THE FIT FOR PURPOSE WEEKLY
Thursday 10th September, 2026
The point of having power was never to prove how much of yourself you could burn.
A surprising part of becoming calmer is that it can feel a lot like becoming less capable.
When anger, anxiety, stress or dissatisfaction have spent years making you move, their absence can feel like lost power.
This week’s edition is about keeping your ambition without continuing to rely on the internal states you were trying to escape. It will help you examine what your productivity produces, what it costs and whether you can build the same future through better means.
THE BIG IDEA
Productivity normally measures how much you produce. It rarely accounts for the fuel you used or what the process cost you.
Anger can give you another rep. Anxiety can keep you moving. Stress can fill every available space with work.
These things can produce impressive results, which is precisely why they are so easy to defend.
However, being able to turn suffering into progress does not mean suffering is necessary for progress.
When you become healthier, you may work fewer hours, stop volunteering for unnecessary discomfort and begin taking your limits seriously. If your identity was built around how much damage you could absorb, that can feel like weakness.
The alternative is not becoming passive or unambitious. You can still want difficult and unreasonable things.
The difference is that peace, presence and enjoyment stop being rewards you promise yourself after everything is finished. They become part of how you pursue it.
Your health and fitness should follow the same principle. A plan can challenge you without requiring you to dislike yourself, punish your body or make the rest of your life miserable.
Perhaps peace does reduce raw output. But if your effort becomes more deliberate, sustainable and aligned with the life you actually want, doing less may represent better productivity.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Choose one goal currently demanding significant effort and answer:
- What am I pursuing?
- What usually gets me moving - purpose, enjoyment, anger, anxiety, guilt or dissatisfaction?
- What is my current method costing me?
- Which parts of the difficulty are genuinely necessary, and which simply prove how much I can tolerate?
Then change one unnecessary part of the process.
That might mean protecting your recovery, removing a task that no longer matters or allowing yourself to enjoy something without first earning it through exhaustion.
Keep the ambition. Reconsider the fuel and the means of attainment.
WORTH YOUR TIME
WHAT IF PEACE MAKES YOU LESS PRODUCTIVE?
In my latest essay, I look at how I became extremely good at turning unhappiness into output, why that system worked and why becoming calmer briefly felt like decline.
It asks whether peace really makes us less productive, or simply exposes how much of what we called power was our willingness to spend ourselves. It is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument for building a life worth experiencing while you pursue it.
PROOF IN PRACTICE
Caragh came to me feeling demotivated and uneasy around training and nutrition. She believed that if she was not training five days a week, she was failing.
As Caragh said:
“For so long, I thought the solution was more gym sessions, less food, and pushing harder.”
We replaced that pressure with education, purposeful training and an approach she could adapt to her life. She became more confident, more capable of making her own decisions and stopped treating every imperfect week as failure.
PURSUE SOMETHING DIFFICULT WITHOUT MAKING YOUR LIFE WORSE
Running With Purpose is personalised 12-week coaching for busy adults who want a serious running goal to improve their life, not consume it.
We begin with what you want running to give you, alongside your current fitness, available time, training history, recovery and competing responsibilities.
I then build your programme around your real circumstances, giving you a meaningful challenge without relying on guilt, chaos or constant exhaustion to keep you moving.
SEE HOW RUNNING WITH PURPOSE WORKS
A FINAL QUESTION
What have you been calling productive simply because it produces a lot?
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