Productivity Versus Self Care is a False Dichotomy If...

.....you focus on healthy, sustainable practices and let go of attachment to internalized demands and expectations. Easier said than done, of course.

Video Helping is Real Help

This summer, I am a teaching a graduate level course on crisis intervention. Of course, there is no relevance to this course and our current national/global context!!! This week, my students begin working with each other in peer-counseling triads  For four weeks, they will get a flavor for what it is like to help and be helped via video, right now, in the contest of the pandemic, racist violence, uprising, and political/leadership incompetence.

While some of them may be skeptical that helping can happen via video, I know it can. It does, and after ten years of doing it, I firmly believe that I can establish nearly the same quality helping relationship that do when I work “live.” In fact, I have worked with so few client in person during the last decade, I am not even sure how I would do anymore with real live people!

I am writing this as I have seen some posts in social media about people needing help for anxiety and/or depression but not wishing to engage via video. I get the reticence—it is really weird at first. But please—reach out and seek the help you need—give this strange post-modern way of being engaged in help and helping a shot. You own it to yourself.

Lean into Processes, Let go of Productivity

It is one of the great paradoxes of writing--if I let you let go of the need to be productive, and focus on the quality of your processes, you will be more productive. And healthier. And more balanced. Needed in these times.

Healthy sustainably writing sessions. Day by day. Working on relationship to writing. You will be productive without worrying about productivity.