Leah Gervais: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show, Leah here.

 And today we are talking about hustle culture, burnout, culture, the lack of hustle culture, everything in between when it comes to navigating how hard you should work when you’re overworking yourself, when you’re not pushing yourself enough. And all the mixed messages that we get on the internet and from books and podcasts and other people on hustle culture and what really we need to do to make our goals happen. 

There is a whole difference, there are a whole set of views on this. There you have the Gary Wiener, Vayner trucks of the world talking about how important it is to never stop working, to work 25 hours a day to work, work, work yourself to the bone. 

And then you have sort of the more woo woo feminine energy, uh, voices, thought leaders, sharing things on the complete opposite end of the spectrum where they’re really sharing that you can just attract more, focus more on your energy, be more, do less things like that, and really promote this anti hustle culture, uh, as it has really been a reaction to burnout. You know, because a lot of people have burnt out. 

 So, as I was sharing, we are fed a lot of conflicting information about the best way to be successful, the best way to show up, the best way to have a morning routine, the best way to get your day started, the best way to work. And I think a lot of this came from a very well-meaning place. A lot of it came from the rejection of just the byproducts of capitalism. 

And I am not, I’m very much capitalist. To be clear, this is not an anti capitalist conversation. It came from burnout. It came from overworking. It came from worth only being defined by productivity or outcomes or results. Losing an intrinsic sense of self or losing in a sense of self away from our work or realizing that burnout isn’t worth it.

 All of those things have led to this conversation that we now all are very much fed around, not hustling, not overworking, not burning out, et cetera. And I think that that was very well intended. And I think that the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction.

 I just spoke about this on my, one of my wealth builders calls. There is too much shame now around hustle culture, and it has to end because there is not a seven figure business owner out there, not one who has gone to where he or she is without a season of hustle culture. At least one my guess would be more than one.

And if someone is telling you otherwise, if someone is telling you that they reached seven figures without ever hustling, all with attracting things to them all, with doing things in flow, my guess would be the way that they make money is by telling people to do that too.  I bet that that’s how they got to seven figures selling this narrative that you don’t have to do anything.

 So of course people are going to buy from them because they wanna believe that too. And that’s not necessarily shade to them. But the point is that I believe what we should reject in hustle culture is our intentions around work when they come from a place of scarcity, a place of fear, a place of lack, a place of not good enough, a place of desperation.

 But if you are in momentum, if you are in flow, if you have an idea, if you want to take action, do not hold yourself back.

And dare I say, if you want to hit seven figures, hell, if you wanna hit six figures, embrace a season, of hustle. It doesn’t have to be forever. It doesn’t have to be torturous. In fact, when I look at some of the times in business, when I hustled the hardest, actually all of those times in business have been the most fulfilling for me, for the most part.

 Sometimes I’ve had to hustle to correct things when they’ve gone wrong, and that’s been hard. But for the most part, that’s when I birthed something new into my business, into my work, into my life, into the world. It’s extremely exciting and I wanna walk you guys through the process of thinking of something to actually seeing it through. 

But before I do that, I just want to reiterate so clearly that you need to work hard to be successful.

And I know it sounds like extremely obvious advice, but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves because we are so frequently told that hustle culture is a bad thing and burning out is a bad thing. Burning out is a bad thing. 

I mean, I, I’m not trying to promote burning out, but this delusion that’s going on on the internet right now about how people can make a certain amount of money without working a certain amount or without putting a certain amount of effort in, or by only believing it and not taking action, is going to break people’s hearts and it’s going to lead to businesses not working out. 

And it’s going to lead to not enough money being made. And I don’t want that for anyone, especially people who really want to be successful. 

If you look, listen closely at any mindset book, any podcast, any audio book, any speaker who talks about some of these more anti hustle culture principles like the law of attraction, like listening to your energy, like being in the right place at the right time, like looking for internal guidance, if you really listen to what they’re saying, those, that is just the beginning of the, of the piece of advice.

It’s not like tuning into your internal guidance and everything will come to you. It’s like tune into your internal guidance and then taking action based on what it tells you. If you want to attract what you want into your life, then you need to take actions to reach that point of attraction. It doesn’t just come from sitting on your couch and thinking about it.

