Convicting piece by Dan Pallotta:
Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.
A lot of this has to do with the (sometimes false and sometimes real) expectations that if we do not look and act incredibly frazzled our peers and supervisors will assume we are not working hard. So we are rigid on ourselves, we live with the fear of man, and we tell ourselves to stay there. Because if not, we’re clearly wasting precious time.
No doubt this hits home for many of us; it certainly does for me. The only solution is to find our value, self-worth, and identity in something other than our job. If what we do defines our value then we’ll never be good enough: every uncompleted task becomes a judgment against our character.