Between Productivity and Presence
I have been oscillating between the two poles of productivity and presence the last couple of years. My experience prior to the work I do here at Magis had always made me take an unrelenting posture towards productivity and there is no other explanation except to serve the capitalists’ goal of profit-making. But, nine years into the work of learning how to build a center for healing through the expressive arts, where your services put the wellbeing and mental health of people first, I’ve discovered that my previous experiences could only help me navigate the way through up to a certain extent.
A case for productivity and presence
In management science, productivity refers to the observable and tangible facets of a person’s performance. It’s something that needs to be within a person’s control. It’s also something that a leader needs to be able to regularly have their eyes on and manage. Anything uncontrollable or beyond your foresight can be seen as your shortcoming or ineffectiveness. Knowing this, productivity can often feel like the complete opposite of presence. Productivity needs to be in step with the right pace, while presence is about mindfulness and cultivating the quality of attention.
Starting up a center for healing and learning through the expressive arts needed me to be both: productive and present. It was a little challenging for me to integrate these two perspectives because I was so used to just having one. As I learned more about the expressive arts as a service and product, I realized that building a center for healing took more than just building a business. I needed to go through a personal journey that fully understood what it was all about.
It seems easier to put some boundaries between you and the work you do if you’re developing a business of products like mobile phones, or technology, or even food. But starting a venture that was all about the wellbeing and mental health of people, I learned, takes more than just business acumen. I needed my entire self to be part of it and that meant bringing both my inner life and my work life into the picture, not just the latter. It meant bringing my vulnerabilities, my apprehensions, and my deepest convictions to the table. It meant giving the team I work with the permission to do the same.
I realized that there was no other way to learn how to navigate the wellbeing business except to bring our own wellbeing to the forefront of our work. And that the mission to bring the value of the expressive arts into the conversation of Filipino wellbeing—and into my own personal wellbeing—was more important than the conversation of just having a sustainable business.
The pandemic has shown how easily our lives can change because of a tiny but lethal virus. The climate change has shown how one typhoon’s wrath can destroy a city. Political conflicts can show how wars can shatter a family’s dreams. The list that affects wellbeing and mental health are endless, and while we know we can’t save the world on our own, I think the efforts to influence a small part of society that’s within your reach means a lot to those who feel the impact of your work.
Deconstructing and transforming leadership
I studied Otto Scharmer’s work on awareness-based social systems and transformative leadership because it was the closest I could get to finding commonalities with the approach used in the practice of the expressive arts. I needed a leadership perspective that influenced the way I managed the work, so that I could stay true to the services we offered and to the mission we pursued. This congruence mattered to me because I wanted to keep my integrity even if learning a different leadership style felt like it took me on a journey of unlearning a lot of the things I knew how to do.
Deconstructing my own leadership perspectives made me feel a kind of fragmentation as someone possessing both an artist’s and an administrator’s worldviews. It was challenging to function with two paradigms that seemed to wrestle with each other. But committing to the work of wellbeing and the arts gave me the opportunity to bring the gaps closer, experience what the impact of art really felt like, and at the same time, manage a business that promotes it.
Scharmer explores the qualities of a changemaker and the process that naturally emerges in the work of changemaking. One of these qualities is presencing. Presencing as a leadership skill is very similar to the principles introduced within the therapeutic approaches of the expressive arts like decentering, embodiment, attunement, or space-holding. These are the skills that enable the changemaker to become not only a catalyst but also be a model of how this change intimately shows up in their own life.
Learning how to manage productivity and manage one’s presence in a more integrated way can feel like an experience of having to manage the tension of opposites. It’s not a walk in the park, especially if your venture started with an uncommon concept and not one that could sell like pancakes. But staying in the journey made me discover that sometimes, what is most important to work on is the meaning you create before the money you make. Sometimes, you have to be protective of your headspace and make sure you don’t engage in priorities that compete, because doing so would deplete your own capacity or your team’s. While it is ideal to have clarity at the onset, sometimes what is also important is to learn how to manage what’s ambiguous and uncertain because wellbeing is not a destination that is clear cut. Managing wellbeing for me is learning how to manage what is constantly emerging.
We all have our own mental health and wellbeing challenges, and sometimes our neurodiversity as a team would be predominant in our ways of working. This made me realize that sticking to traditional management approaches didn’t always work. I learned how to be less calculative, and be more integrative. I learned how to notice incremental progress rather than go after sprints. What would typically feel like slow growth, we learned to reframe until it felt like deep growth. We continue to learn that we can’t work this wellbeing business well until we, too, start demonstrating the qualities of a team that manages wellbeing well.
There would be some days where we feel the perfect flow and there would be days when we struggle to find the right strategy to communicate a new offering. There would be days when we hit a dead-end in our brainstorming sessions to craft the best proposal. There would be days when we finish a cost model in a breeze. We oscillate between these moments and the farther the peaks were from the valleys, the longer it took for us to recover from a bad slump. Then: we’d hear about how well-received the support group session was, and we’d remember why we have been doing all of this in the first place.
