CHOOSE YOUR HARD

So what I want to talk about today is the idea of choosing your hard and being loyal to yourself.

I see this a lot with the women that I work with. They come to me, we do some work together, we untangle some fears, some goals, some desires, they decide on a way to move forward or they discover something they want to achieve in their business and they are super excited about it. It feels aligned.

They have admitted some deep desires and we create a beautiful roadmap for how they are going to bring it to life.

And then it comes to actually take an action on that thing and usually it's around the time where they have to start talking about their ideas where they have to start promoting a new product where they have to start sharing with their community or audience new things that they are developing or thinking about and the resistance starts to set in.

Now there is always a reason for resistance and it's usually avoid risk or vulnerability and wanting to feel emotionally safe psychologically safe. Which is, of course amazing and important.

And that is the beautiful and intelligent thing about our brains. It is super concerned for our safety. That is always at the forefront and so it makes sense that when we are considering doing something new or when we are moving into new territory in our life or relationships or our work that our brain senses vulnerability in wants to keep us safe wants to try and protect us from the vulnerability and the risk of failure the risk of rejection the risk of the unknown.

But what our brain isn't really concerned with is fulfilment it isn't really concerned with trying something that we are feeling called or moved towards.

And so when my clients come to me and they talk to me about how they are resisting putting their work out there or asking people to buy from them to connect with them and they start to talk about doing other things or planning other things usually my challenge to them is to thank their brain for trying to keep them safe and then also to let them know that it's time for them to choose their hard.

It's time for you to choose your hard.

Because in any situation we where you're putting your most truest ideas out there into the big world for other people to see, to judge, to have opinions on - the two options that are facing you are both going to be hard options.

1. to shrink back and decide to not do the thing to not talk about the thing to shy away

2. to go ahead and talk about the thing to share about it to move ahead with your idea.

Both of those options are hard.

On one hand if we go ahead and move toward the hard part is the unknown if it's gonna work if people will buy it if it connects if it makes sense that level of ability is on his harsh

And on the other hand not moving towards the thing shrinking back staying (sometimes it's required when we really need to feel safe and we're not in an emotional place to address those risks) but sometimes sitting back shrinking hiding playing about behind the scenes and not ever putting our ideas out there is actually hard also because it means that we are not being faithful and loyal to the to the thing that has been bubbling up inside us.

Once out, the thing that needs air and breath around it, that route is hard as well, that route can also lead to real feelings of difficulty and resentment and betrayal to yourself.

And so if both of these options are difficult we get to choose - do we choose the option that's difficult and moves us away from our idea? Or do we choose the option to move towards the thing, knowing that it brings risk?

But this option is where you get to be really loyal to yourself or you get to be faithful to your ideas where you get to show up for yourself and follow through on the things that have been calling to you.

I wonder if you’re in spot right now where you need to move forward and it’s feeling hard. I want you to know that you get to choose which hard right now. The one that moves you away from your ideas, or the hard way that moves you into alignment with the stuff you are feeling called to move towards.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE FEAR OF FAILURE?

This week I want to talk about what we do with the fear of failure.

It’s so so important that we address this as an elephant in the room for anyone who is contemplating doing something new or putting themselves out there in any way with their ideas or work. At some stage or another in our lives, our businesses or in our attempts at creating, we’ve all felt the sting of failure or disappointment.

-        Something hasn’t quite taken off.

-        The thing you poured your soul into was met with crickets

-        The product you really believed in didn’t sell as well as you hoped.

-        The idea you have had for a lifetime suddenly seems to be happening for other people all around you.

-        We’ve all lost steam. We’ve all lost our nerve. We’ve all shut down and stopped.

This is the stuff of being human and we need to talk about it and normalise it just as much as we do the strategies and the reflective tasks we undertake when things are going well.

Especially for women, failure feels personal. It feels overwhelming and daunting. It shuts us down, closes us up and stops us from moving forward because failure feels SO vulnerable and exposing.

Often it feels like visceral rejection when things haven’t gone the way we hoped.

But - if we continue to try to hide from the things that aren’t going well, and bypass the hard feelings about the ways in which we feel things haven’t worked out we are going to miss out on a huge component of growth, of resilience building and of the courage honing muscles that it takes to life fully as a whole hearted person.

To fail and just hide is to skip the most significant work that we can do as humans. To fail and learn is how we grow and evolve and develop empathy for ourselves and others.

When we deny the times where things have crashed or we try and swipe away the hard, painful moments of discomfort we are missing out on an opportunity to learn and build.

