Chris Edgar: Author of Inner Productivity

"Initially I was worrying, 'are they trying to tell me I’m not hacking it here and giving me easier work to do?' But as it turned out, it wasn’t that my work was changing at all. What was happening was that my experience of work was changing."

Chris Edgar

As author of the book Inner Productivity Chris Edgar, sees it, the trouble with most productivity systems is that they don't take into account that actual humans - with all of their fears, distractions, and emotional reactions - are the ones that have to implement them.

In his former career as an attorney, Chris Edgar found the stress and anxiety of his work piling up and spilling over into the rest of his life. Initially he was just looking for ways to help him de-stress and stop waking up in the middle of the night stressing about some spelling error on page 23 of the document he had just handed in that day.

Over time, though, he realized that the techniques that he was exploring, like mindfulness and visualization, were having a significant impact on the quality of his work day. The more he worked with them, the more he realized that there was a very real benefit there that anyone could tap into. 

Edgar left his law practice to focus full time on using what he learned in his own journey to help other people find the focus and sense of ease it takes to make the most of their efforts.

His book, Inner Productivity, is packed with the insights he has gained both through his own experience and in his work with clients.

In this podcast, Edgars outlines some of the ideas and techniques from the book.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

• How techniques like meditation and mindfulness changed his work experience completely.
• Why any productivity system is only as good as the focus of the person implementing it.
• Why a "fight or flee" reaction to procrastination only makes matters worse, and what to do about it.
• How accepting your inner experience is the cornerstone for productivity.
• The three core elements of Inner Productivity.
• How to start listening to what your body has to tell you.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Chris Edgar

Length: 20:50

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Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

As Chris Edgar sees it, there’s one significant flaw in the majority of productivity approaches out there. They have to be implemented by humans. So rather than a perfectly tuned machine cranking out maximum results, we get sidetracked by procrastination, or any shiny bauble that ISN’T what we’re supposed to be focusing on.

Edgar’s book, Inner Productivity, addresses that oversight. He answers the question, “How do you find that internal focus that helps you make the most of your efforts.”

It all started with the stress and anxiety he experienced in his former career as an attorney. When that stress spilled over into the rest of his life, Edgar started exploring ways to counter it. Little did he know that he was planting the seeds for a new career.

For several years I worked as a litigator with a large law firm. And you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I had some stressful situations, and some anxiety-provoking situations while I was there. And I had a pretty high tolerance for stress in the workplace, but the problem I was having was that I was starting to take that stress home with me. So if I was sitting on the couch hoping to relax with a magazine or something like that, I would have this nagging voice in the back of my mind, worrying about if there had been a typo on page 23 of some document I had handed in that day.

And so I started looking for ways I could relax in my rare off hours, and what I ended up turning to were what’s often called mindfulness practices, or spiritual practices. Things like meditation, yoga, qi gong or tai chi. And I started a pretty regular routine of meditation and yoga, and what I started to notice was not only was this building up a sense of centeredness when I was trying to relax at home, its effects were starting to seep over into my work. I was taking that sense of calm and that centeredness.

And it seemed very strange at first. I wondered whether the higher ups were trying to tell me something. Everyone seemed so calm all of a sudden, and things were getting done more easily, and I seemed to be getting out of the office earlier. So initially I was worrying, are they trying to tell me I’m not hacking it here and giving me easier work to do.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t that my work was changing at all. What was happening was that my experience of work was changing. And so over time what I started to discover – initially when I took up these practices I believed they were things I could only do on my own time. I figured I can’t exactly get down on the floor with my yoga mat and run through a couple asanas whenever I feel stressed in the office. That’s probably not something that’s going to fly with my superiors.

But as it turns out what I started to see was that there are forms of breathing and movement and visualization that I could do in real time as I was sitting there at my desk. I didn’t need to get up and go to a class or watch some video or burn some incense or anything like that. I could just sit there and all I needed to do these exercises was my own mind and body.

And so after a few more years I started to realize that I was more interested in these techniques, in adapting spiritual practices like meditation and yoga into my work than I was in the work itself that I was doing. So I was becoming more interested in this than in drafting legal briefs and reviewing documents and doing the other kinds of things that were the mainstays of my job as a lawyerk.

And so what I eventually decided one fateful morning was that I was going to go out and I was going to teach these techniques to people, these ways I had found to adapt these mindfulness practices into my work. And I realized there was a large audience of professionals like doctors and lawyers and accountants and so on, who really hadn’t had much exposure to these kinds of practices, even people who were out here in the Bay area. Or maybe they come to them with some degree of prejudice. You know, this is only for woo-woo new agey types. I don’t need this. I’m an upstanding professional.

