reacting and responding to the experiences we have in life, and
my distinction between escaping your experience and accepting it
parallels that concept.
We can live our lives in reaction to our thoughts and
emotions, pushing away whatever experiences feel too
uncomfortable for us or that we think we “shouldn’t be having.”
Or, we can respond to our inner experience, by choosing how we
will act, even in the face of intense sensation. An important
theme of this book is that, the more we develop the ability to
respond rather than react to our inner experience, the more
productivity and enjoyment we’ll get out of what we do.
We might also see accepting our inner experience as a
way to show ourselves genuine compassion. True compassion for
ourselves means accepting all of our experience—all of the
physical sensations, ideas, emotions and so on coming up for us
in any given moment—without calling them inappropriate and
trying to escape from them. Otherwise, our love for ourselves is
only conditional—we’ll only accept ourselves if we’re happy, or
excited about what we’re doing, or in some state we label as
“positive.”

ACCEPTANCE DOESN’T MEAN RESIGNATION

Accepting or allowing what you’re experiencing doesn’t
mean grudgingly resigning yourself to it. Sometimes, although
we dislike the sensations we’re experiencing and wish they
weren’t arising, we resolve to grit our teeth and “put up with
them” as best we can. Maybe, for example, we find our job
repetitive and tiresome, but we tell ourselves “this is as good as it

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gets,” and resolve that life isn’t fair and we’ll just have to suffer.
However, this is just a subtler form of fighting against our
experience because, even if we don’t try to “do anything about
it,” we hate and internally resist it just the same. It’s like when
we were children and we didn’t want to do some chore—we may
have gone and done what we were told, but we did it sulkily and
half-heartedly. This sort of passive-aggressive resistance leaves
us with the same drained, irritable feeling that aggressively
pushing away our experience creates.
Nor do we need to pretend to be happy about what we’re
experiencing to accept it—we don’t need to force ourselves to
smile when we’re feeling down. Accepting our inner experience
is more of a matter of removing the labels we usually put on it.
Rather than treating the thoughts and sensations you have as
“bad” or problems to be fixed, or trying to convince yourself they
feel wonderful when they don’t, see if you can let them be, just as
they are, without mentally judging or categorizing them.
For instance, I imagine you’ve had the experience of
being bored with your work from time to time. Most of us
perceive boredom as a “bad thing”—when we feel bored with
something we’re doing, we complain about it, both inside and to
others. We tell ourselves we’re lazy for feeling bored, or gripe
that the work we’re doing isn’t stimulating enough. We also tell
ourselves it would be “better” to experience something else—
perhaps joy, love, excitement, or some other sensation.
The next time you find yourself getting bored, I invite you
to try this experiment. Take a look at the thoughts and sensations
that come up for you when you’re bored. In other words, what
events in your mind and body let you know you’re experiencing
boredom?
Perhaps you feel a sinking in your stomach, tightness in
your jaw, heat in your forehead, or something else. For the
moment, take your attention away from the thought “I’m feeling
bored and that’s bad,” and focus it directly on what’s actually
going on inside you. Let go of your resistance to the sensations
you’re noticing and simply allow them to be.

15

What I think you’ll find is that, without the mental labels
“boring,” “bad,” “awful,” and however else you usually judge
those sensations, they no longer seem so intense and difficult to
tolerate. In other words, the judgments and labels we put on our
thoughts and feelings can be a significant source of suffering in
themselves, and you can lessen that suffering by looking directly
at your experience as opposed to putting it in a mental category.

LISTENING TO THE INNER GURU

At a deeper level, we can do even more to achieve a sense
of ease and inspiration in our work by not only allowing the
thoughts and feelings that come up to be there, but also seeing
them as a source of valuable inner wisdom. Whatever enters our
consciousness as we work—whether it’s fear, despair, fretting
about our relationship with our parents, or something else—it
likely has something to teach us about where we have room to
grow as human beings.
This perpective is in keeping with the idea in some
Eastern spiritual traditions of the inner guru, or gurudev. The
inner guru is a wise part of us that guides us, in ways we may not
immediately understand, toward love, peace and abundance in our
lives.
What I’m recommending is that, instead of seeing the
mental and emotional “clutter” that arises as we work as a
problem to be fixed or run away from, we try perceiving it as a
message from our inner teacher designed to help us achieve our
full potential. As Muktanand Meannjin observes in Yoga: The
Essence of Life, “our own inner guru doesn’t always prompt us to
do things that will be pleasant or easy, but if we ignore that inner
prompting we miss out on something valuable.”
Let’s look at a few practical examples. Earlier I
mentioned Gail, a client I worked with, who was persistently
tormented by a gnawing feeling of loneliness when she was
working alone in her office. Her normal response to this
sensation was to distract herself by checking e-mail or instant