I want to talk about three perspectives on failure that are really significant and freeing and can hopefully reframe our view of disappointment into liberating opportunities to understand ourselves, the world around us and how we can meaningfully continue to build courageous lives, even when things don’t work out how we had hoped.

Three perspectives on failure

1)     The first thing I want to talk about is the importance of identifying how the fear of failure shows up for us.

Because this fear of failure is a huge deal and the effect it has on us is powerful. The perceived fear of failure is stopping women from bringing their ideas, products, solutions and service into the world. Think of all the amazing things that women have tucked inside them that can contribute to more goodness, more beauty, more awareness, more education in the world that are not being revealed because we are afraid of failure.

-        I want you to take some time and really, REALLY hone in on how the fear of failure is showing up in your life. Is it hesitation of even looking into that thing you’ve been ruminating over? Is it showing up as perfectionism – never being quite ready to put that thing out there for others to see or hear about and endlessly polishing it up? Is it showing up as relentless calculation of numbers, followers, figures and stats? Waiting for that magic number before you dip your toe into the thing that you feel really drawn to make, create or do? If any of those things connect – I want you to feel relieved – there are so many of us that feel this way – but it doesn’t have to be so.

-        The fear of failure is NEVER going away – again, this threat of failure is just a tactic of our inner protector that wants to keep us safe from emotional risk. but how we view failure can be reframed to serve us better. If we can try and view it differently as I’ll line out in the next few minutes, then maybe, just maybe we can be women who boldly try, showing up and being true even when it feels scary, knowing that it’s more important to be loyal to our dreams and our desires than it is to our fears.

2)     Secondly I think it’s important to talk about expectations.

When we set out to bring something to life in the world, often we are caught up in the how, the what and the when that we forget to reflect on what we want this offering to achieve. We spend a lot of time working out the details of all the other stuff without giving thought to our own expectations around it and when we forget to take that stuff into consideration and things don’t go to plan, we end up feeling hijacked, dijected, thrown and deflated. Something that I like to do to try and manage my own expectations around whatever it is that I’m going to put into the world is to get comfortable with the base level.

For me, the base level of my expectations is about being loyal to my idea and affirming that I AM HAPPY WITH HAVING COMPLETED WHAT I SET OUT TO DO. My own satisfaction is the top of my expectation list. This trumps anything that comes next. Have I been true to my values? Have I worked hard? Have I put the time in? Have I really took into consideration what will serve my community well?

Once that is in place, I try to hold the rest of the expectations a little less tightly. Once I have decided that I am happy with what I have done or put out there, then I am more able to identify what kind of response or reaction I want to have from the things I put out there.  The more secure I can feel in the value of my work, and naming the desires for impact that I have can actually help give me the energy and self support that I need to put those things in the eyesight of the people I want to serve or connect with. And it takes energy to do that because marketing or talking about our offerings can be tiring and exposing. Having no idea of our expectations, or just having our expectations swirling around in a mass of insecure ideas can actually harm us, because we haven’t fully connected with our desires or outcomes and that is an important and worthy part of the process, not to be overlooked.

3)     The final thing that I want to say about failure (and this is the gamechanger)  is that everything we do, every wrong turn, tricky decision, every way that we hide, every time we choose to stop, is SIMPLY JUST AN OPPORTUNITY TO RECEIVE INFORMATION.

-        Every time we put something out into the world and we get a response, whether good, bad, noisy or quiet – it’s all just information. Learning this – THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST INFORMATION has been a REALLY SIGNIFICANT, LIBERATING part of my visibility journey and remembering this aspect has given me real courage as I have decided to put my ideas out there, marketed my offerings and continually chosen to show up for myself truly. Everything we receive back – its not good. It’s not bad. It’s not praise OR criticism. It’s JUST INFORMATION. And it’s up to us what we do with that information. 

-        If you’ve ever launched something to crickets or posted an idea that didn’t take off or developed a product that didn’t sell – it’s not that the idea was bad. It’s not that what you had to offer wasn’t valuable or interesting.

The quiet response is just information. And it’s up to us to access and use that information wisely. If our offering is not connecting, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It might just mean that we need to collect more information. These things that might immediately feel like failure might just be an opportunity to get the information you need to get your thing out there in a way that does connect.

It might mean you need more information about the time of the month or year you are offering it. It might mean you need more information about the people you are trying to reach. It might mean you need more information about what price points. It might mean you need more information about what kind of set up people feel is accessible etc. It might mean you need to build more trust with your customer or audience base in order to connect in the way you are expecting to…

-        This information isn’t given to you to shut you down and stop you, like your inner critic or ego would like. It’s given to you as a gift to sift through and determine what you should do with it. See this as a gift to build on rather than an out or an opportunity to wallow or quit. If we can see this information as a way of shaping what you do so that more people can connect with it in the way you want them to then we are exercising bravery and resilience and our ego is not in the driving seat – service and value is.