So what I realized was that a lot of these people could benefit from a reduction of stress and the focus and the peace that these practices can bring you. Having done what I’d done, I had access to an audience I could really help by teaching these things. And so that’s what I’ve been doing.

As he used those ideas first to transform his own work and then help his clients find that focus and productivity, Edgar started to formulate an approach that anyone could use. He outlines that approach in his book, Inner Productivity.

The book is called Inner Productivity, and the book is about bringing practices like mindfulness meditation and yoga and qi gong and so forth into your work in a way that helps you achieve a state of focus and peace as you work.

When we think of productivity my sense is that we usually think of techniques for rearranging our working environment. We think of color-coding our folders reorganizing our e-mail inbox, or holding shorter meetings and so on. There’s a lot of great techniques out there for doing that. And what I’ve noticed is that there really isn’t a lot out there that deals with what’s probably the biggest obstacle that we face in getting our work done which is ourselves. Our own minds and bodies.

If our minds are wandering off into the past, fretting over the break-up of some relationship that happened ten years ago, or they’re projecting into the future worrying about how big the bonus is going to be this year, I hope I get a promotion and so on, then no many how many of these cool techniques we’re using for our work environment, we’re still going to be distracted. We’re still going to be unmotivated. So that’s really where this book comes in.

You can have the best productivity system in the world, but if your procrastination kicks in, the system is rendered ineffective. Edgar shared his perspective on procrastination, why it happens, and what to do about it.

In my experience what happens is we’re sitting there chugging along in our work and we’re feeling productive and getting things done, and we start to have some kind of experience. We start to have some kinds of thoughts and feelings that feel uncomfortable or scary to us.

So maybe we’ll be sitting there chugging along – and this will be a very familiar example to a lot of people, I think – we’ll start having this burning curiosity about what’s in our e-mail inbox, for instance. And if we leave that long enough it actually starts to intensify into a tension in our bodies. If you look at it closely it’s actually your muscles tightening up, maybe your shoulders or your chest or something like that tensing up.

And because we don’t want to experience that tension, what we do is we either fight or we flee. We have what I call a fight or flight reaction. So we try to fight against this sensation by beating ourselves up basically by saying, oh come on, I can’t believe you’re being so lazy and wondering about your e-mail again and why can’t you get this thing done and so on.

And I think as a lot of us have experienced, fighting in that way and beating ourselves up can actually be physically draining. So it can actually tire us out and make it more difficult to get done what we want to do.

Or we flee, so maybe we give in to our urge to check e-mails and try to get rid of that sensation that way. Or we’ll run off and do something else so that we can distract our minds from that sensation. We’ll go off and instant message with friends, or call someone on the phone, or play mine sweeper, or do any of the thousands of things that we can do without leaving the comforts of our desks to distract ourselves these days.

So what I’m proposing, rather than fighting or fleeing, is a different way of relating to these inner experiences, to these thoughts and feelings. And that’s to just accept them, is the term that I use. So just sit there and breathe and relax your body and allow whatever thought or sensation is coming up to pass away.

If it’s a burning curiosity about your e-mail, for instance, just sit there and breathe and relax whatever area is feeling tension, maybe your shoulders or your chest or wherever it happens to be, and breathe and relax your body, and allow whatever thought or sensation is coming up to pass away. If it’s a burning curiosity about your e-mail, for example, just sit there and relax whatever area is feeling tension and allow that sensation to flow through you. And as you keep doing this over time, and as you keep noticing and understanding that allowing that sensation to be isn’t going to hurt you in any way, that it’s actually just going to pass away like any other thought or feeling that we have, the more you understand that, the more you become comfortable and familiar with those kinds of sensations. And after you do this for a while and that experience of burning curiosity about your e-mail or whatever it is comes up again, you become able to say, OK, thanks for sharing and I’m going to continue typing this board presentation or writing this e-mail or sculpting this sculpture, or whatever it is that you do with the bulk of your time at work.

Edgar acknowledges that, as effective as this approach can be, it doesn’t always come naturally.

I think when we first approach these kinds of techniques, we have some kind of fear or discomfort about the idea of just letting that urge to check your e-mail to be, or just allowing that sense of emptiness, that creative emptiness that we call writer’s block, allowing that to be as it is.

We tend to come in worrying that if I allow those things to be there without doing anything about it, I’m going to get hurt in some way, or they’re going to stay there forever. And then when we actually become trusting enough to let those be, we start to discover that they’re really not such a serious problem at all.

In his book, Edgar outlines three main elements to Inner Productivity.