16

messaging with her friends, but this gave her only temporary
relief.
When she resolved to just breathe, relax her body, and
accept the feeling of loneliness rather than pushing it away, she
had a remarkable intuition. Some memories from when she was
very young emerged, prompting the realization that what she
really wanted in those lonely moments was to reconnect with a
few of her childhood friends.
With this in mind, she got in touch with several people
from her past, and today she greatly values those renewed
friendships. The feeling of aloneness, as it turned out, contained
a valuable lesson about how she could improve the quality of her
life.
I’ve also noticed that this perspective offers a wonderful
new way to look at what we usually call “writer’s block.” Before
I started seeing my inner experience of working as potentially
valuable, I used to shame myself in moments when my mind felt
empty of ideas. “Come on, you need to finish this,” I’d say to
myself. “Think something up already.”
I gradually learned, however, that if I simply sat there with
that blank feeling, without fighting or running from it, the
blankness gradually dissolved, and the best ideas I’d had all day,
or even all week, would reveal themselves. When I treated that
blankness as if it had a gift to offer me, rather than seeing it as an
enemy, its value spontaneously emerged. I’ll talk a little later
about some exercises for learning to accept and even appreciate
that feeling of creative emptiness, and how that can help stimulate
your imagination.
Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” lyrically describes the
attitude I’m inviting you to bring to your relationship with your
inner experience. As Rumi puts it, although we may not
understand why at first blush, even “the dark thought, the shame,
and the malice” that come up for us can serve “as a guide from
beyond”:

17

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Rumi, “The Guest House”

The first part of this book contains exercises and perspectives to
help you become aware of your inner experience of working, and
to accept and value it—being a welcoming “guest house” for it—
instead of fleeing from it or shoving it away.

CULTIVATING “INNER PRODUCTIVITY”

As I mentioned earlier, once you have an accepting
relationship with your inner experience of your work, the next
step is to transform the way you experience working so you can
find the most efficiency and enjoyment in what you do—in other
words, to develop what I call “inner productivity.”
Many aspects of the mental and emotional state we bring
to our work could be included in the category of inner
productivity—such as how excited we feel about what we’re
doing, how distracted we are by other events in our lives, how

18

tense or relaxed our bodies feel, and so on. In this book, I boil
these down into three basic elements of inner productivity, which
I call Attention, Intention, and Foundation.
When these elements are fully present while we’re
working, we’re at our most efficient, and we produce our highest-
quality work. In these moments, we don’t even feel like we’re
“working,” as that word is usually used—we aren’t bored,
stressed, or expending a lot of energy.
Instead, our work starts to feel like the activities we do for
fun—we aren’t strongly attached to the outcomes we achieve, we
don’t feel like we’re making much effort, and we experience
genuine passion for what we do. We actually enjoy the process of
working—the in-the-moment act of doing our tasks, rather than
just the product—the money, prestige and so on we may
accumulate through what we do.
Of course, as you probably know firsthand, it’s still
possible to do our work even if we haven’t cultivated all these
elements. For example, even if we feel totally uninspired in our
jobs—if we lack what I call an inspiring intention—we can still
grudgingly do what we’re told when we’re in the office, because
our fear of losing our jobs is stronger than our dislike for our
work. However, we can’t be nearly as productive, or enjoy our
work as much, as we can if these factors are present.
I’ll give you an overview of each aspect of inner
productivity, and the exercises I offer in this book to help you
develop them.
Attention. It seems clear that we’re most efficient, and
produce our best work, when our work has our full attention. If
our awareness keeps drifting away from what we’re doing, or
we’re replaying a song in our heads as we do our task, we’re
unlikely to be at our most productive.
As I noted earlier, most productivity advice for helping us
pay attention focuses on how we can remove distracting
influences from the external environment. For instance, some
writers advise us to turn off our phones and close our e-mail
applications when we’re working on an important task.