Here’s the thing.

When we look at things through this lens of failure is just information, it kind of makes the threat of failure less powerful. Of course there are always going to be risks when we decide to put ourselves out there and take steps to pursue something close to our hearts and the risks are real and we have to deal with the real feelings of fear and discomfort.

The other option is to not do anything with the things we feel drawn to create or do and the trade off for that is another type of discomfort. It’s the discomfort of always wondering if we could have given that thing a go. It’s the discomfort of maybe never feeling the fulfilment of trying.

Both paths lead to some sort of risk and that’s the work – figuring out which one – because we are going to face discomfort either way. Hopefully you’ll chose the one that gives you the chance to be loyal to yourself.

In the meantime, please reach out to me with any of your own thoughts on this and know that if you want to build courage in a deeper way you would be so welcome to join the assembly members community – my coaching community of women who are all on this courage building journey together.

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

In this post I want to talk about success and feelings.

Ultimately, the idea of success is so subjective. How one measures success is not going to be the same as the next person.

Most of us are so disconnected to our own desires and needs that we end up defaulting to ascribing to the measures of success that seem easy and palpable:

-        Hitting a certain number of followers

-        How many people buy from you or sign up to your thing

-        How much money you bring in

-        How busy or in demand you are

By all means, these can contribute to the idea of being successful and in some ways – it feels really good to know that people are desiring our products, or connecting with our work or interested in what we have to say or share. But this can’t be it. This can’t be all we have been given as a measurement tool.  What if we are absolutely missing a critical metric here: How we are feeling about what we are doing?

So often, when we are bringing ideas into the world, creating a business or something we feel excited about, the focus is on these metrics as guideposts for how we are doing. We tend to bypass the ‘feelings’ stuff and cross our fingers that if the metrics add up, the feelings will follow. Unfortunately, that’s usually the opposite of how it works.

I have several clients who, on paper are hitting all of those measures of success that I talked about a minute ago. They are booking clients, taking in a lot of orders, super in demand for their products and services and yet when we get into the coaching space and really reflect on how all of that is feeling, successful isn’t a word that comes up. Tired is. Frazzled is. Unclear is.

Often what I hear is that their work feels out of control, that it has taken on a life of its own. It’s like they work for their business instead of their business working for them amongst the other usually very complex and busy demands of their whole life.

There is little to no connection between the standard measurement of success and the feeling of success.

In the work that I do, I feel like my job is often about pulling my clients back to themselves. Dusting off the road that has been littered with expectations, arbitrary rules and measurements and shining a light back to the centre of who they are and asking

“what of this isn’t working for your energy right now?” “What do you want less of?” What do you want more of? What feels misaligned?

These aren’t the questions that come up in a downloadable business plan; but they hold the most power. Because when we are asking and answering these questions; when we make space to get quiet about our real desires, about how the work we once loved is making us feel, about what we really want this work to look like within the context of the rest of our lives, then we can gently course correct and strategize to make them a reality and rebuild a path towards it.

Maybe, if you’re feeling stuck in the zone of setting metrics for yourself based on numbers and figures to identify success, or you’re feeling detached from how you want your work to feel and just cruising along in autopilot it would be helpful for you to sit down with some of these questions today

These are the questions and the metrics that help me to unpack if what I’m doing is really fulfilling. If you want to write these down and check in with yourself, feel free.

-        What kind of impact is my work having with the people it’s for? Are they really feeling the intended shifts that they’re here for? Are they trusting themselves more, feeling supported?

-        How is my energy towards my work? Am I excited for it or dreading it? What am I dreading and why?

-        How is my business allowing me to live your life outside of it? Do I feel like I can’t switch off, have I given myself so much to do that I’m taking it into family time, have I made up arbitrary rules for myself that are limiting my ability to experience joy or pleasure?

-        What is the quality of my relationships? How connected do I feel to the people that matter in my life?

-        Do I feel like my reputation is holding up? Am I in integrity with how I’m communicating my work, how I’m selling my services, how I’m showing up for my clients?

-        How do I feel about selling this service? Am I delighted to let people know about it? Am I grounded in the value of it or am I feeling some scarcity and fear?

-        Do I feel momentum in my work, like I am finding space to grow deeper in my knowledge of how to help my clients?

-        Am I feeling supported? Do I need to check in with my business support system (for me that’s other coaches or my supervisor)?

