Has hustling to grow your business taken over your life even though you’re making more money than you ever have before? Does the thought of taking time away from being productive create resistance or uneasiness in you? It’s probably because hustling became such an ingrained habit for you that you don’t know how to turn it off. But you didn’t start your business so you can work all the time; you started it so that you can live your life to the fullest! Listen to this episode to find out how to break free of the hustle, find balance in your days, and create real freedom in your life.
How To Be Successful AND Have A Life
We’ve got a yummy episode for those entrepreneurs who are at a place in their business where they have achieved a lot of success. They have started to experience the financials coming in and they’ve got clients coming in. It’s almost like you don’t know what to do when you’re not working. If you’ve had that level of success where sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming. Where you are maybe in a place where you’re taking on so many one-on-one clients a week and your entire week is revolving around your business. You’re spending all your time creating content for your business and you don’t know what to do when you’re not working. Even those moments when you can’t describe who you are without your business. That’s what this episode is about. What we want to dive into is being able to understand, recreate, redefine and re-identify who you are outside of your business even when you’ve achieved a massive level of success. The reason why we wanted to bring this up is because for myself, and Dan, I’m sure for you as well, and for so many of the other women that I’ve worked with, there’s a common thread around getting and working so hard for so long to get to a level of success in your business.
You’ve sacrificed friends. You’ve sacrificed going out. You’ve sacrificed going to the clubs. You’ve sacrificed all of these things that normal people would do to build your business. You’ve gotten to this level of success in your business to where now you have the finances. You have money coming in. You have the clients. You have time and you don’t know what to do with it now. You don’t know who you are because everything that you’ve been for the last X months or years has been contributed to building the business. This is such a beautiful place to be when you get to rediscover who you are, what you love, what you enjoy doing and the potency that comes from that helps you elevate your business so much more. In this episode, we’re going to be diving deep into rediscovering yourself when you reached that level of success. How to create a lifestyle for yourself around your business so that you’re not constantly living in a place of overwhelm or burnout or always being on for the business. How to turn yourself off from the business so you can go be a human in the world.
It’s very important. One of the things that I see with a lot of my clients also when they start cracking into the multiple sixes as well is the inability to turn off the not enough script. It’s like we find ourselves hustling so hard day-in and day-out because at first, we’re not making any money, “It’s not enough.” We’re making more money. That’s okay but still not enough. Now, we can pay for everything that we want. Our apartments, cars, meals, and everything but we don’t have a free life. We have to keep this hustle going on to pay for everything so it’s still not enough. Then we cross over to six figures and we see that like, “We can still have so much more. It’s not enough.”
Then we get to a place where it’s like, “I have more money than I know what to do with it. I’ll put a lot of it in savings.” The not enough script doesn’t turn off because it’s been there for so long. It can trap us in our businesses and in that hustle mode when we don’t need it. The weird thing here too is that if we wanted to be even more successful at that point like Sophie was saying, you only have 24 hours. You only have a certain amount of energy. You only have a certain amount of patience or willpower. You keep on hustling like that, there’s a limit to what you can do. You can build the team around you and they can work. You can push yourself to your max even with a team because that not enough script will push you to your edge every single time if you let it.
What we need to start doing is reincorporating us, who we are, our passions, our joys, our loves, and our inner children. Take a little bit of time away from the not enough, away from the business, and away from all that because the counterintuitive thing here is that those energies, us playing and having fun and digging into our lives and being a human, that energy is what you need in order to grow your business even more. That’s the secret sauce that will make you ultra-successful. It’s weird. What I’m saying is at a certain point, you need to work less in order to achieve more. It’s bonkers. You need to stop thinking about achieving in order to achieve. That’s why we decided to have this episode to explain that. It’s to help you make it practical for yourself and allow yourself to experience even more love, happiness, joy, chill, relaxation and time off so that you can return back to what makes you yourself, so you can expand your whole life and not just your business.
It’s so fun reflecting on this. I’m thinking about the point where I was making more money than I ever knew was possible to make. I was more stressed out, more anxious, and more frustrated with myself than had ever been because I didn’t know what to do when I wasn’t working. It took me hitting that point of, “What am I doing all of this for?” to start to recognize, “What’s important to me? What do I want to do? How do I want to be spending my time? What do I enjoy doing? Who is Sophie and what is she all about? Let me get to know this girl.” It’s so interesting because for so many entrepreneurs and many of my friends and peers who have these six and some of them are even on their seven-figure, meaning million-dollar business, it’s a similar thing to like, “Who am I?” You’re not the person you were when you started. By no means, you’ve grown exponentially since then. It’s this process of rediscovering and recreating who you want to be.