I wish more leaders would dare let go of control. Dare embrace the inner fears that prevents them from stepping to a new way of leading in reciprocity. I do see more and more leaders becoming ecosystem nurturers that understands how to create conditions conducive for life wherever they are, wherever they go. That listening and sets the potential of the organization free.
The personal as universal
What is most personal is most universal, a meditation by the Henri Nouwen Society has said. The process of learning to manage my mental health and wellbeing in my workplace required me to pay attention to a lot of the intangibles that either deter or nurture elements of an environment that make the experience of wellbeing tangibly felt. I have learned, by engaging in the arts, to adjust the way I hold these emotions over the years with a loose grip and consider them also as part of the whole experience. It’s led me to experience longer thresholds of endurance and deeper healing and growth. It has become for me a frame of mind, heart, and soul that allows me to draw from the interior sources of wisdom and inspiration, teaching me to be more inclusive in my perspectives and accepting of the not so perfect pieces of other people and of myself.
The process of navigating what is intangible to create a tangible experience of wellbeing is also at the heart of our work at Magis. The expressive arts partner with us and become tools and methods, ways to harvest new knowledge, ways to explore conduits to ideas and creativity, ways to give voice to the silent, and ways to see the hidden. The expressive arts become a companion, a mirror, a magnifying glass, or a lamp post to any person wanting to learn how to experience confusion, stress, frustration, demotivation, and fragmentation with more gentleness and self-compassion.
One can easily ask, so what does this have to do with the bottom line? I say: it has everything to do with the bottom line. Just like the depletion of environmental resources deterring the supply chain of a manufacturing brand, the depletion of human resources comes in the form of a depletion of a sense of agency, burnout, and the eventual decline of performance and productivity. Humans who lose a sense of their own presence lose their instincts to function, to perform, and do the work. The arts can help soften the calloused layers of a person whose personhood is crouched underneath years and years of stress, and in some cases, even trauma.
Bridging productivity and presence: discovering sound
The work of creating pathways towards the wellbeing for you and your team needs to involve managing the dance between productivity and presence. Sometimes, productivity is the result of an effortless overflow because you’ve had quality rest more than planned and predetermined effort. Sometimes efficiency is fueled by inspiration and motivation instead of how accurately you prescribed steps in a work manual.
With that in mind, one morning I decided to experiment with a new modality and medium that gave me a chance to discover new things about myself and our team. In this experiment, I wanted to see how a disposition of playfulness could bridge the tension between productivity and presence.
I had this intention in my mind as I thought of my experimentation with music. Thinking about music without thinking about composing or mastering a particular piece felt a little uncomfortable at first. As a musician, I was used to moving towards a specific creative direction and outcome. I am learning that to play means I can give myself permission for this moment to not try to produce anything at all except to play, enjoy, and be with music.
I decided to use what resources were around me. A common element of design that we use in expressive arts work is to use what is accessible. So I had my voice, my phone to record myself, my journal, and nothing else but one early morning and the waking sound of birds.
Like someone who hasn’t exercised for a long time, I felt my vocal chords strained, raw and rough. I chose to see what sounds I could express as a response to the birds chirping and singing outside my window. It felt funny and weird but I stayed in the moment and I wondered if I could get them to play and sing with me. But more than trying to make them respond, I leaned and settled into inhabiting the moment with my full attention and let the moment be. As I made sounds, I noticed them turn into melodies and slowly started to notice how the birds felt like they were harmonizing with me. To feel what harmony means as a felt sensation in your body without intellectualizing it, was priceless. Tears started to fill my eyes as the moment gave me experience of playfulness and wellbeing I was looking for. And for the first time as a musician who studied under a few classical teachers, I was able to say, “Wow, I like how I sounded.”
It takes practice to be able to say to yourself that you like who you are, or you like what you do, or you like what you worked on. Especially if the process involves looking a little bit like a fool yodeling with a few sparrows early in the morning.
But allowing myself for a moment to experiencing the simple joy of making sounds and making melodies gave my brain a reset. It made me less indifferent to the way my voice was also a part of me and is one of the ways that communicates and expresses who I am and what I am about. I realized that I’ve taken this for granted and giving some appreciation to this instrument that I use on a daily basis brought a new meaning to what being present and productive meant. It takes giving yourself the permission to play to discover new pathways for deeper presence and productivity.
Straddling between the tension of two worldviews, that of an artist/administrator, has taught me that wellbeing begins with the journey of appreciating the sound of my voice which can shift when I am wearing one hat or another and still recognize that these shifts remain part of me.
So the next time I oscillate between the rhythm of productivity and the stillness of being present, I don’t have to wrestle with the tension or think that they’re opposing perspectives and dispositions. In time, through my own expressive journey, I’ll have developed the capacity to know that I have it in me to hold both threads, like the warp and the weft of a vibrantly designed fabric being woven within the welcoming arms of a loom.
Our stories are connected. Find out how Kathy’s story is connected to this one: