Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up my friends, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I am your host Britt Seva, and I’m really excited to geek out with you a little bit today about a topic that’s been really heavy on my mind recently. We’re going to talk today about toxic productivity and the productivity spectrum.
Now I myself am admittedly an achiever. I know for certain that I find a lot of value in my life when I’m achieving and let me tell you what achieving is for me. Achieving is definitely professional achievement, there’s no doubt about it, but also as of the time of this recording, there’s no dirty laundry in my house. All of the laundry is done. That makes me feel like an achiever as well. When one of my kids does well in school, it actually makes me feel like I’m achieving as a good parent. I like achieving in all the ways, but professional achievement is definitely a part of it.
Now I know not everybody listening to this podcast is wired that way, but most people who are focused on business, most people who chose to be entrepreneurs, which you, when you chose to go to cosmetology school, you chose to be an entrepreneur. There’s no doubt about it. You chose to be self-made.
Most people who make choices like that are achievers to a degree and those of us who are achievers can really slip to the dark side and the dark side could be considered workaholic. It could be the hustle life. Any of those things would be considered the dark side.
I think for a lot of us, we were raised in the times where it was like, well, paying your dues is part of this industry. I know that’s certainly the message that was delivered to me and so we’re almost conditioned to think if I work hard enough, then everything I want will come to me. However, the longer you live on this earth, the more you realize, oh my gosh, that’s certainly not always true.
Raise your hand if you’re listening to this podcast right now, and you’ve worked really hard towards certain things and they just never come together.
So a part of us knows that that’s not true, yet we still are working really, really hard. What I am finding through a little bit of research I’ve been doing recently is that I think toxic productivity is something that plagues our industry big time, but people in general. So I wanted to dedicate this week’s show to the concept of it.
Let me take you back in time because I certainly didn’t develop toxic productivity on my own. This is something that actually crossed my Instagram feed and really sparked a light bulb moment for me. If you follow Create and Cultivate on Instagram, you may have seen this as well. I just love everything comes out of Create and Cultivate. I’ve gone to their conferences a couple of times. I just think that they’re pretty brilliant. One of the posts that they had, I’m going to read it to you verbatim.
It says, “Signs you’re suffering from toxic productivity. One, your work is harming your health and relationships. Two, you’ve set unrealistic expectations for yourself. Three, you’re ignoring important information around you. And four, you’re having difficulty with rest or stillness.”
Even reading this now, I’m having a hard time not sinking really low in my chair because I’ve been and done all of those things, and in a cycle where I’ll get over it and then come back to it. Often I’ll even tell myself, “Well, this is a short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.”
And yes, but the question becomes how short-term is the sacrifice? Is there an end game here or is this just my reality for the next decade? And how do you ensure that you get out of this toxic productivity cycle to ensure that you actually are creating a life well lived?
After I saw this Instagram post, it just stopped my whole roll and I dove in and really researched this concept. It turns out Create and Cultivate didn’t develop this either. There’s a whole psychology behind it. When I looked a little bit deeper, it actually goes beyond just the idea of toxic productivity and into what is called the productivity spectrum.
So I really want to talk about both today. I encourage you to really ask yourself, where have I been? Where am I right now? And then we’re going to talk about some ideas and concepts to ensure that you are productive.
We, as human beings, are designed to achieve. Absolutely. You are supposed to improve your life and your lifestyle and your mental health and your physical health and your circumstances over your lifetime. That is the goal of being here in this lifetime. There’s no doubt, but there’s gotta be a way to be productive without slipping to the dark side. That’s what I want to explore in the podcast today.
We talked at a glance of some of the things that may be signs of toxic productivity, and that was from the Create and Cultivate post. But I want to share with you a few of the other signs that I heard as I did my research a bit more.
At the hundred foot view, a really good sign that you may be toxically productive is that you find it hard to hit pause on your work and take adequate time to rest, to take time with your friends, to read a book that has nothing to do with business, to stop listening to a business podcast and just veg out and Netflix and chill if that’s what you want to do, because there’s this incredible guilt that you could be or would be or should be spending time in a way that would push you closer to your goal.
What I found through my research and I think why this is starting to hit mainstream media a little bit is that this is a concept that’s been around for a long time. However, the research that I saw across a ton of different sites was that the pandemic really put this to a fever pitch for a few different reasons.