I break down Inner Productivity into three elements. Attention, intention, and foundation. Attention is pretty self-explanatory. It’s just the ability to hold your attention on a task that you’re doing for a long period of time without having to make a lot of painful effort. So without having to constantly drag your attention back from the past or back from the future or having to constantly take breaks because working is to painful, or something along those lines. And so cultivating the ability just to hold your attention is one of the things that the exercises in this book help you to do.

The second element is called intention. And intention is basically a 30,000 foot perspective on why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s what I mean by creating a powerful intention. So a lot of us in our work get bogged down and unmotivated because the things that we’re doing seem kind of minor and meaningless.

Like I’m sitting there typing this e-mail, or maybe I’m rearranging my file folders or something like that. And if I’m not aware, if I’m not present to the larger context for why I’m doing that, then I can start to feel really bored and start to think, why am I doing this? I can’t believe I’m hurting myself like this. But what the questions in the intention section have us do is to take those questions seriously. OK, why am I doing this? What’s the overall contribution that I’m making to my business and to the world with what I’m doing right now?

And when we do that, that reconnects us with that sense of passion that got us into what we’re doing in the first place. And suddenly it starts to make sense. Ohhh, OK, that’s why I’m doing that. I’m not just hurting myself here. I’m not just being a masochist. So that’s the idea behind intention.

Foundation is a sense of unconditional love or appreciation for yourself. And when I talk about this sometimes I get some raised eyebrows and cynical looks like, well, loving yourself is great but it doesn’t pay the bills, right? Now, what I think is that in our society we tend to base our sense of self-worth on external achievements, the money that we get or the prestige or the career or our academic degrees or what the boss said about us and so on. And the trouble is that when we do that, even if we’re getting what we want, even if we’re getting money and prestige right now, there’s always going to be some anxiety about the possibility that we might lose those things in the future. So that’s what basing our self-worth on external rewards creates. It creates anxiety. And that anxiety leads to all these neurotic behaviors that I was doing that led me to come to these spiritual practices in the first place. Things like waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, thinking oh no, what does the boss think of this e-mail that I sent today. I hope he was OK with it, and so on. And of course that’s not productive at all. All that does is get us more frazzled. So developing a sense of appreciation for ourselves, and really a sense of solidity. Really a sense of groundedness is what the foundation element is about.

While the ideas he outlines in Inner Productivity are now an integral part of both his career and his overall life, Edgar admits that wasn’t always the case. In fact, he had what he would describe as a prejudice against them.

Before I went to law school I had no exposure to spiritual practices, or I had the kind of prejudices against them that I was talking about before, like oh, it’s all that airy-fairy stuff. I didn’t really have a concept of the fact that you could unconditionally respect yourself, or see yourself as a worthy person. I bought into what I think a lot of us in our culture buy into, which is of course my worth is based on how much money I make, or how prestigious my degree is and so on. A lot of us, it’s just operating unconsciously. We don’t really even have choice around it.

So my initial reaction to some of these books and some of these teachers that talk about self-love was, oh come on. And then when I actually got into practices like meditation and yoga and I was able to experience that sense of groundedness that I’m talking about, in my body, I realized, whoa, these people are coming from a place that I never even knew existed. And that’s what really sparked my interest.

In a way, I’m very thankful for my work in the legal profession, because without it I don’t think I would have been guided into doing the kind of work that I’m doing now.

Edgar is quick to distinguish between the ideas at the heart of his work and a more formal approach to spirituality or religion.

When I use the word spirituality, something that I’ve done in interviews before and speaking engagements that I’ve done, some people immediately get turned off. Some people think religion. They think fundamentalist groups that want to force their beliefs down my throat, or something like that. And so what I want to make clear at the outset is that I’m talking about a bunch of very practical techniques. And you can use them and you can immediately see for yourself whether they produce results for you.

So I’m not asking you to accept any beliefs. I’m not asking you to believe in any vision of the cosmos. All I’m doing is asking you to try these techniques out. And I think that that makes it an easier pill to swallow with a lot of the things that I talk about.

One of the huge challenges most of us face is the tendency for our mind to go wandering off in all directions but where we are, right here and right now. Edgar offered a simple technique to help bring our attention back to the present moment.

 Our body is usually something we forget about if we’re working. What I suggest is if we to some extent keep our attention focused on the body, the sensation that we’re feeling there, that it actually helps us keep our minds focused on the present. There are a lot of spiritual teachers out there who talk about the fact that the sensations coming up in our bodies are always happening right now. So when you focus on what’s happening in your hands, or your feet, some part of you, then your attention naturally shifts. Before your mind was wandering off into the past, into the future. Oh my goodness, is the mechanic going to finish fixing the car tomorrow, or I hope this person’s opinion of me is good and so on.

