I really liked this blog post from Dan Pallotta, on the Harvard Business Review site. He writes:

Many of us have grown up thinking that if we are properly self-punishing then we are somehow being responsible... We don’t correlate our sense of responsibility with what we are actually producing. We correlate it with how hard we are being on ourselves. Thus anything that’s fun cannot possibly be work, and everything that’s unpleasant is.

Pallotta connects this tendency to the theology and mindset of America’s Puritan past. He says it’s high time we abandon this masochistic attitude and start taking care of ourselves:

We have to rethink what it means to work and to be productive. We have to disentangle self-hatred from responsibility, self-criticism from self-care.

Read the whole thing, it’s short. Hat tip to the Call & Response blog at Faith & Leadership.

Shalom y’all,
John

John James
Research Coordinator
Clergy Health Initiative