One, fear, and fear is one of the things that will push us to do things faster, wilder, and more impulsively than just about anything else, because fear is a really powerful emotion. For a lot of us, especially in our industry, we felt the fear of losing it all in 2020.
I’ve always openly said that our industry is recession-proof. I still stand behind that. I think we’re seeing the results of that now as our industry has never been growing faster and demand for stylists has never been higher and stylists are growing at more of a rapid rate now than ever before in my lifetime, for sure.
However, we’re coming out of this season where we weren’t pandemic-proof, even if we’re recession-proof, and that was scary. Some of you were out of work for months, half a year, and we lost a good chunk of the industry during that time. For a lot of you, even if you weren’t out of work, maybe there was a slow season or there was a lot of unpredictability. We said, “Well, oh shoot, I need to get my life together,” and that reflection was a really good thing.
But then what happened is for a lot of people, the pendulum really swung and it wasn’t like, “Okay, what do I need to shift and pivot? What kind of adjustments do I need to make to ensure that I have plenty of savings? To ensure that I have safe-proof my life in business, that my finances are in order?” instead of just looking at like, “Okay, what do I need to do over the course of the next year to make sure that I get stable?”
It was like, “Whoa, what do I need to do to revolutionize my life?” and it was pedal-to-the-metal, go. I think you can look to your left and to your right and see people who are continuing to react that way.
It’s hard not to. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that got caught up in that big time because of the fear, for sure. So the question becomes, how do you make sure that you’re safe-proofing your business without getting into that hustle life?
Let’s go back to some of those signs and that you may have a bit of the toxic productivity.
One, the inability to shut off. Just to relax and enjoy life and to not live on Instagram and to put your phone away. I did an episode a few weeks back, all about being all in, which is a practice I put into place in my life many years ago—almost a decade ago now—literally to save my family. That was the point of doing it. One of the things that—there’s a lot of things I’m not good at, and I think that toxic productivity is something that’s plagued me definitely in the last year, for sure.
But one of the things I am good at is turning off. I don’t feel the need to be constantly connected. I’m not scared to lose something. I don’t have FOMO when I have to turn something down. Those are some of the really good signs that you are in a healthy relationship productively.
If you feel like you have to respond to every DM, if you like that your clients can text you, if you’re scared you’re going to miss something, if you feel like you want to comment on enough feeds to get out there and to be seen, you don’t wanna miss anything and you check your Instagram 15 times a day, or maybe you’re an education junkie—that’s something that really plagued me for a long time and that was a little bit of that FOMO too, is I would take workshop after workshop, after masterclass, after mastermind, after every possible opportunity to learn, to be there, to read all the books, to do all the things.
And I didn’t read books for pleasure, oh my gosh, for years, and when I was watching TV, I was watching educational documentaries. I still do a lot of that because I enjoy it, but it’s about finding that balance.
So really asking yourself, like, do I turn off? Are there times where it has nothing to do with being productive? Do you relax on a Sunday and do no chores even if your house is a wreck? Do you do the things that allow you just to turn off and just to be you for a while? Aside from vacation, like literally on the day-to-day basis, are you able to shut off and shut down too?
I know this is a big one for a lot of people in this room. Guilt about productivity, meaning y’all in this room, listening to this, get stuff done. Everybody does. There’s nobody here who is just laying on their floor in their kitchen all day long, seven days a week. Like you all get up and life happens and stuff gets done. But if you ever lay in bed at the end of the night and you’re staring at the ceiling and your mind is spinning of all the things you would’ve done, could’ve done, should’ve done, saw somebody else doing, and you’re convincing yourself that you’re a loser because you’re not doing all that stuff, massively toxic.
We’ll talk about how to make sure that you get out of that cycle, but that’s a huge sign that you’re not in a good space with productivity.
Number three: problems with health or personal relationships. We talked about the four pillars of wealth here all the time, right? There’s love, there’s health, there’s time, and then there’s money. I always put money fourth because money is a by-product of all the other three. But if you allow your health to slip, like you stopped going to the gym, you don’t eat right. You’re living on coffee. You don’t take a lunch break. You don’t take a bathroom break. You don’t take time with your friends. You don’t take time with your family. You miss out on social events because you’re worried about being productive. You don’t call in sick because you’re afraid your clients will be mad. You don’t stay home sick with your children because your clients will be mad… That’s toxic. That’s no good.
When those things start to happen, we have to start asking ourselves, “Am I living to work or am I working to live?” and really recenter around what a life well lived would look like.