[bctt tweet=”At a certain point, you need to work less in order to achieve more.” username=””]
The question that I always ask is, “How would you enjoy spending your time? What would you enjoy doing?” It’s so important, especially at this level, and I would encourage if you’re not yet at this level and if you’re in the process of building to build your business around your lifestyle. That will make this phase so much easier versus trying to mold your lifestyle around your business. The more that you can build your business around your lifestyle, meaning you put you first. You put your lifestyle for first. Whatever is most important to you that you continue to stay dedicated to those things, then you can start to give yourself grace and give yourself permission to know that, “I take weekends off, end of the story.” It may take me a little bit longer, but I’m going to maintain my sanity to a certain extent if I give myself the grace to do that or to go out. For me, a big thing has always been music festivals. I love going out and dancing.
All along the way over the last few years, it’s always been, “I’m going to go and do this.” Even when I didn’t have the time to go do it. I gave myself permission to go and do that because if I didn’t, I would be so much more frustrated and burnt out. Similar to what Dan is talking about here, it’s listening to that inner child, giving yourself permission to play more in your business, to have more fun which will fill up your cup versus constantly coming from a place of sustenance and from a place of lack, frustration, and stress. Anything that you try to create from those states will not be nearly as good as it could be if you were to take a day off, take a nap, take a break and take a day to go play. Take a weekend away and come back feeling fully rested, fully recharged and having a much more lighthearted spirit and ready to create.
For me, we haven’t done an episode fully on the shadow yet. One of the things that I do, one of the elements in my shadow is this aggressive child where it can come from all sorts of different places. If you believe in astrology, I’m not only a Sagittarius. I’m Sagittarius in four different places in my chart, which means I am the poster party boy of the zodiac and I need to have fun. It’s not like I like it, I need it. If I don’t have it like food and water, I will break things. Not just physical things but emotionally, I’ll break myself. I’ll go on a bender without even realizing it. I’ll get into fights with people. I will act out. I’ll have little freaking moments of going nuts. For me, I need it. I need to chill out. I need to give myself that time. I need to honor my inner child. I need to go on trips and vacations. I need to go to festivals. I need to play video games and all sorts of things that I find fun and pointless. That’s an important thing. It’s not about achieving anything in those times. It’s about chilling out and having fun. Whatever it is your hobby is, reading but not reading to learn.
I used to read all the books on my apartment and I have hundreds of them. We’re learning things. I started like, “I’m going to read like a Stephen King novel,” which for me was way outside of my comfort zone. I’m like, “What am I learning from this?” I’m allowing myself to have fun or watch shitty movies or play hooky. I haven’t worked a five-day work week in months. I very frequently take days off whenever I feel like it or three-day weekends. I never work on the weekends unless there is something that I’m so excited about that I need to get this done. I need to get this out of me because I want to create this awesome thing. I can put it to bed and I can go and play. It’s important. Beyond that, it’s important also to think about, like Sophie said, “What are you doing all this for? Why do you want to make all that money? Why do you want to have that time and financial freedom?”
If it’s to fully enjoy your life, you can do that now. No one is telling you can’t. Why wait? You have this gorgeous car in your driveway. The keys are sitting right next to it and you’re like, “I’ve got to earn X amount before I can drive the car.” It’s there. It’s waiting for you. Hop in and drive around. What is the deal? The pressure that we put on ourselves thinking that, “I’ll have fun when. No, I’ll take care of myself when. That festival that I really wanted to go to, that trip to Italy that I wanted to go to, that weekend with my family I wanted to go to, I’ll do that when.” You know what happens, life fills in for you. That when it keeps on getting pushed out further and further as you continue to get more stressed out and burnt out. Maybe you have an inner child like I do that starting to rage at you and hates being ignored. It builds up. Why not have fun now? It doesn’t need to be a total lack of responsibility. You get to kick it a lot more than you think you do.
You brought up a big thing that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. I like to call it an addiction. It’s this achievement addiction. We’re addicted to achieving that we almost feel like ill or weird if we’re doing something that isn’t worth achieving. I know that you were mentioning that there was a time in your life where you’re like, “I can’t not be working for something.”
[bctt tweet=”Allow yourself to step out of your comfort zone and do other things than work.” username=””]
It didn’t make any sense. Why would I be doing something if I’m not achieving something with it? I couldn’t understand why I would do something like that.
