Beyond Hustle & Balance

Hustle, hustle, hustle. It is a very common word among startups, entrepreneurs, and business-driven individuals. I get the chills when I hear it. The idea of rushing and pushing and making constant noise repels me. 

A year has passed since I put my actions where my words were and finally started my solopreneur journey as an independent mentor/coach/consultant. It ain’t easy. There is so much I don’t know how to do, but I am learning a little bit every week. It is not true that I am working 60-80 hours a week. But sometimes I get caught up in the anxiety brought up by the uncertainty of not knowing when I will start getting stable results so I can spend more time enjoying doing the job as opposed to “hustling” to find the job.

On Saturday morning my mind was buzzing. I was bitter. I needed the buzz to shut down. I kept moving between my instagram stats and my site visit numbers. My body was tense. I was crunching numbers to reduce the burden of my company expenses. I felt like I was going to burst. So I remembered my own recommendation. I asked myself: what have I been doing too much of? The answer would help me find what type of rest I needed. So with a desperate kind of energy I urged my husband to join me for a walk in nature. 10 minutes into it and my brain started to slow down. The sky was clear, the sound of the water running down the river was soothing. My dog was so happy to be in nature. He wanted to smell it all and take it all in. He ran in zig zag. His happiness was contagious. Quickly I managed to feel relaxed, and ready to enjoy the weekend and the other areas of my life outside my business: friends, family, home, hobbies, nature, art, connection.

I want to keep doing what I am doing. I love when after a session someone tells me I gave them tools to think about. I saved them days of work in a one-hour session. I helped them change perspective in how they saw their own behavior.

But I do not want to become just that. In the past I have become the jobs I did and lost my other selves. I think we are much more than a job and our lives are much more complete when we allow ourselves to be different things at different times. When we can take a break from relaxing and put in the needed effort to make an idea flourish. When we realize that constant effort is not the answer and we take the needed break to recharge and regain perspective. When we stop seeing the world in a dual approach to life of all-or-nothing. It does not have to be all “self-care” and “relaxation”. And there is nothing inherently wrong with “effort” or “hard work”. The trouble comes when we are obsessed over one or the other. There are points in between. There are changing energies just like there are changes in nature we need to learn to tune into. There are lazy people who are just tired. There are hard working people who are just trying to escape themselves. There are people who seem lazy, but they are just content. And there are the ones who work hard not because they are trying to prove anything to anyone but because they truly get joy from what they do. And these are just 4 options that cross my mind. I bet there are more.

I don’t want a life of duality: rest or work hard. I want a life where I can dynamically use the cards I am dealt at the moment. Where my ideas, creativity and energy are efficiently used. My ultimate motivation is to move beyond this or that and learn to move like the seasons around me. Be the best mentor/wife/woman/friend/trainer I can be as long as I can be. This comes with knowing when to hit pause on being a mentor/wife/woman/friend/trainer. We cannot be all things at once. We cannot be present with others if we are not present with ourselves.

A contextual problem seems to be our complete disconnect from how systems work. For example, the constant frustration I see in people when it snows in March, but when you go through the records you will see that there has been snow in March almost every single year. The knowledge of that information gives some peace of mind, but it is even more liberating to accept that you do not control when it will snow or not, and you can only work on your actions and attitude towards a cold and snowy day. At first it will be hard, but over time it will get easier. It is the constant expectation of something to be different than what it is that causes frustration and it is acceptance that we can be capable and adaptive enough to be OK with it. We do nothing with expectations. We do a lot more with the acceptance of what we cannot change and with courage to change what we can.

Another challenge I feel in avoiding the extremes is that our medium of work is ever present. I walk with the dog and reflect on a topic that I think will resonate with my audience so I plan to share it with them in a video or set of visuals. But what does “my audience” even mean? It seems logical that if I want to spread financial education I need to reach people to get to as many as I can serve. Reaching people in 2025 seems to require being out there like a TV star in the media all the time. I do not like blaming tools. Tools are what we make of them. But it is also true that we can only know how effectively we can use a tool to support us or harm us to the extent that we know ourselves, our strengths, our vulnerabilities.

So here I am on a Monday starting the week with the intention of delivering work I enjoy and care about, while recognizing that I am vulnerable and imperfect. One such vulnerability comes from learning to use and not be used by the tools I work with to spread my work and I need to be relentless with separating the moments, the times, the personas I move between to not reach that point of desperation as I did on Saturday. 

For that I need to keep asking myself questions. Difficult and simple ones. Difficult things such as: what do I want to ultimately achieve through what I do? Simple such as: Do I need a break or can I push a bit harder?

While I do not have a specific practice of “I do this every morning to start my day” or “every night I will ask myself these 3 questions”, the one thing I have become very good at is at getting to know myself and identify if I am ready to jump in and crack on a task or if I need to pause and dig deeper to figure out when something is wrong. 

So take this as a gentle signal to check in with yourself. Grab a pen. Or perhaps talk to yourself out loud. It works. Give it a try. You don’t need to wait for a new week or month or yet to recheck and reset direction. It’s a process. Not an end goal.

Happy Monday,
Maria 🌺