Now, another one is having really unrealistic expectations. So expecting that you’re able to perform at a very high level every single day, imagining that every day will be perfect, nothing is going to come up and you’ll just be able to hit hard, hard, hard, hard, and achieve at this incredible level. When you’re looking for very rapid growth and you are nearly killing yourself to get there, that’s obviously unhealthy.
But I think for a lot of us, we think we’re like living in this race. Like if I don’t hurry up and do it, somebody else is going to.
I’m going back to myself, probably five or six years ago. It’s been some time for me. I thought that for sure, but the older wiser version of myself looks around and I realized—and I’ve shared this very openly before—I’m not competing with anybody else. I’m only competing with me, and so there is no race. But if I am destroying myself in this race to be productive, how would I ever show up as my best? I will never achieve everything that I’m hoping to.
You start to realize that faster, bigger, more, and hurry, hurry, hurry, creates a sloppy mess. It doesn’t actually create the results that you’re looking for. Setting those unrealistic expectations of high performance all the time leads to things like B words, breaks, B word burnout, and that’s a huge sign of toxic productivity.
Lastly, just general restlessness. If you feel guilty taking a break or off or declining an opportunity, and when you do those things, it affects your self worth, like you start having negative self-talk, without a doubt, you have a toxic productivity issue.
I want to take a pivot for just a second, because after I had gone down this rabbit hole for a while, I stumbled across something that is also really widely documented called the productivity spectrum. It places being productive into three categories: healthy productivity, which is what we all want and we’ll talk about how to get there, right at the end of this podcast, I promise. Then toxic productivity due to an overwhelming amount of feelings or emotions, and toxic productivity consumed by work.
What this means, I found through research, is that if you are overworking, like you’re having all of the things that we just talked about, like the guilt that you’re not doing enough, I’m not achieving fast enough. I can’t take a break because breaks are bad for me. I need to be focused on business. I need to hurry the heck up. All of that is very toxic, but then there’s the other side and it’s low productivity and it’s generally caused by self-doubt feelings. It can be things like imposter syndrome, it can be things like procrastination, it can be things like lack of confidence, self-worth issues, but the polar opposite of the overworking is the underworking.
I’ll be candid, I’ve coached a lot of people who were toxicly productive, but on that negative scale where it’s like nothing I can do, nothing I can say, I could literally spoonfeed you strategy and you’re still not going to do it. That’s also toxic productivity, which is leading to a non-result.
Being overly like hustle, hustle, hustle, won’t get you the result you’re looking for, and then being under productive is also toxic and also will not get you the result you’re looking for.
What we’re looking for is that sweet spot of being productive, but in a really healthy way.
The solution to this toxic productivity is actually very simple, and it’s the things that we all know that we should be doing. But as I did this research, I definitely crosschecked myself and said, “You know, where are the areas I’ve gotten off track? Where are the areas that I feel like I’m doing a great job and how can I shift into the year ahead?”
The first thing that we need to have to be productive in a healthy way is clearly defined reasonable goals and not realistic goals, which, you know I’m not a fan of that word. I was very happy to see in my research, nobody was saying realistic goals. It was just reasonable. You can still shoot for the moon and back. You can still have the sun, moon and stars. That’s not a problem, but you have to be reasonable in how you’re going to achieve it.
Being reasonable about your goals means that you are strategic in the work that you’re doing. You don’t cut corners. You don’t try and just follow somebody else’s path to success, which p.s., you can’t ‘cause you didn’t watch all the stumbling blocks that happened along the way. That would be fully impossible, but that you actually set reasonable goals and then work strategically to make sure that they happen.
One of the things I talked about recently in Goal Setting Workshop is how to avoid chasing squirrels, right? It is such a tempting, noisy world we live in right now, which every article I read said this is a huge part of the problem, is that we see people living through a filter. You see somebody on social media, you watch a reality TV star or whatever, and you assume that you know everything going on about them. You see what they’re achieving, you see what they’re up to, you see their lifestyle and you say, “Oh, I want that,” and you think if I just work hard enough, I’ll get there. You have no idea what it took to get to that place nor do you know if that person’s even happy, if they’re living the lifestyle you’re looking for.