A simple exercise for doing this is to just pick some part of your body. The easiest one for me is my feet on the ground, the sensation of pressure of your feet against the ground. And notice any other sensations in your feet right now. Any sort of tingling, or pulse, or warmth, or coldness, whatever’s there. And notice as you bring your attention there that your attention, your awareness naturally shifts back into the now. And that’s the purpose of these body awareness exercises.

As Edgar sees it, most of us miss out on a lot of what our bodies have to tell us. I think of it as body deafness. But if we slow down and pay attention, he says, our bodies have a lot to say about the choices we make. Take our career choices for example.

In our culture what we tend to do is we tend to focus solely on cost benefit analysis when we’re deciding which direction we’re going to go in our careers. How much money am I going to make, what’s the benefits package, what’s the location, and so on. And a couple of years, or maybe ten or twenty years down the line, a lot of people end up regretting the fact that they did that. They wish that they had listened more closely to their instincts. I think that when you’re paying attention to the sensations in your body, to how it feels when you consider different career options, that’s a way of getting in touch with those instincts, that sixth sense, or intuition that people would like to go with a little bit more when they’re deciding what to do.

An exercise that I talk about for people who are interested in a career transition is just take a piece of paper and write down a number of possibilities. Just brainstorm for a little bit. Don’t censor based on what sounds rational. And scan down them and notice how your body feels as you consider all of them, rather than coming from an intellectual place. Rather than thinking about the practicality of it. And if you feel a sense of warmth and openness, perhaps, in your heart, then that can be some inner guidance that this is something that you’d enjoy doing. That this is something you can stick with in the long term.

Or you might look at something that seems rational, like becoming an accountant or something like that – no offense to people who are accountants – and you might feel a tension, a contraction in your body, like your body is rejecting that idea, even though it sounds rational. And that’s valuable wisdom too I think that we often don’t listen to. So that listening is very important in that context.

I asked Edgar what kinds of stumbling blocks he sees as people try to focus on Inner Productivity.

One of them would be that kind of body deafness that you were talking about, when you’re deaf to what’s going on in your body. We’re deaf to a whole potential source of motivation that we might be tapping into. So that’s one example.

Another example would be this attitude that we tend to have toward our inner experience. What we tend to do is we try to shut them out as they come up when we’re working. And what we don’t realize is that we’re actually using a whole lot of energy by doing that. We’re telling our minds shut up, stop thinking about the vacation you’re going to take in two weeks, things like that. Or every time we have a painful memory we run off and check our e-mail so we don’t have to experience that memory. We’re actually wasting a lot of time and wasting a lot of energy that we could otherwise use to get our tasks done. So this whole attitude of fighting and fleeing from our experience is something that does tend to get in people’s way and ends up producing a lot of suffering. And the irony is that people think if they can just get away from these thoughts and feelings, or anesthetize them or something like that, then they’l be able to get their work done. But that’s actually what’s creating the procrastination in the first place.

Edgar described the central most important idea he wants people to come away with after reading Inner Productivity.

That would be the attitude of accepting your inner experience when it comes up. So if you’re sitting there and a painful memory starts to come up, or a worry about the future, or maybe just some kind of tension in your body, like your back getting tight, for instance, see if you can just allow that to be exactly as it is. So notice the urge to do something about it. Notice the sense that it’s a problem and allow that urge to pass away, and relax to the extent that you can. And the more you do this, the more you start to notice that those thoughts and sensations aren’t that threatening to you when you start to put them in perspective. And you start to be able to go forward in what you’re doing even if those sensations are coming up. So I think that’s really key to keeping a sense of focus and motivation.

If you just do that, if you just adopt an attitude of acceptance, then I think that will grow your personal productivity really by leaps and bounds.

I asked Edgar what he loves about his work.

Working with people and taking them to places where they’ve been unwilling to go before, which is one of the major themes of this book – accepting the inner experience rather than running from it. And seeing that look on their face and seeing that presence that they have when they realize that really this isn’t so bad after all. That fear that they never wanted to explore, or maybe they thought they should never get angry, or they should never feel sad, or something along those lines. And when they actually allow that experience to come up and just allow it to be, their whole perspective shifts and they have this aliveness about them that’s really exciting to me to witness.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you would like to learn more about Chris Edgar and Inner Productivity, you can go to www.innerproductivity.com. If you would like to learn more about me and how I can help you discover a career that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com