Authenticity: Why Productivity Starts with Your Truth

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Welcome to Bethcast: Periodically Productive. I’m Dr Elizabeth Blakelock, and today I want to start with a feeling I suspect a lot of us know quite well. That feeling of being productive, technically. Getting things done. Hitting deadlines. Keeping plates spinning. And still never quite arriving at ease.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Humanist productivity means questioning the productivity narrative. It rests on three pillars of resilience, connection and authenticity. Today we are focusing on authenticity.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

I’ve read a lot of productivity advice over the years. Honestly, probably too much. And most of it, in one form or another, comes back to the same basic message: you need to change. Change your habits, your routines, your mindset, your morning, your evening, your systems, your boundaries, your discipline. Maybe all of them at once if the internet is feeling particularly energetic that day.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Now, some of that can be useful. I’m not allergic to a good system. I like structure. I like clarity. I like knowing what needs doing and doing it well. A lot of those tools did help me. They helped me become more organised, more intentional, better at following through. So this isn’t me saying all productivity advice is nonsense. It isn’t.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

But I do think a lot of it misses something really important. It assumes the the answer is always to become a more optimised version of yourself, rather than asking whether the conditions around you are asking too much in the first place.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

And that matters, because there is a very particular tension that comes from functioning well in a system that still doesn’t fit. You can be capable, reliable, responsive, thoughtful, all the things people praise, and still feel slightly ahead of yourself all the time. Anticipating needs. Adjusting tone. Staying useful. Staying easy to work with. Staying, if I’m honest, safe. It just doesn’t feel like ease.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

That’s where I keep coming back to this idea of humanist productivity. For me, it’s a way of keeping productivity human. Grounded in real lives, real bodies, real constraints, real histories. Not just efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Not just, “how do I squeeze more output from the day?” but, “what is this way of working asking of me, and what is it costing?”

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Humanist productivity shifts the focus away from managing time as though we are little machines, and towards understanding energy. But even that isn’t quite enough, because energy doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Energy is shaped by expectation, by experience, by whether we feel safe, valued, included, understood. It is shaped by what we have learned we must do in order to belong.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

If the point is that if productivity starts with changing ourselves without understanding ourselves, it will always be incomplete. And for me, the first pillar of doing productivity humanely is embracing authenticity.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

When I say authenticity, I don’t mean the polished version you sometimes hear in workplace language. You know, “bring your whole self to work,” as if that is equally safe and equally possible for everyone.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Authenticity, in this context, is not only self-expression. It’s not just saying what you think or showing more of your personality. It is being willing to understand how your patterns were formed in the first place. That’s a very different thing. Because so much of what feels natural to us is learned and needs to be unlearned

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

The instinct to say yes quickly. The comfort in being the reliable one. The little hit of relief that comes from being needed. The habit of getting ahead of a problem before anyone can notice it. These can look like personality traits, and sometimes they are strengths. But they can also be strategies. They can be ways of navigating environments where belonging has felt conditional.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

And once you start looking through that lens, overwork can look very different. It isn’t always ambition. It isn’t always poor boundaries. Sometimes it is adaptation. Sometimes it is survival. Be useful. Be agreeable. Be exceptional. Don’t take up too much space, but also never drop the ball. Those messages are not distributed evenly. They’re shaped by gender, race, class, trauma, power. Some people are given more room to experiment, to fail, to be difficult, to be visibly unfinished. Other people learn that the margin for error is much, much smaller.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

That’s where intersectionality becomes something you can feel, not just a theory you mention. It shows up in the calculations people make every day. How much space is safe to take. How polished they need to be to be read as competent. How much emotional and practical labour is required just to remain legible as “enough.”

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

And this is why I found Women Who Work Too Much by Tamu Thomas so powerful. Not because it offers a shiny new system. It doesn’t begin there, and I think that’s one of its strengths. It offers language for something many women have felt without fully naming: that overwork can function as protection. That being “the one who copes” can feel safer than being the one who needs support. That rest is not always restful if, underneath it, there is fear.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Thomas writes with real honesty about the way worth can become entangled with usefulness, agreeableness, and exceptionality. And crucially, she doesn’t flatten women into one experience. She keeps an intersectional lens on who is expected to endure, who is permitted to rest, and whose exhaustion gets normalised.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

For me, the book shifts the central question. Not, “How do I manage my time better?” but, “What am I protecting myself from?” That question can be uncomfortable. But it is also kind. Because it replaces judgement with curiosity. Not, “Why do I keep doing this?” but, “When did I learn this was the safest way to be?”

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Once authenticity enters the picture, the goal changes. We stop chasing a definition of perfection that doesn't fit, or at least we can notice when we’re doing it, and move instead toward integration. And I think that word matters. Integration means your identity, your needs, your limits, your values, and your work are allowed to exist in the same room. You are not splitting yourself into acceptable and unacceptable parts just to keep functioning.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Perfection is mostly performance. It asks for polish. For control. For a version of competence that is smooth enough to reassure everybody else. Integration asks for honesty. It asks whether the way you are working actually belongs to you, or whether it’s a defence you’ve become very skilled at calling a standard.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

And that’s where this gets practical, even if it doesn’t look like conventional productivity advice. The practice is paying attention. Pausing long enough to ask: is this mine to carry? Or have I picked it up because I’ve learned that being dependable is the price of belonging? I mean, that is not as catchy as “wake up at five and change your life,” is it? But I think it’s more truthful.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Without that honesty, productivity can become another form of self-abandonment. We can become incredibly good at coping while drifting further away from ourselves. And I don’t think the answer is to abandon ambition or discipline or care. Those things matter. They matter to me. But I do want to know where they’re coming from. Are they rooted in choice? Or are they rooted in fear? Do they expand my life, or quietly contain it?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

That, to me, is the real work of authenticity. Not performing a more expressive self. Understanding who you have become, what shaped that becoming, and deciding, gently, what you want to keep. Humanist productivity starts there. Not with doing more with less, not with ever-tighter optimisation, but with truth.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

So if this episode leaves you with anything, I hope it’s this: ask what is truly yours to carry. Ask what your overwork has been doing for you. Ask whether your version of productivity helps you live honestly, safely, and whole. Because authenticity is not the reward at the end of the process. It’s the first step.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Thank you for joining me here on Periodically Productive—a small space for big reflections. Until next time, I hope your hours are filled with purpose, and your days are shaped by what matters most to you. I’ll see you next time.