This was a huge problem in the relationship that I was in because he was such a chill person when I was like, “How can you sit there and watch TV? I need to be doing things.” It was a point of conflict because I would get irritated that he wasn’t working towards something. He would get irritated that I couldn’t chill out for an hour and watch a movie with him. It was so interesting but it was that aspect and recognizing what was underneath that, the underlying piece. What was interesting for me when I started to explore that and explore why I was needing to feel like I constantly had to be doing something was this underlying belief. That if I wasn’t achieving and if I wasn’t doing, then I wasn’t enough or that I wasn’t deserving. My identity was so engulfed in the need to achieve and to be doing something that I felt empty or lost or confused or like I wasn’t enough if I wasn’t doing something.
If that’s something that’s present for you, my loving invitation would be number one, to know that you’re human. You’re allowed to take time off. You’re allowed to sleep. In fact, you’re supposed to sleep because if you don’t, you’re going to lose your mind. It’s necessary for you to rest, to take time away, to take time to get to know who you are outside of your business and to discover the underlying need if any if there is something there that’s present for you and why you’re constantly feeling like you have to be doing something. Also, more importantly, it’s similar to what Dan’s touching on here, “What are you doing all of it for? What’s the bigger reason for doing all of this? How can you start incorporating that into your life now versus constantly putting it out until this happens or that happens or whatever the other thresholds are?”
We’re going to dip into the world of serious for a second because it’s important to touch on this. You may have heard me talk about this before. A woman named Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care for many years. That meant that she was with a lot of people in their last days of life. They spoke with her. She wrote a journal. She collected all these different stories. After a little while, I noticed that there were patterns between the regrets that people had at the very ends of their lives. I want to throw this out there for you because it is important to take a step back, take a much bigger view of what you’re doing to make sure that you are going to live a life of no regrets, hopefully, but as few regrets as possible. The most common one that she had was the regret, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Sometimes we can fall into the achievement mode. The constant need to grow, constant need to earn, constant need to evolve and expand and do because we think that’s what is expected of us. We fall into a role.
We think like, “If I sit there and watch movies all day, what will people think of me? What would my partner think of me?” If I blow work off to go to an amusement park, what will people think of me? That’s not an entrepreneurial behavior. That’s not what a coach does. Coachworks. Businessperson works. That’s what we do. We make money all the time. We can fit into roles that aren’t ours. We must honor ourselves and each one of us has an inner child. Each one of us has somewhere in us, a romantic, a player, someone who plays. Someone who plays stuff, anything, music, games, that just goes out and jumps in puddles. We all have that in us. I feel like each one of us has an adventurer in us. We’ve got to be true to these different aspects of ourselves or else we will regret it.
The next one is the most common one. This is the regret that you got from every single male she nursed. If you’re a male, you better be reading this, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” You combine this, especially in the Western world, us, men, we’re supposed to be earners. We’re supposed to be almost like these machines where we create. That’s our role. We’re supposed to dominate. We’re supposed to conquer. We’re supposed to have all these things. We’re supposed to walk around in suits and drive around in expensive cars. I don’t know what we were raised to think of but it’s bullshit and it’s not true. We can fall into that and it’s so easy for us to fall into that and feel like, “All we got to do is work.” At the end of our lives, we think, “When did we live? Was all that for? When did we enjoy ourselves? When did we put down those masks of who we think we should be and allow ourselves to be who we are?” These two are the most common deathbed regrets. I want to make sure that none of us fall into that.
I don’t want anyone of us to have that feeling or we even look back. I see a backlash on the internet now because there are still is a lot of people going out there, “Fuck 2018. This is the year of blah, blah, blah.” There are a lot of people saying, “You shouldn’t say that. Look forward to 2019.” My question is when you look back at 2018, if you have any negativity for it, if you have any regrets in it, do they fall into either one of these? Do you feel like you wish you hadn’t worked so hard? Do you feel like you didn’t yet have the courage to live a life that is fully true to yourself? If you have even an inkling of that, then my challenge to you is to change the game for yourself moving forward no matter where you are, but especially if you’re already successful. Allow yourself to step out of your comfort zone and do other things than work and dig back into who you are and what makes you happy and what makes you tick. Go out and play and go out and have fun with people. Do all of the things that you said no to in this last year, sacrificing all of it for work.