19

No matter how many distractions we eliminate from our
environment, however, we’re always stuck with the biggest
source of distraction—the mind. If we don’t know how to calm
our minds, they will constantly wander into the past or future,
recycling painful memories and conjuring up anxiety-provoking
future scenarios. Often, our minds are at their most disruptive
when we have to fix our attention on a single task, which we
frequently need to do in our careers.
Most of us have, at least briefly, experienced moments
where we’re “in the flow” or “in the zone” as we’re working. In
these moments, only the task we’re doing matters—not what
others may think of our work, how big the bonus will be this year,
what we’ll have for dinner tonight, or any of the other concerns
that typically occupy our attention as we’re trying to get work
done.
This is similar to the state some athletes report
experiencing when they’re playing at the top of their game—it’s
as if everything but the game fades out of their attention, and their
performance feels effortless and intuitive.
This book provides exercises for helping you enter that
state of flow, and letting your other worries and priorities fade
from your awareness, as you’re working. The exercises focus on
bringing your awareness into the present moment and away from
the past and future, quieting thoughts that pull your attention
away from your tasks, and maintaining your focus even when
you’re confronted with intense emotions and sensations.
As I’ll explain, among other things, training your attention
on what you’re feeling in your body, and what’s going on in your
immediate surroundings, is a great way to keep your awareness
rooted in the present.
Intention. We’re at our most productive when we have a
clear, inspiring intention regarding what we want to achieve in
our work. For example, if it’s a dream for you to deeply move
many people with your fiction writing, you’ll feel more focused
and creative while writing if you hold that dream in mind. But
when we’re working just to survive, or simply because we feel

20

we’ve “got to do something,” we can’t maintain the same
efficiency, even if we’re really skilled at what we do. If you mop
floors for a living, for instance, the fact that you do a really
immaculate job of it won’t sustain your motivation in the long run
if you don’t enjoy mopping.
To many people, establishing a clear intention is about
writing out an organized list of goals to guide your progress in
your work. I think this is helpful, but it’s not the full picture.
What many of us don’t see is that it’s equally essential to really
feel the intention behind your work on a physical level—for
example, to actually feel your desire to contribute to others with
your work as a warmth and openness in your heart. If this sounds
strange or mystical to you, try the exercises in the Intention
section and your perspective may shift.
One reason many of us have trouble achieving the goals
we set is that we don’t experience our desire to reach those goals
in our bodies, or at least not as fully and richly as we could.
Many of us are disconnected from the emotions and sensations
we experience in our bodies, or disregard them and set our goals
out of a perceived need to please others or conform to social
expectations. When we’re working toward what we think we
“should” want, rather than what we actually want, we aren’t
fueled by that same inner fire.
The exercises for developing a clear intention in this book
will help restore your ability to feel, and be empowered by, your
vision and desires on a deep, visceral level.
Foundation. We have what I call a solid inner
Foundation when we recognize we are complete and worthwhile
beings, no matter what happens in our work situation. Even if the
boss yells at us about our project, we don’t meet the sales target
for this quarter, we feel like we’ve alienated a colleague, or
something else, we don’t lose our composure or our regard for
ourselves.
This attitude is foreign to many of us. Instead, for most of
us, our sense of adequacy and self-worth depends on our career
success. In other words, if we don’t make a certain amount of

21

money, receive a certain amount of praise, or achieve whatever
else we define as success, we don’t feel good about ourselves.
This is what I call a feeling of lack—a feeling that we aren’t
whole or worthwhile unless we achieve certain things in the
world.
In fact, many of us believe we wouldn’t be motivated to
do anything at all if we saw ourselves as okay no matter what
happened in our careers—that we need this feeling of lack or we
can’t succeed. We fear that, if we loved ourselves regardless of
what happened, we’d plop down on the couch, switch on the TV
and never get back up except to go buy more chips. In fact, in my
experience, the opposite is true—the more we recognize our basic
wholeness regardless of what happens in our lives, the more
focused and inspired we become in our work.
When our self-worth is riding on what we accomplish, we
endlessly second-guess our work, make compromises in the hope
of gaining others’ approval, and dread working so strongly that
we put it off. In other words, the fear that naturally results from
basing our opinions of ourselves on our career success actually
harms our productivity.
As psychologist Joseph R. Ferrari writes in
Procrastination and Task Avoidance, in describing research on
college students’ test-taking habits, “students who have extreme
anxiety are most likely to procrastinate, because it is more
reinforcing to avoid the anxiety associated with studying than it is
to study.”
One interesting aspect of these elements of inner
productivity is that they tend to reinforce each other. For
instance, if you have a clear intention—if you’re inspired by what
you’re doing—you’re likely to be more motivated to hold your
attention on your work. A solid foundation—a sense of
unconditional self-love—will also help you pay attention to what
you’re doing, because you won’t find your mind constantly
drifting off into anxiety scenarios about others disliking or
ridiculing what you’re doing. So even if, at the moment, you
don’t feel very grounded in any of these elements, when you