 And you know, every time you really listen to someone who’s teaching these, that’s really the underlying work of what they’re saying. They might not be sharing the actions that they’re taking. 

And that’s where I think it gets confusing because we feel like we hear someone talk all about the mindset work, the do they journaling may do the thought work they do, changing their beliefs, using mantras, all of that type of stuff. And that’s all you hear them do. So it’s easy to think that that’s all they do, but that’s often all they share because that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

They’re telling you how they get into an aligned place so that they can take better actions and so that they know which actions to take, not so that they can get an aligned place so that they don’t need to take action at all, ever. And when we don’t understand this and we don’t take action, we then think the mindset work isn’t working. And then we get into an even more frustrating place than we’re already in. 

So if there’s a financial goal you’re working toward right now, or if you’re listening to this and you wanna quit your nine to five, or if you’re listening to this and you want to make $10,000 in a month, or if you’re listening to this and you wanna make passive income overnight, really ask yourself, can you do that? Not can you like, do you deserve to, but would you be able to go to sleep tonight?

Is there a way for someone to find out who you are, see whatever it is you’re selling and buy it from you in the next 24 hours? Is there a way in the next 30 days for people to pay you $10,000 worth of services? Do you have the services? Do you have payment processors? Do you have the system set up in order to respond to them? Do you have the actual product or service built out? 

And these things aren’t meant to make you feel overwhelmed or full of shame or stressed out, They’re just meant to bring clarity to the situation that you’re in. 

So you can be honest about, maybe you do need to embrace hustle culture a little, maybe you do need to get up earlier. Maybe you do need to invest in your business a bit more. Maybe you do need to really put yourself out there in a new way.

And I just wanna sort of have this edge offer so that you can be honest about what you really want and how you can get it and not reject it. Because someone on Instagram is telling you not to hustle so hard. So I wanna clarify when I think hustle culture is a good thing and why I think we need to embrace it a little more.

The whole goal of personal development, especially as it pertains to entrepreneurship, is to learn to trust yourself. 

The ideas that we hear, the advice that we learn about having a morning routine, about having rituals, about having mind, doing mindset work, about investing in a certain way, about using certain strategies. These are meant to be places of inspiration.

 But you do not need to follow anyone else’s cookie cutter advice on how to live your life or how to run your day or how to run your business. 

If you are so stringent upon a morning routine because you saw someone on Instagram do it and they look super happy and successful and their life doesn’t look that hard, and you’re then getting up every morning and drinking a green juice and getting up at a certain time and doing a run, or you know, praying for a certain amount of time or whatever, because you saw that you’re missing the point, the point of having a morning routine is for you to get connected with yourself into your frame of mind.

So your morning routine should look like you get up every morning and you trust that you know what you need that morning to get into that place. Does your body need to exercise right then? Do you want to do a meditation instead because you’re feeling a little bit off centered? Do you want to get up early because you’re inspired? Do you want to sleep in because you’re tired? Having that sense of self-trust is what makes the difference. 

So when it comes to hustle culture, the big rejection around hustle culture is when you hustle because you’re afraid that you’re not going to succeed, you’re afraid that you’re not doing enough, you’re afraid that if you don’t work hard enough, you’re therefore not going to get what you want. A lot of that conditioning comes from the corporate world, and that’s what a lot of us are trying to undo.

And that is a noble thing to unlearn. But hard work and hustle and sacrifice and discipline when it comes from a place of, I am so fired up that I don’t wanna sleep until this idea is out on paper, or I am so dedicated to seeing this through that I’m willing to skip a workout here and there. I’m gonna say it.

 That is a good thing. That is part of the human experience. That is you living out your purpose. And if we are so resistant to that, to the point where we need to be doing the same things every day just for the sake of balance, we need to be waking up and sleeping the same amount and getting the same amount of exercise and eating the same perfectly balanced meal just because that makes us healthier.

 We’re becoming robots . We are missing the point, especially if you are an entrepreneur.

You do not subscribe to daily. You don’t want things to be the same every day. You don’t want things to be normal. You don’t want things to be average. You want extraordinary. 