I want you to be careful not to listen to these questions, contemplate your answers and dip into shame. Shame will keep you stuck in the mire. If you’re contemplating these things and lots of them feel hard to answer, that’s OK. You’re not doing things wrong, you’re doing your best. Try to welcome this as an opportunity to reset, without shame lingering, but as a way to take some power back and inject the priority of how you are feeling as an integral part of your work.

Without these as thresholds to reflect on, I am likely to overwork, load stuff onto my plate, numb out or disconnect. I am likely to overthink, to fixate, to be easily hurt or offended and take things really personally. I’m likely to be emotionally up and down because my validation has been built on the wrong metrics. 

These are the metrics that matter to me because I know that when these things are prioritised, my work becomes a joy. It becomes regenerative, a pleasure. Most of us start with the opposite metrics and hope that the rest will fall into place, or we believe that the outward “success’ will somehow morph into feeling like we are thriving. When the opposite is actually true. When we realign our work or business to take into account our whole self and put structures in place to honour that, that’s when the magic happens.

I hope this gives you permission today to start to measure what you’re doing from a different angle. I hope you feel courageous enough to be honest about the impact of what you are doing on how you are feeling and are willing to take whatever steps you need to shift things around.

THE TROUBLE WITH HUSTLE CULTURE

I want to address Hustle Culture today because this is something that I’ve become increasingly aware of in online coaching spaces.

The idea that our productivity is measurable.

Or that if you work harder and faster and more that somehow your value increases.

It’s the message that if we just keep pushing through hard stuff, we’ll be met with success on the other side. It’s the quotes on Instagram that encourage us to ‘rise and grind’ or ‘Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done’.

The reality is that lessons on the dangers of hustle culture and quotes like these are often learned by burnout. This message, which is often found in the entrepreurial world, dominated by masculine voices, lacks so much nuance, context and real life grounding.

We are sweeping these pressurised ideas of what it means to achieve success or go after our dreams over the lives of real people with a huge spectrum of differing responsibilities, of access, of mental health needs, of time constraints, of financial obstacles, of physical abilities. And when we hold this culture up as the one that is the pinnacle, and fob all of that contextual stuff off as ‘excuses’ then the damage is absolutely real.

It leaves people questioning their worth, the value of what they have to offer, their ability to do things, their competency and it quashes their passion, their desires and their motivation. Hustle culture has a temporary dopamine hit of motivation, but it’s not a sustainable way to work and it’s a toxic message to peddle.

So today I want to talk through four ways that I see hustle culture seeping into how we are expected to work today, why it’s a troubling message and what the alternative is.

 The problems with hustle culture and what the alternatives are

The first thing I want to raise about hustle culture is the idea that if you are someone who is building a business, a community or creating something to put out there and offer.

1)     Feeling like you need to always be on and available.

Hustle culture is not really interested in boundaries. It talks a lot about how you can’t miss opportunities, you have to seize them no matter what and offer the very best, most responsive output to your clients, customers or community.

This idea that human beings have the capacity to always be responsive to the needs of their business is dangerous and is a quick way to send your nervous system into high alert which is a really harmful state for our bodies to be in consistently.

We are not bots, we are humans. We do not owe our IG followers or inboxes quick responses. To think that we need to reply to every single question, response or request that comes our way lest we miss something is scarcity mentality dressed up as being attentive to our community.

This scarcity mentality is rife in hustle culture, but it’s often disguised as not letting opportunities go by. But behind this is the reality that often we believe that if we don’t make ourselves available at all times, if we don’t respond to every single DM, if we don’t reply to every question from potential customers or clients then they will go away and there’ll be less for us.

That’s simply not true.

They may go elsewhere but it doesn’t mean there’s less for you. I don’t know about you but I want to build a business where my clients know, appreciate and respect my boundaries about my availability to respond to them. I want them to see me as human, with complex and widespread responsibilities outside of my work. A lot of my own work around this has been about trusting that my work stands up, even when I step away from it or take breaks. It’s been about trusting that the value I have to offer isn’t connected to how available I am to be all things to all people. I wonder what shifting around you might need to do in your head or in practice to reroute the idea that you shouldn’t be expected to be on and available in your business all of the time.

2) Using guilt or shame to attract customers

The next message of hustle culture that I want to address is the practice of using guilt and shame to attract customers or clients. No no no no no.

I have seen this SO much in the online business world – the language that is put out through copy, sales pages, Instagram etc is all about focusing on the dissatisfaction and pain of the potential customer or client. It’s a technique that works, for sure. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. But using tactics to rush people into buying from you or alluding that there is something wrong with them in order to sell your stuff is manipulative at best and ethically wrong at worst and isn’t actually creating a culture of business honesty and integrity.

