Hustle isn’t about what you do, but how you do it.
Hustle is the dismissal of personhood. Under the guise of being in service of a greater good, we shoo away pesky humanity, and we grind.
What I’ve learned recently—by stepping out of the workforce—is that this can be done outside of the typical “work” construct.
Homemaking on 5x
I’m primarily a stay-at-home mom these days, and if I am not careful, I will work myself to the bone at this job. My first few months were marked by frantic grocery store runs and complex dinner recipes. Making homemade dog food and entertaining delusions of canning jam. Believing that any home project I could conjure up was also one I could take on.
It was actually my wonderful older sister, Donna, who inadvertently helped me come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to sustain this pace.
She didn’t say anything about it, but when she gave me all of her old canning supplies that she bought and never did anything with, I got the glimmer. A little sensation in the back of my mind telling me that I, too, would lose steam at this pace, albeit having excellent intentions.
Donna has three grown children and spent many years as a SAHM. And thank goodness, because her experience gave me the reality check I needed at the time.
Slowly, I started pulling back from being so ON. So ALL OVER IT. From having delusions of grandeur no one could talk me out of.
They’re the Same Picture
“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything” and indeed I was approaching SAHM life from the exact same place I had approached entrepreneurial life. I was somehow busier than ever, and just as stressed as I had been when going into my office every day (and sometimes weekends) training big teams of people and facilitating corporate coaching programs. Except my to-do’s went from sending emails and scheduling meetings to hitting up 3 different grocery stores for ingredients and scrubbing the grout of my kitchen tiles with a toothbrush and some miracle cleaner that had been pointedly advertised to me online.
That last bit of sentence is more of a metaphor; I actually resisted the grout-scrubbing and decided my grout is simply gray and that’s fine. But you get the idea.
Reflecting on the Downshift
It’s been a year since I had to make the shift to SAHM and pull back from my work. A lot has happened in that time, not least of which was the loss of my father, and with it the reconstruction of my identity.
I am an orphan now, so that’s one thing I’m getting used to. But I am also a mom and wife and sister first… rather than an entrepreneur. For a while, I viewed this shift as a rebellion laced with a hint of revenge. As if I were angry at the life I’d willingly chosen and needed to get back at it. Seeing that I could be in hustle-mode regardless of vocation woke something in me. A desire. I think for peace, but not the kind I was fighting for before.
Before it felt like “I just need to hit this professional milestone and THEN I will be at peace,” which runs counter to my entire framework. And yet, I was often fighting for it by default.
The new kind of peace is in nurturing myself and my life. Not trying to get back at past paradigms or prove anything to anyone, just to till the soil I have and let things grow in their time.
Work, but Make it FUN
A few weeks ago, a friend asked if we could do a coaching call and offered to pay me. I said I will happily do it, and if they want to pay me something after they can go ahead and pick an amount.
We had the call, and it was some coaching, but honestly it was more advice and consulting about how to market a business idea in a way that doesn’t suck your soul out. I know enough of the pitfalls on this topic to gently redirect people, and to suggest good resources to help along the way. The call was fun, which is the primary reason I’d like to do more of them, but it was also nice to pass along some of the things I have learned the hard way, things that are second nature to me, but news to others. Revelatory news, at that. So I might offer something in the realm of “borrow my brain” calls.
What’s nice about the idea is that people could use it for literally anything. I can make a page on my website that just sort of outlines all of my various life experiences (and they ARE quite varied) and then offers the opportunity to talk something through with me.
I’m not set on it yet, so we’ll see what I conjure up in the next week or so. I am going slow on purpose because I can feel the pull of the hustle, and while I have slowed myself down considerably in the last year, I know how easily I could shift back into that gear.
Choosing Peace Over Proving
I do need to bring in some money each month, but I’ve been in the question of how I want to do that, and the same coaching paradigm I’ve been in is not the way I’d like to do it. Not because I don’t like coaching anymore, but because it requires something of me that I seem to have limited supply of these days: my undivided energy and attention.
My energy and attention are on my family now, and while it does not have to be either/or, I find that I want it to be. I want my focus to be on my home and the people in it. On my relationships. On my own creative pursuits. And I want to stop tying all of these things to entrepreneur life. I want to let my husband support us with his work and income while I support us with my time and attention on the things he doesn’t have space to think about.
I still want to be of service to the world, just at a different scale. One that feels easy and fun and simple.
Thank you for reading, and I hope that you found something in this useful <3
Please let me know if so…
If you’re wanting to be of service to the world, this post was a lovely contribution. ‘Peace over proving’ really stood out to me, and dovetails with my recent experience of re-discovering my core essence in the wake of misfortune; pleasantly surprised that deep down and close in, there is no need to prove myself ‘worthy’ of love
Finding the work/life balance in *anything* can be difficult, especially when work can be anything you put yourself into gear to do.
I really appreciate you sharing your experience with the downshifting to this style of gear. It’s kind of like the gears on a car where if you’re on terrain that can’t quite get traction, those gears are there to help gain the control needed.
Maybe that’s not as great a metaphor as it was in my head… 😆 regardless, it’s nice to see that in a world that seems to endlessly turn at a speed that’s hard to match most of the time, that taking things at your speed is the thing to focus more on.