So stop rejecting this idea that you can do something extraordinary to create something miraculous. And when your hustle comes from that inspired place, that place of passion, that place of drive, let yourself experience that. It honestly is sometimes the most exciting part of my business, euphoric part of my business.

 Sometimes that’s not always the case. Sometimes I have to hustle because things are bad and I have to fix them because I’m the owner of a business and things begin and end with you. And that’s hard, but I still would never trade it. 

So I wanna talk to you guys a little bit about what my process is these days for birthing something new, for selling something new, for actually putting something out into the world in case it can kind of help you take some action on your own, especially if it does mean getting you into a little bit of a hustle culture place.

 Again, I wanna reiterate no one that you look up to that has hit seven figures, got there without a chapter, at least one of hustle. So stop rejecting it.

Now before I go on, not every chapter is a chapter of hustle. I’m not in one right now. I’m a new mom. I love working three days a week. It’s working really well for me. I feel good about it. But I have certainly had my chapters and I will again.

 So when I get a new idea, when I have a creative inkling or an epiphany or make a decision about something that I wanna create my business, Oh gosh, I’m sorry, you guys got the construction. Hopefully it’s not too bad on the recording. 

Then the first thing I do is just get clear on that desire. So I have these ideas a lot in the shower. I have them on planes. I have them early in the mornings. I have them when it’s quiet.

A good example of this is I recently decided what I wanna do for our Black Friday sale, which is I want to put VIP days on sale, which I’ve never done. I’ve never put my VIP days on sale. I love my VIP days cause they’re truly magical. 

So I was excited to have the idea to bring them to more people by putting them on sale for a little while. And I got also really excited about the locations that I was gonna have them in. So that was my idea. I had this idea, I’m trying to remember when I had this idea, I think on a plane, now that I think about it. I think that’s where it happened on a plane. 

So get the idea. I have had ideas for things at three in the morning, and I will get up in the morning and I will write it down.

And I know that sounds psychotic, but I just believe that things are being channeled through me and that I’m having them for a reason. And I just have that element of self-trust at this point where if I’m up, I believe that it’s because I’m being led to something. And so I write it down and I try to get as clear about it as I can before I then take action and I write down any steps about action I know I could take to do that. 

So in that example, I knew that I needed to kind of make a little list of like, all right, I need to look at the dates that I could be, I could do these VIP days. What are the payment plan options gonna be? What sale do I want it to be at? Do I need to make a new landing page?

Um, you know, what’s the process that I wanna have to let people know about this, et cetera. Then as I’m doing this, typically as I’m writing down what I wanna create, and especially if I’m writing down some things I need to do to launch it, I start getting these fears around it. I start getting these limiting beliefs around it, I start getting my own upper limits about that. 

So if that is part of your normal process, and it is, this is where you stop, this is where a lot of people stop. A lot of people get ideas. They then start thinking about what they would need to do. They then get caught on the fact that they don’t know how, they don’t know if it would work. They don’t have the confidence, they don’t have the experience, they have some sort of ceiling, and they therefore stop themselves. 

So that’s the key. You cannot stop yourself. So what I do is I then go right down the things that are stopping me from moving forward, or that I’m afraid of from this idea or the failure fears that I have around it, and I write them in an email to my coach and or I write them in my journal and or I talk to my husband about them, but I try not to lay all my business stuff on him because then we Never, never talk about anything else. 

So in this example, one of my big fears with my v i p day promotion is that I don’t have as many. So for, like my mastermind in coaching, we have so many testimonials, we have so many success stories, and we’re just, I’m just very, very good at what I do. And I’m very good at my d i p days too. 

But  I realize that my VIP days are a bit harder to quantify in terms of how successful people are from them, because you really have to implement a lot of what we talked about, and you really start seeing success sometimes three to six months after the actual day. 

So I just don’t have this huge body of testimonials from them. Like I do my mastermind, my coaching, other scalier side hustle, other things that we’ve done.

So that was my edge. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t have any, I don’t have all these glowing testimonials. Will anyone, how can I convey how powerful these are? Uh, in a way that is just really hard to put a number on. 

You know, so many people get different things out of VIP days too. Like, I had one client, I had one VIP day over the summer in Paris, and we, my client and I mapped out how she could make like $200,000 in sales, and she did that. She did it next month. 

