Hey there! This post is part of a series:
- The Hidden Costs of Productivity: Why Efficiency Culture Leaves Us Drained
- Aligned Building: 5 Core Elements for Creating Without Burnout [This one!]
- Flow, Don’t Force: How the CARE Framework Transforms the Way We Build
Let’s keep exploring the path we took last week: a different way to think about “productivity.”
We started by refusing its harmful elements, because acknowledging and unlearning is a key first step. Now it’s time to rebuild by discovering and embracing a more aligned approach.
In the past, when I worked with some of my clients as their project thought partner, I used to call my approach mindful productivity. But what if we wanted to ditch the term “productivity” altogether, in the spirit of that refusal? How could we call it instead? At the moment, I’m playing with “aligned building”. I like how it evokes a sense of physical progression.
Anyway, no matter the terminology, the Care to Impact approach to building rests on 5 core elements. These shape the foundations of a project creation system that honors your needs, desires, and unique traits while still moving your work forward.
Let’s explore them:
1. Natural, organic pace. We embrace our own pace, extended timeframes, spontaneity, and imperfection, just like we see in nature. And we acknowledge that growth can be slow, non-linear, a bit messy, and still deeply meaningful.
2. Focus on both journey and results. The destination matters, but how you get there is just as important. By paying attention to how you feel while building alongside what you’re building, the process itself becomes nourishing instead of depleting.
3. Context awareness. Every project happens within a web of circumstances: your current situation and your health, your values and your unique traits, your community and even the wider world. Taking these into account ensures your system supports you instead of working against you.
4. Cyclical and experimental flow. Projects rarely unfold in a straight line. By embracing cycles, flexibility, and experimentation, we allow space for realignment, creativity, wonder, and even mistakes, which often become unexpected sources of learning and innovation.
5. Embedded rest and regeneration. We intentionally weave in rest, play, and pleasure. These aren’t rewards for finishing or achieving something, but essential ingredients that sustain energy and creativity along the way.
These five elements invite us to reimagine productivity, or better “aligned building”, as something that nourishes rather than extracts, that helps us bring our ideas to life without burning ourselves out.
In the next post in this series, I share how the CARE Framework serves as a flexible structure to make sure these five elements are not just ideas, but a lived reality in the way you build a project, a business, or your leadership path.
In the meantime, I invite you to pause and reflect: which of the five elements resonates most with you? And how could embracing it benefit you?
If these five elements resonate with you and you’d like support weaving them into your own work, join me in From Seed to Impact.
Grounded in the CARE Framework, this workshop series guides you through building your next project or chapter with clarity, care, and regeneration at the center.