[bctt tweet=”Digging back into you is a very powerful tool for growing your business.” username=””]
What we’re getting to here is business is great. It’s important 110% but it’s what you’re doing the business for. It’s okay to be selfish. It’s okay to think about yourself and like, “What do I need? What do I want? What will make me happy at this moment, right here, right now? If it’s something as simple as like taking a nap, I love naps. They’re my favorite thing in the world. I’m fucking tired of taking a break because it’s something where it’s like if I don’t give myself what I’m needing at that moment, then I feel more stressed and more frustrated. What we want you to do is to start to celebrate where you are right now in your business and in your life. Give yourself grace and if you still have more to go, fantastic. Love and enjoy that process, but also enjoy where you are right now and give yourself permission to do some embodiment work. The embodiment work, the mindset aspect of it, the identity work is not just as important, if not more important, than the business strategy in and of itself.
Here’s the truth. Being a marketing and business mentor, if you are not taking care of your identity and who you are as a human being and figuring out the depths of your soul and in what you want to do and what you love, the strategy is only going to take you so far. The strategy will work to any capacity of which you’ve evolved yourself. If you’re finding that you’re hitting a plateau in your business, if you’re finding that you can’t seem to get past this window and you have all of the strategies, the steps, it’s not that you need more strategies. It’s that you need to get clear on who the fuck you are and what you want and where your gifts are. Figure out how you can elevate yourself emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, so that you can elevate the strategies that you’re having. Your strategies will only amplify what’s already there. If you’re not at your best, meaning you as a human being, then your business won’t be at its best. My loving encouragement, my loving invitation to each of you is to ask yourself where in your life for you personally, as a human outside of your business, do you need to create space to have and feel more wholeness, more happiness, more joy, more play, more fun, more gratitude, and more grace?
Another thing to remember as well that when your clients or your prospects check you out and see what you’re doing and how you can help them, they don’t look at the service itself. They look at who you are, because what they’re thinking, and I’m sure you’ve done it too, is that by working with you, by learning from you, that they will be more like you. If all you do is work, then why would they want to be like you? That can come off harsh, but that’s the truth, isn’t it? They want to have a life that is even more fun and expansive and loving and all these things that we’ve been talking about. That’s what I’m saying at the beginning of this episode that digging back into you is a very powerful tool for growing your business. When you can show them that like, “If you work with me, you get to do all these fun things too. Look at this amazing life that I’ve created for myself. Do you want a piece of this?” “Yes.” “Let’s work together.” That is a powerful marketing message. People love that stuff. It’s one of the reasons that so much marketing right now is being done on social media because then they can see hopefully who you are, not just what you do. It’s a beautiful thing to think like, “I get to have even more fun and make even more money? I get to appease my doer side and my human being side?” Yes, you do. It’s true. Go and have fun. It’s a great way to make money.
Have as much fun as you can and let that spill over into everything you do. Sophie, you’re dead on when you’re saying do the work. Go find out who you are. You might feel a little uncomfortable because of the answer to Sophie’s question for you, “What do I want to do right now?” The answer might be a practiced answer which is, “I want to work.” Allow yourself to look even deeper past that. This is your task for this episode, is to really tune in and to give yourself some time. Put work away and sit with yourself. If you need to meditate a little bit if you need to turn on some music or whatever, or go work out, fine. Go clear your head and then dig in and ask yourself, “What would make me happy right now?” Listen to all the answers that come up. You might get some weird ones as Sophie said. It might be to take a nap. It might go eat a burrito. It might be a drop in a puddle or whatever. Do it. Take a chance. Go do it. As long as it’s not causing any suffering, go do it. As long as it’s not illegal, go do that. Blow everything off, drive to the beach, and go lay in the sand. Go do it. Go onto yourself. Go and maybe even build in some time to do that into your schedule. You might want to carve out an hour, a few hours, something like that or half a day where you’re going to do whatever is going to make you feel good at that time. As long as it doesn’t cause any suffering and as long as it’s legal, go and do that. See how you feel at the end of it. If you feel fucking good, then start making a practice of it. Start making that a habit. You may find that a lot of other things in your week change with that.
Keep us posted. We love seeing and hearing all about it. As you’re taking on these things, if you get bored and you decide you want to take a picture of it or tag us in it, we love seeing your stuff. Tag us on Instagram or Facebook, Dan Mendilow and Sophie Kessner. We will be stoked to see your content and see what you all are up to. The #MindMasteryAndManifestationPodcast, we would love to see all the cool things that you are up to. We are sending you all so much love. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you all on the next episode.
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