This kind of marketing preys on peoples vulnerabilities as a quick way to get conversions and close the sale. Again, it treats people like commodities to accumulate from. It’s scarcity driven, not authenticity driven. This type of communication comes in all different forms but usually it’s packaged up with some sort of urgent but arbitrary time frames and pricing. It also plays on language that would have you believe that without this thing, you’ll be less than, stuck, or left out.

What we need is more business owners communicating about your business from a place of trust and honesty, highlighting the value of what they do, speaking to what their product or service offers and allowing people space to make up their minds, rather than hustling people into things as a statement connected to their struggle.

3)  Assigning worth or value to your output

There is definitely something satisfying about giving your best to a project or idea, right? That is a great feeling. Knowing that you’ve committed yourself to something and seen it through and are really proud of your work. But with hustle culture looming around us we have to be careful that we aren’t conflating working hard with hustle.

Because in hustle culture, it’s more about showing that you’re working hard, glorifying your output and your ability to grind more than it is about the quality of your work and your dedication to doing a good job and preserving your capacity limits. It’s Instagram posts about how busy you are, more as a humble brag nod to how much you work. It’s a reinforcement of the idea that if you’re not struggling, you’re probably not working hard enough. Which we know is bullshit.

When we assign work or value on someone’s ability to push their mental and physical capacity to the limits or on how productive someone is, we are bending to the capitalism playbook that would have us think that the only thing that matters is accumulation and increasing the bottom line. We know that humans are made for more than just working. We were made for community, to experience pleasure, to enjoy rest, for curiosity and innovation. Not to grind away as a badge of honour to the detriment of all of those things.

For those of us who have grown up with messages about our productivity being a measure of our worthiness, it takes a great deal of unpicking. It’s hard for our systems to go from filling up empty space with stuff to do, always improving or striving for something to relaxing into the margins and being at peace with our efforts in the different seasons of life.

It takes some practicing being able to slow things down, being OK with not always doing, setting limitations to our work days and what we do. Hustle culture creates an addiction to doing and elevates it as the most important part of the human experience. Reality is, if we love what we do and we want to have energy to sustain or even regenerate ourselves in our work, we have to practice knowing what is ‘enough’ for us to take on and do so we can be fully present, attentive and aligned with our work.

4) The fall narrative that hustle is a fast track to success

Another fall out of hustle culture is the idea that there is a fast track path or quick hack for growth or success. Hustle culture will try to whisper to you that there are insider ways that you can access the next level and you can do it with speed.

It’s important that we break down exactly what it is this message wants us to hustle towards? What is the end game of hustle culture and it’s promise of “success”? Is it to make loads of money? Is it to have thousands of followers? Is it to feel more freedom? Maybe it’s not even a consideration. Maybe the end goal isn’t even something clear but feels like a slippery slope we feel we should go down if we want to feel like what we’re doing is worth something.

“Once I crack 10k followers, everyone will take me seriously”

“Once I have sold out launches I’ll be known for what I do”

These illusions of fast tracks to growth or success, however you want to define it – are a fools errand. They are often laden with risky or unfounded business advice that have big promises but no real substance.

But the real fools errand quality is that it robs us of the joy (and pain) of being a beginner, a learner, of growing with your community, of trying things out on your own terms, of factoring in your own very nuanced life, of building steady foundations to your business that feel honest to you and reflect what you want to build.

We have forgotten that there’s nothing to win here. No one is going to be crowned fastest business winner of all time. It’s not even that the goalposts will keep moving, it’s that the goalposts don’t even exist. They are a construct that keeps us feeling inadequate and competitive and have us convinced that we are always too far away from it.

There is no hack to growing your business. There is only you and your aligned, trustworthy way of showing up for your work, doing your best and letting people know how they can connect with it.

Ultimately, hustle culture leads us down the path of always having to prove ourselves. Prove that we’re good, we’re hard working, we’re worth paying attention to. Hustle culture sneaks up on those of us who are ambitious and believe we have something to offer that is valuable. What it robs us of though is the ability to be present and grateful for what we have, because it will always insist there’s more to gain.

Happiness becomes a threat to our sense of achievement because contentment has been sold to us by hustle culture as laziness.

Don’t fall for it my friends, take the longer, steadier more honest path.

Don’t give up on your ideas and your beautiful work. Honour it by putting scaffolding around it that will hold it up, that will offer you spaciousness to stay creative and in your integrity and know that I’m right along with you, trying to do the same.