And so we create these very unrealistic goals based on nonsense, where if we would take a step back and stop looking externally at how we want to define our life and really say no, what, what do I need to make me happy? Why did I get into this industry? Why did I choose this profession? What was I hoping was possible when I was eight years old? What was I dreaming for my life? When I was playing MASH with my friends, what was I hoping for?
I’ve always said openly, like when I played MASH with my friends, ‘cause I was a normal eight year old, like everybody else, right? I never needed the mansion or the eight kids or the fancy sports car. I always dreamed of suburbia with the white picket fence and a couple of kids and just a really reasonable life, and that has been my cross-check.
And if you talk to my team, they’ll tell you, that’s the lifestyle I’m living, but I have to keep that cross-check in mind, otherwise I’m going to start doing wild and wacky things. But having that cross-check of what is reasonable and what am I doing all of this for allows me to say no with confidence. It allows me not to chase squirrels and to really only do what makes sense, which leads into point number two, healthy boundaries.
Boundaries to me is one of those things, it’s almost become a little bit buzzy, like, oh yeah, boundaries, got it. But what does it actually mean? I found a really great definition I want to share with you because I thought this was just so killer and very tangible, the idea of tight, loose, and healthy boundaries.
I’ll be the first to admit—this is a very vulnerable podcast. I’m just going to lay it all out there—I’m somebody who has very tight boundaries and a sign of tight boundaries is that they can cause isolation. It’s probably not a surprise to you that I have tight boundaries. When you hear podcast episodes, like the one on me going all in, that’s a really good example. I have a very, very close circle of people that I invest time with. It’s really tiny and having very tight boundaries does cause isolation, abso-freaking-lutely, and it can be a little bit extreme, but generally you go into a tight boundaries place because of survival or trauma. It can be for a lot of different reasons, but you don’t want to stay there. It can be really unhealthy.
Then there’s loose boundaries where you’re a human doormat. I’ve been that person. I spent most of my life as that person, where you’re a yes man or woman and you just want to please everyone and you desire to achieve so badly that you feel like if you just serve enough, do enough, put yourself out there enough, work hard enough, and put in the time, it’ll all come together.
I am here to tell you as somebody who is a recovered doormat, friends, that is not the way. It will never happen. You’ll be taken advantage of, absolutely, but you’ll never achieve everything you’re hoping to.
Instead, we’re looking to have healthy boundaries, which I’m definitely working on and I’m getting better at it. I’m watching myself get better. When you have healthy boundaries, you’re able to communicate what you need and your preferences with confidence. You can say no and you don’t have to hide. There’s no isolation, but it’s just like, “Yeah, no, thanks. I really appreciate you thinking about me, but it’s not a good fit,” or “Yeah, I appreciate you inviting me, but I’m staying home this weekend,” and no amount of guilt would bother you. It has nothing to do with that because you’re confidently choosing what makes the most sense for you and your life and finding the balance, right?
And then number three is a solid schedule of time off. I really love this. I think I’ve talked about this concept loosely, but I don’t think we’ve ever really dove in.
One of the things I talk about is having office hours, right, as a stylist or a salon owner or an industry educator or whatever, which is clearly defined time where you’re working as being the CEO, the CFO, the COO, and the CMO, right? Those are going to be your office hours, but for pretty much all of us, where is your office? For some of you, it’s in the back of the salon, but for most of us, we also have a home office and the home office can sometimes be your bed with a laptop on your lap. The home office can be your dining room table. It can be your couch. It can be the passenger seat of a car where you’re on DMing and you’re texting clients back and you’re working on your phone while you’re supposed to be enjoying time with your loved ones, right?
That home office is really dangerous, very dangerous, and so having actual time off where no matter what happens, like come hell or high water, I’m not working. If means I lose 10 clients, then I do, but this is my time off.
That is scary and that goes back to having those healthy boundaries of what does it look like for me to be productive in a way where I’m not also desperate, to be productive in a way where I’m not overly thirsty, to be productive in a way where I’m not worried about missing out on anything. What I’m worried about missing out on is life, period. Like allowing yourself to not achieve in some ways so that the overall achievement is much more of the life and the lifestyle that you’re looking for.
I hope you’ve gotten some really good, helpful takeaways with this one. I’ll tell you learning this idea was really mind blowing to me and it really changed the way I look at what it means to be an achiever and what it means to be productive. I’ve always talked about the four areas of wealth—time, love, health, and money—but really thinking about what it means to be productive in a good way, toxically productive, and living a life that is whole and beautiful.
So you all, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
