Grace Marshall, speaker, productivity ninja at Think Productive and the award-winning author of How to be REALLY Productive and Struggle, shares how we can redefine success on our own terms and how life's messiest moments can spark growth, creativity, and resilience.

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Grace is a self-proclaimed, naturally disorganized, chief encourager. She helps people rethink productivity, not as a relentless race to do more, but as a way to work smarter with heart. She's coached thousands from being overwhelmed to learning how to get things done without burning out in the process. She's been featured in The Guardian, Forbes, and on BBC Radio.

In this blog post, we’re covering the following:

Redefining Productivity
Cultivating a Fulfilling Work Life Experience
How to Go From Survival Mode to Thriving
Finding Opportunity Amidst Struggle
Separating Truth from Fiction
Handling High-Functioning Fear in Leadership

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1) Redefining Productivity

What does it mean to be productive?

According to Grace, productivity isn't just about getting stuff done. Rather, it's about your life experience as a whole.

“It feels good to be able to tick things off a list. And the science behind it is that we get a dopamine hit.” - Grace Marshall

When you cross something off a list, it makes you feel good, and you want more.

“That kind of productivity can be really seductive.” - Grace Marshall

This kind of productivity can be useful when you have a lot of things that you need to get done.

“It can be great at creating pace and energy and momentum, but if you're checking off all the wrong things, it sends you round in circles. It sends you off on a tangent.” - Grace Marshall

When you transition from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial world, all of a sudden, you are the one deciding what success looks like, and success might not look like ticking defined objectives off a list.

“The easy to tick off things might take you in completely the opposite direction to where you actually want to go.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that success might look like sitting with something very undefined and asking yourself questions.

What do I want to do?
What does success look like?
What is my ideal client?
How do I want to approach the next three months?

To answer these questions, you have to give yourself permission to get curious and give yourself space to explore.

“If you're doing any kind of innovation, you've got to have space to explore. Otherwise, you're only going to find the familiar things.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that throughout this process, there will be lots of failures and things that don’t look like success.

“Most of the time, it looks like frustration, it looks like dead ends, it looks like strange mutations, but then something happens that catches your imagination. [...] It's almost like having that inventor's mindset, but just for the everyday, for your work.” - Grace Marshall

It is the foundation that you are digging that matters.

“Trust in yourself that when it feels like everyone in the world is just like going a million miles an hour and achieving all these things, you're not playing that game. You're playing your own game. You're defining your own game first, and it's okay for you to go at your own pace because you're doing something important here.” - Grace Marshall

2) Cultivating a Fulfilling Work-Life Experience

How can we shift our focus from getting stuff done to creating a fulfilling work-life experience?

Grace explains that when it comes to the productivity conversation, we start off talking about efficiency.

“If you're doing a whole load of things efficiently, but you're doing the wrong things, that's not productive.” - Grace Marshall

However, according to Grace, this is still not the whole story.

“For me, the experience is about doing good work in a way that does you good as well as the good that you're doing out there in the world. It's about the whole work-life rhythm, the experience.” - Grace Marshall

Are you actually enjoying the process?

“When it's enjoyable, it's sustainable, and we're not going to be burning out.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that we spend so much time at work, so we should work in a way that strengthens us.

“Sometimes the things that other people know you are really good for, are the things you actually want to stop doing. I can do that and I know I can do a good job, but actually that's not doing me any good.” - Grace Marshall

3) How to Go From Survival Mode to Thriving

Many of our listeners are in a space of feeling like they're in survival mode.

Grace shared some tips for how to elevate your day from being merely busy to being genuinely fulfilling.

Her first tip is a language trick. She suggests swapping out the words “I’ve got to” with “I get to”.

“When we're in that space of ‘I've got to’ we put ourselves in that kind of energy of survival mode. [...] And yet, if you swap your language for ‘I get to’, it reminds you to look for that purpose, that fulfillment, that reason why, or even just the thing that I enjoy doing.” - Grace Marshall

For example, if you're running to catch a train to meet your friend for coffee, it’s easy to feel like “I’ve got to get there in time”. However, in reality, you “get to” meet your friend for coffee.

This applies to harder things as well, like exercise.

“I get to go for a run. I get to do these squats and work on my legs or work on my glutes.” - Grace Marshall

And while it may feel like you are tricking yourself, Grace explains that it reminds you of all the opportunities you have in your day and helps you understand if you are choosing to do the things that make you happy.

You can even use this language trick for things you haven’t chosen, like a hard conversation with a colleague.

I get to do this in a way that honors this person or honors our relationship.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that this trick points you in the direction of curiosity rather than fear.

Survival mode is often a form of fear. Grace calls it high-functioning fear and gives us some examples.

High-functioning fight:

“It is that kind of hustle mentality.” - Grace Marshall

High-functioning flight:

“This might look like strategic avoidance.” - Grace Marshall

High-functioning freeze:

“It looks like busyness. [...] In the workplace, if you stay very still, that gets you noticed. And so, freeze can look like there's a lot going on. It's like, I'm so busy dealing with all this stuff, that if I'm honest feels safe, I haven't got time to deal with that thing that feels like a struggle or a challenge.” - Grace Marshall

High-functioning fawn:

“That's the people pleasing, the accommodating, the saying yes when you know you should have said no.” - Grace Marshall

4) Finding Opportunity Amidst Struggle

Grace shared some advice from her book, Struggle, for finding opportunity amidst times of struggle.

She explains that when we hit struggle, we get tunnel vision and instead of looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, we look for emergency exits - ways to get rid of the struggle. This is essentially a fear response.