22

work to develop one of them the others may naturally fall into
place.
Another important aspect of these elements is that the
degree to which they’re present varies from moment to moment.
As a simple example, you’ve probably had the experience of
approaching your work with clarity and focus for an hour, and
being barely able to keep your eyes on the computer screen, or
whatever you’re trying to focus on, in the next.
This is why regularly using the exercises I’ll talk about to
cultivate inner productivity—and doing it in real time, in the
course of working—is critical if you want to get the most done
and the most fulfillment out of your work.
I offer many different exercises for developing inner
productivity in this book, and there are a few ways you can
approach them to make them work for you. One possibility is to
experiment with all the exercises in the book, and notice which
ones influence your peace and focus at work most significantly.
As with meditation, yoga and the other practices that
inspired much of this book, different exercises will resonate more
deeply with different people, as everyone’s mind and body is
unique. Thus, exploring to find out what works for you and
developing your own routine will likely be helpful.
Another possible approach is to look over the table of
contents and the introduction, watching for areas where you’d
like to see the most growth in your working life.
Perhaps, for instance, you tend to find your attention
getting scattered as you’re trying to work, in which case you may
benefit most from the Attention section. If your main concern is
with feeling uninspired and tired of your work, Intention is likely
the most helpful section for you. Foundation would be the area
to emphasize if you feel nagged by a constant anxiety or doubt
about your capabilities that holds back your progress.
To be sure, many people who have read my materials or
worked with me personally have discovered that their real area of
concern is radically different from what they thought at the outset.
A few people who came to me saying they were feeling

23

distractable in their work, for example, ended up discovering that,
in reality, their issue is that they start to feel paralyzingly afraid
when they work alone. So, my suggestion would be to give the
book a full read, and then focus on regularly doing the exercises
that fit best with your specific concerns.

MY OWN JOURNEY

To give you an idea of how I came to this work, and to
illustrate how it can practically apply to your own working life,
I’ll tell you a little about how my own journey brought me to this
point. It started several years ago when I was working as a
litigation attorney at a large law firm. I doubt you’ll be surprised
to hear that, in doing that job, I had to contend with some stress,
anxiety and long hours in the office.
I had a pretty high tolerance for stress, at least when I
experienced it in the workplace. Unfortunately, the tension and
anxiety didn’t dissipate when I left the office at night—I tended to
carry them home with me.
I would make an effort to relax in the usual way when I
got home—by exercising, surfing the Web, calling a friend, or
something else. However, no matter what I did, it seemed I
always managed to spend at least some of my time at home
worrying.
Even as I was trying to relax, I’d find myself mentally
running through all the things that could potentially go wrong
with the projects I was working on. Maybe I’d miscalculated
some deadline, made a grammatical error in a document, said
something a colleague found offensive, or something else.
Sometimes, my worrying habit even made it hard to go to sleep.
I didn’t want to take sleeping pills or put some other drug
with potentially harmful side effects in my body, so I started
looking for a technique or practice to help me get a good night’s
rest. In the course of my search, I explored meditation, yoga, qi
gong, tai chi and a number of other spiritual or mindfulness
practices. I got into a regular routine of meditating for fifteen

