To Rest or to Be Productive: A Personal Story of Transcending Dichotomies

Do you value being productive? Personally I highly value productivity and I ran into a conundrum this Sunday while thinking about planning my day.

As I laid in bed thinking about the day ahead the voice in my head posed a question:

“I could be productive today or I could rest today. What do I want to do?”

When I heard that sentence some warning bells rang and my self-coaching mode kicked in.

Do you detect anything wrong with that statement?

I did, and I immediately ‘went meta’ and I started to think about my thought to structurally analyze it (in the field of Neuro-Semantics we refer to this thought about a thought as a meta-state).

What red flags did I detect?

• It is an either-or-statement that deletes the potentiality of having both rest and productivity.
• It is a false dichotomy separating two possibilities that are not inherently separate.

Could I not rest and be productive in one day? And do work and rest need to be separate activities? How could rest and productivity be integrated?

I was also aware that one characteristic of self-actualizing individuals that is modeled within the field of Neuro-Semantics is that “self-actualizing individuals transcend and integrate all dichotomies.”

So what did I do?

I aimed to integrate the dichotomy. I asked myself, “Could not rest be part of being productive? Could not rest be one of the most productive things that I could do today?”

These questions helped me to integrate the false dichotomy.

It helped me to see that resting can actually be a highly productive activity, in fact, without rest no one’s productivity could be sustainable in the long run.

In the end I decided not to do either of the two ‘choices’ fully. I did not rest all day nor did I have a full ‘productive’ work day. I chose to work for an hour or two and rest for an hour or two amongst my other errands. I recognized that they are not inherently separate things, and I decided to do both!

So what are you taking away from this article?

One possibility is to better understand the ‘self-coaching process’ and how you can bring more awareness to your self-talk to make personal changes in real time. The power of applying your NLP, Neuro-Semantic, and coaching skills to yourself.

Perhaps a higher awareness of either-or statements and false dichotomies and an idea about how to coach to those distinctions.

And/or perhaps the awareness that rest can be a part of productivity — in fact it is a necessary component of sustainable peak productivity.

Let me know in the comments section what your biggest takeaway is and I trust you will be more rested and productive as you transcend and integrate any dichotomies you discover in your neurology.