So that was a very clear win. I had another client who last year I had a v i p day with her, and during it, she had a breakthrough realizing that alcohol was no longer serving her, and she stopped drinking that day.

That was her last day of ever drinking. So very, very different results, very different outcomes, very different depending on the person.

 So it really, that is, my limiting belief is like, how am I gonna be able to convey what if people don’t know what they want and they don’t, they can’t visualize how powerful it would be. That was my fear. 

So I kind of wrote that out, kind of journaled it, and then I just realized that it, it, there’s so much power in knowing how transformed you’d be from a full day of coaching and in a beautiful place and away from your day to day that I need to trust that the value itself is obvious and that I’m very clearly an excellent business coach because my clients all have such good results and that that’s going to be enough. 

So that was, Oh, Sam, I am, oh my God. So that was her. I am 14 months alcohol free since that day. Oh my God, that’s gonna make me choke up. 

So Sam, if you wanna share anything about the power of your VIP day, I would appreciate it because you can help me bust through this upper limit that I’m having. So I wrote that down in an email. I also started journaling about it a little bit and started really thinking about it, and it really helped me see that a lot of this was in my own head. 

My clients have amazing results from VIP days, and I had faith in my own ability to, uh, convey the power of them to my audience, and I was clear about the person that I knew this would be good for, and that she trusts herself enough to know that she would be a great fit for this and that it would be really transformative for her, and that it would be very helpful for her.

So I was kind of able to shift out of that. Then the next step is to delegate it, is to allow other people to help me with this. So I have a team at this point, but even if you don’t, just kind of coming up with a checklist of what you can do to roll something out is the next step in taking action. 

So there’s no real hustle behind this. As you can see, I thought of this in plenty of time. There’s no time crunch. I’m not gonna have too many all-nighters. This isn’t something that’s super frustrating. It’s not gonna make me pull my hair out, but I’m not sitting on the couch thinking that I’m going to attract this into my life magically. 

I’m going to convey the value of it. I’m going to work hard on it. I’m going to have people help me and I’m going to execute it.

So this is just an inside look at what it looks like, and this is not really a hustle culture chapter for me. Oh, Sam, you’re so welcome. I love seeing it, but it is just an example of putting work and putting time into what needs to happen to move things forward.

 So I hope that this gave you guys some perspective on hustle culture and what it means to move things forward. And if nothing else, I hope it gave you just some honest truths about what you might need to do or might not want to do in order to hit whatever you’re working toward next. Um, and really just put yourself back into a place of power, knowing that if you do move forward with things, things will work. 

But you have to do the work. You have to do the work. And there’s nothing wrong with using hustle culture from an inspired place, from a place of really seeing something through.

I mean, think about, I feel like hustling a good analogy to it is like a hard workout. You don’t need to do a hard workout every day. I, if you follow the, you know, flow of your hormones, you don’t need to do a hard workout, uh, every, especially depending on what time of your cycle you’re in. But there’s nothing wrong with doing it if you want to do it. 

There’s nothing wrong with going on a run if you want to run, and if you really want a result of feeling healthier, having the endorphins feeling like you’ve install, instilled the sense of determination. 

Sometimes you have to put it through, even though it doesn’t feel good every step of the way. I’ve really gotten into running lately and every step I’m not enjoying, but for the most part, I really enjoy it. I’m excited to do it, and I love the result.

And I think that that’s really what we can channel back into with hustling here too. The reason that hard workouts sometimes get a bad rap is because they, again, come from a mal intent place. They come from a place of punishing your body or needing to lose weight or needing to, uh, you know, keep up look a certain way or not enjoying your body.

 And, and of course you don’t wanna work out from that place, but is working out the problem or is intention the problem?

 And the same is true with hustle culture. Is hustle culture the problem or is the intention around burning yourself out, perfectionism, associating your own worth with, with, um, associating your own worth, with your outcomes and results? Those are the problems.

 So adjust your intention. Lean into doing hard things because you’re powerful and you can do it, and I believe in you. 

All right, you guys, I hope that this helped you. I’ll talk to you guys soon. Here is to your biggest vision.

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