24

minutes in the morning and evening, and doing a half-hour of
yoga before I went to bed. I immediately noticed how strong and
warm my body felt during my yoga routine, and how easy it
seemed to get to sleep after I finished.
After several months of these practices, I started noticing
something interesting. My new routine wasn’t just helping me
sleep—it was affecting the way I experienced other areas of my
life, including my work. At first, I suspected that the higher-ups
at my firm were giving me less challenging work and people to
deal with, and I wondered if they might be trying to send me the
message that my services were no longer needed. But eventually,
it dawned on me that the way I experienced my work was
changing—not the amount or difficulty of the work.
This shift in how I experienced working manifested in
many different ways. I started becoming able to work for longer
periods of time without stopping to check e-mail or indulge in
some other distraction. I found myself getting less rattled by the
conflict and time pressure that were part of my job. Most
importantly, I found myself actually starting to enjoy what I was
doing—not just the money and prestige the legal profession
offered, but the moment-to-moment process of drafting papers,
reviewing documents, and doing my other tasks.
A few years later, once I’d deeply immersed myself in my
practices, I had another important realization. When I’d started
out doing meditation and yoga, I assumed I could only do those
practices at home, and that it wouldn’t be practical to bring them
into the workplace. After all, I couldn’t exactly bring my yoga
mat into my office and run through a couple of asanas whenever I
felt my stress level peaking, could I? If I wanted to bring inner
peace and focus into my work through my spiritual practices, that
was something I’d just have to do “on my own time.”
However, I began to recognize that this wasn’t necessarily
true. After all, I’d learned about meditations, visualizations,
forms of breathing, and so on that didn’t require a yoga mat, a
DVD, or any other special equipment. In fact, I didn’t even need
to get out of my chair to use some of these techniques.

25

For instance, if I was feeling sluggish and uninspired, and
I wanted to reconnect with my desire to serve my colleagues and
clients, I could use a yogic technique called “breathing into the
heart,” even as I sat at my desk. Without getting up, I could clasp
my hands behind my back, stretch out my arms, stick my chest
out, and take deep breaths, relaxing any tightness in my heart
area. Just taking a few of these breaths could help me get back in
touch, on a physical level, with my compassion for others and
sense of mission.
In other words, I could adapt the exercises I normally did
at home so that I could do them in real time, as I sat in my office.
With these techniques, I realized, I didn’t have to wait to access
the state of “flow” my disciplines helped me enter, feel more
open-hearted in my work, or deepen my sense of peace. I could
give myself all of those gifts right now, in this moment. And in
fact, I wasn’t the only one receiving the gifts—when I felt more
peaceful, alert and inspired, everyone around me benefited from
my efficiency and my calm, positive attitude.
As time went on, I began feeling more and more
interested in how I could adapt spiritual practices to transform my
experience of my work, and of other areas of my life. I started
taking transformational workshops, going to retreats, and
interacting more with others who were on a “spiritual path.”
Gradually, I started to realize I was becoming more
interested in the process than the content of my work. That is, the
process of how I entered “the zone” as I worked, stayed calm in
the face of pressure and conflict, and so on were starting to
interest me more than the drafting and reviewing of documents
that were the mainstays of my job. (Shockingly enough, right?)
One morning, I woke up and realized it was time for me to
make a change. I’d become so interested in the techniques I was
using to cultivate what I call “inner productivity,” and so
convinced that they could also be a great gift to others, that I
resolved to teach those techniques to the world.
Ever since, I’ve been doing just that, in several ways—
I’ve been offering workshops on using mindfulness practice to

26

find satisfaction and productivity in your work; doing one-on-one
work as a personal coach with people interested in getting more
out of what they do; and writing books and articles on the subject.
A few years before, I would never even have considered
making such a radical change in my life. But the practices I’d
adopted had given me a sense of inner peace and stability—what
I now call Foundation—that made it possible to pursue a goal I
was genuinely interested in, rather than one I thought would
impress or placate others.
As it turned out, developing a deep-seated conviction that,
no matter what I did with my life, I was basically safe and
adequate as a human being, helped me not just with my
productivity, but with going after what I really wanted in my
career.
Now, let’s talk about how you can use mindfulness
practices to get the same kind of peace, focus and enjoyment in
your work that I found for myself.

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Message from the Author

Thanks for checking out the introduction to Inner Productivity: A
Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work—I hope
you found it helpful. If you're interested in achieving a deep state
of focus and peace in your work, the full version of the book is
packed with insights and techniques to help you get there.

The book is available on Amazon.com in both paperback and
Kindle formats, at the links below:

Paperback Version

Kindle Version

If you'd like more information about the book, visit
www.InnerProductivity.com, where you'll find videos, radio
interviews and articles describing the book's ideas.

Wishing you the best in your work and elsewhere,

Chris Edgar

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