“What if we were to shine a light in the middle of the tunnel? What might we see instead? And in order to shine that light in the middle of the tunnel, we first need to stay in the tunnel long enough to be able to turn the light on and not be looking for those exits.” - Grace Marshall

Grace shared her three step framework, which she calls her three shifts, for dealing with life's shiftier moments.

1. Oh Shift

This is about recognizing that you are struggling or in fear mode.

“That noticing and naming helps us to pause long enough that we're not running through, rushing through, we just stay still in that tunnel.” - Grace Marshall

That stillness allows you to notice what is going on, which is the second shift.

2. What is the shift?

This is about activating curiosity in the face of fear. It’s turning the light on in the middle of the tunnel.

“I often talk about curiosity as the antidote to fear.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that fear will tell you to get away, whereas curiosity will encourage you to take a closer look.

“Your attention completely changes when you look at something with curiosity. You're not trying to get rid of it or fix it, you're just trying to understand it. You're trying to see it from different angles. You're just getting playful and exploring, and that's where you're much more likely to spot the opportunities or the innovation or the root cause.” - Grace Marshall

Grace explains that curiosity will also help you to connect with someone you may be in conflict with.

“What looks like anger might actually be pain. What feels like conflict could be confusion. You lean into your empathy with curiosity. You lean into that compassion. You lean into creativity.” - Grace Marshall

Grace emphasises that curiosity is a gateway to the human skills that get shut down when we’re in fear mode.

3. Holy Shift

This is the revelation, the opportunity, or the discovery that we find when we allow ourselves to approach the struggle with curiosity.

This may happen quickly, or it may take some time, but you will always get there.

“When we hit struggle, it's often a defiance of expectation. We didn't choose it. We didn't think we'd end up here. But in that defiance of expectation can be all sorts of magic that can be discovered if we allow ourselves to pay attention, and so that's where that treasure comes from.” - Grace Marshall

This is such a beautiful way to take your power back in times of struggle.

But what happens when someone recognises that they are in a struggle but are more afraid of dealing with the struggle than sitting in it?

Grace explains that this is about weighing up the cost versus the benefit. What’s the pain versus the payoff?

“Often, what we do is we underplay the pain when it's familiar. It's horrible. I hate it. I'll moan about it, but I don't want to do anything about it because what happens if I open that box? That's the pain that's unknown.” - Grace Marshall

What Grace finds helpful here is talking through this with someone you trust or taking the time to write about it and explore it on paper.

“Fear will tell us all sorts of lies to keep us where we're at. And so even just sometimes that act of writing it out or speaking it out to someone, you hear yourself saying something, you see yourself writing something, and you know that's not true.” - Grace Marshall

5) Separating Truth from Fiction

This framework is not about creating fake positivity, so how can we create a more nuanced outlook that allows for frustration, vulnerability, and truth, and helps us to emerge stronger?

To do this, Grace recommends asking this question:

What is true here?

“If you are in that situation where you're being triggered and all the fear is happening, asking yourself what is true here helps you to separate your facts from your fears and your feelings, and all those three things are legitimate.” - Grace Marshall

While your feelings are true and justified, the reasoning you give your feelings may not be true.

For example, if someone is rude to you, you may think that they hate you. While it is true that they were rude to you and hurt your feelings, it may not be true that they hate you.

“Being able to separate between facts, fears, and feelings is helpful because then you can attend to all of them, but attend to them in different ways.” - Grace Marshall

Sometimes, there may be no way of knowing what the truth actually is.

“I don't know what's true. It could be this, it could be that. But what I do know is I need to put the boundary in place.” - Grace Marshall

6) Handling High-Functioning Fear in Leadership

In the corporate world, the higher up you get in your role, the less feedback you get. This is especially true in the remote world.

You may notice that a senior leader operating from high-functioning fear may suddenly have a whole new set of expectations or be going in multiple different directions at once.

“No one has taken a moment, and maybe the CEO doesn't have that emotional availability to be able to take a moment right now to be like, why am I choosing to do what I'm doing right now, or what is true here.” - Archita Fritz

If we were to ask our leaders or our peers about this behavior, it may snap them out of their high-functioning fear.

“The further up you go, the less people will offer you the truth, the more important it is to have those truth tellers around you, and for them to know that they not only have permission, but like part of their job is to give you the truth.” - Grace Marshall

If you enjoyed this conversation, here are a few more episodes you might like:

To hear the full conversation, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 87.

About The Hosts: Archita And Olivia

ARCHITA

Archita Sivakumar Fritz is the Host and Producer of the Embracing Only Podcast. Archita is a MedTech and Life Science Strategist. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice for her insights into product strategy and nonprofit management, and the creation of inclusive cultures that champion a 'speak up' philosophy.

Following a successful 19+ year corporate career she now helps C Suite across organizations as a Fractional Product Marketing Leader through her company Ready Set Bold.

She works with individuals with 10+ years of corporate experience to find new paths away from toxic or underappreciative environments, enabling both personal fulfillment and broader organizational impact.

→ Grab your FREE resource to build your career transition here: https://embracingonly.com/cubicle-escape-blueprint

→ If you want to work with Archita you can reach out to her here: www.readysetb.

→ Book her as a speaker, moderator, or coach for your next company event or workshop.

OLIVIA

Olivia Grant Cream is the host and producer of the Embracing Only podcast. Nothing makes her happier than providing a platform to women who are changing the world.

Olivia is a proud US Veteran and HR Leader who is passionate about changing the face of corporate America by helping underrepresented people reclaim their power and live the life of their dreams.

She is an advocate for transitioning military members seeking second careers in the corporate landscape.

Olivia is a proud Jamaican and enjoys mentoring, coaching, classic cars, and nature. The way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

→ You can work with Olivia here: www.oliviacre

→ Book her as a keynote speaker or moderator for your next ERG or company event.