What does it really mean to do work you love doing?

What does it actually mean to do the work that you most love doing when you’re working for yourself? I really believe that you do have to have a consistent and reliable thread of motivation underneath why you are doing what you’re doing. Because ultimately, you are the only person who is steering the ship and you are the only person who is actually making sure that the ship stays in motion. Even this decision to say I am going to move in the direction of doing work that I love, I think that we can look at so many places in the world and see that it’s possible, but it is going to require a lot of courage and it is going to require that you take steps and that you believe that those steps are going to work before you have proof that they’re going to work.

Why do I do the work that I do? Why do I keep going when things are hard in business? How have I made it to just under five years at time of recording? I’m so proud of myself, but how have I made it to five years? And not only made it, but I’m able to even look at the next 5, 1020 years and say yes, I’m gonna keep going down this path of building my own business. When I look back at the earlier years of my business, a lot of my motivation truly was I want to make money. I want to have financial freedom. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that as a motivation. I actually think that we all need to kind of fulfill that need. I guess you could say two different levels. But I do think we all kind of have that. Yes, I need to make money. And so that is a motivating factor. But there is a point that I’ve seen myself run into and I’ve seen other business owners run into as well where money stops being a motivating factor and maybe this isn’t true for everyone. So if this doesn’t feel true for you, then that’s totally fine. But I see more often than not that every single business owner who at one point was motivated by money ultimately does kind of hit this place of more money isn’t actually like satisfying what I truly need where we see I could go make more money. That’s awesome. I’m excited about that, but that isn’t actually why I want to keep going. And maybe I shouldn’t say every business letter, maybe I should say every self-aware business owner. I know for me that, that hit after I had had my first six figure year, I made about 100 and 20 something grand in a year in my first six figure year. And then the following January, I had a 80 K sales month. I think that cash in that month was like 35 or something. I need to go back and look at it. But I basically went from 50 something in one year and 14,000 the year before to 100 and 20 something. And then the month after that 120 something year, I had an 80 K sales month. So I had this like very rapid kind of incline into success, financial success. And while that was exciting, as soon as I kind of hit that top of that 80 K salesman, I just realized that money wasn’t all that, it was cracked up to be. And I didn’t really know what my motivation was to keep doing my work. I knew that I was motivated to keep doing my work. I knew that I wanted to keep building my business. It wasn’t that there was a lack of motivation. It was simply that I kind of reached these huge financial goals that I had had for so long. And that previously had seemed so just out of touch I had reached them and I found that I wasn’t really motivated to go make a bunch more money. Of course, I still wanna make more money. I’d love to have a multimillion dollar business and I’m working toward things and money just wasn’t motivating anymore. And so I had to start exploring why am I actually motivated to keep showing up? Because again, I know that I am and I, I want to keep showing up and I am showing up and I still am moving through the hard things I, I’m committed, but I don’t know why. And ultimately, what I realized through a long journey of exploration and deep, deep, deep healing and inner work is that the reason why I’m motivated to keep going when things get tough is because I really love my work. And when I first realized that I actually had a moment of like, but is that enough? You know, is it enough to just say I enjoy it? I started to question like, well, should I have like some bigger reason? Like, I’m gonna save the world in some way, which actually, I would not say I’m gonna save the world because I don’t think I can save the world. That’s also not my place anyway. That’s a different conversation. But it was that thing of, well, is it enough, is it enough to just love my work to have to have some bigger motivation, some bigger purpose or is it ok, that, yeah, this is my motivation and maybe eventually we’ll see. Right. But maybe eventually I’ll get to this point where my main motivator is not even like I love my work. Maybe my main motivator will be service at some point in the future. I don’t know. But I’m going with what I have right now here at HCO, we often talk a lot about sustainable success and the way that we define sustainable success here at HCO is very particular, it’s uh you know, we did it with a lot of intention, but the definition that we have for sustainable success is getting paid really freaking well to do the work you most love doing in the way you most love doing it with the people that you most love working with. Notice that part of that definition is doing work you most love doing. And so I want to have a conversation today around what that actually means because on the surface, it can seem really, really, really simple like, oh do the work you love in the way you love with the people you love. But if we just take that at face value, then it tends to bring up a lot more questions than answers, which is not always a bad thing, but I think we often, you know, just hear these statements and think. Oh, yeah. Ok. That’s what I have to do or? Oh, no, I don’t like that without really digging even more deeply into it. I know there’s a quote, I can’t even remember the exact language but it’s something like, you know, do the work that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life or something along those lines. And I don’t know if I fully agree with that statement. But when I put out on Facebook a couple weeks ago and asked like people some questions about what does it mean to do the work you love and that kind of thing. A couple people had some really strong push backs against this idea because it feels like, well, can I actually get paid well to do the work that I love or should I even try to monetize the things that I love or should I just keep them as a separate thing and just do work that pays the bills? Or what if I don’t even know what that work is that I love? And what if I can’t even like fathom a w in which I even loved doing any kind of work. And so these are the questions that I want to talk about today and just really dig into the nuance and the depth underneath, what does it actually mean to do work that you love doing? Or rather as our definition goes, do the work that you most love doing, which is, that’s an important word in there. All right, let’s dive in. I truly believe that doing the work that you love doing is a key to sustainability. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t put it into the definition of sustainable success. And as you can hear in the definition, I have three keys or three at least primary keys to sustainable success. It’s doing that work you love in the way that you love with the people that you love. And we’re gonna talk about the other two maybe in some future episodes. But for now, let’s just talk about doing the work that you love as a key to sustainability. I know for me that again, when I look at how I’ve made it through some of the very hard things, some of the really just, you know, big challenges of being an online business owner. I see that the reason I was able to keep showing up is because I genuinely love being a business owner. And what’s fascinating to me is as I was really thinking about this episode and kind of brainstorming and preparing for it. I was initially thinking, oh, well, the work love is coaching and what I actually realized is that the work I love, I do love coaching, that’s fine. But the work I love is building a business, which I guess makes a lot of sense why I love teaching about it and coaching about it and all of that talking about it here on this podcast. But the work I love is building a business. And so even though early on in business, I was a social media manager and then I pivoted to brand strategy and then I pivoted into business coaching and I have recently realigned my offer suit and we have courses that kind of thing. Now, even though I’ve kind of done different work in each of those pivots, what I was doing through all of them and what I still am doing is building a business and that is the work that I love. And so that is what I am doing and that’s what I’m getting paid really freaking well to do and I’m doing it in the way that I love and I’m doing it with the people that I love. But really again, coming back in the reason why I see that doing work you love is key to sustainable success is because I just always come back to this question of what keeps me going when things are tough. Again, it’s because I love my work. It’s because I receive some fulfillment from my work because I enjoy my work. And I really truly believe that my work that I am doing in the world is in full alignment with my current understanding of my purpose and my genius now notice that loving my work doesn’t actually mean that I love it all the time. And there are 100% things that I do not love. But even those things that I don’t love, I do ultimately end up in sort of a roundabout way, loving them because I’m so out of myself for doing the hard thing or doing the thing that I didn’t love. And I also see how all of these different pieces are directly contributing to the grand scheme of me getting paid to do the work that I love. You know, I think about in the last nine or so months, I have been undergoing a rebranding process and that has been so magical, so powerful. But also it meant that I had to slow down quite a few things because I was revisiting different things. I was reworking the very foundations of our business. And that meant that there was dips in income that meant that I had to make some really difficult decisions that meant all sorts of different things that I didn’t love. But because I see that they all are contributing to the work that I do love ultimately and contributing to my success in doing that work. I somehow again, roundabout way end up actually loving those things or having difficult conversations with clients is not something that I love. I really do not love having to have those conversations and every single time that I have a difficult conversation with a client. I always walk away, feeling so proud of myself because I did that thing. So, again, sort of roundabout way here. I do end up sort of loving even the things that I don’t love when you’re working for yourself. I really believe that you do have to have a consistent and reliable thread of motivation underneath why you are doing what you’re doing. Because ultimately, you are the only person who is steering the ship and you are the only person who is actually making sure that the ship stays in motion. And so if you do not have that thread underneath, then it’s gonna be hard to actually do that. The great news though is that I truly believe that if you’re a business owner, you already have that thread of motivation. It’s not something that you have to like try to create. I think it truly is just creating awareness around the fact that it’s there. And then as I said before, really allowing yourself to continue to stay curious about what is the work that I really love? And if we’re looking for full sustainable success, how do I love doing that work? And who do I love working with? Here’s the thing though, I think that a lot of people including past versions of myself don’t allow ourselves to do the work that we most love because often we are trained to make decisions about our livelihood based off of what is going to make the most logical sense or what is going to logically make the most money. When I look back at my time in college, I remember very clearly and this makes me sad to even think about. But I remember very clearly thinking how cool would it be to be able to be an English major? Like I wanted to be like a literature major or something like that. I’ve always wanted to write a book. So, you know, I just thought, oh, I wanna do that. But then when I really thought about it, I was like, well, those people don’t make money so I shouldn’t do that. I should be a lawyer. And so I got a degree in political science. I do not use that degree at all. It’s fine. I used the experience of getting the degree though, of course. So I am very grateful for that, but I chose a path based on what I thought was going to make me the most money. And it’s also really interesting because I actually also considered doing a business degree back in college. But I actually told myself, I don’t even remember why, like, I can’t do that. I should just be a lawyer. And when I really think about it and from my current knowledge, I think that I chose not to do a business degree because I knew I wanted to be a business owner. But I wasn’t allowing myself to have the thing that I actually wanted because that didn’t feel safe either anyway. So I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought, oh, this is the safest route. This is the thing that’s gonna make me the most money lawyers are always needed. So, you know, here we go. I just, I’m gonna have such a secure career if I am a lawyer when I started my business, of course, I ended up not going to law school. So there’s that. But when I started my business, I started my business literally from asking the question, what skills do I have that I can get paid for? And so I started out as a social media manager because I knew that I was good at social media. I had had experience running little side hustle businesses that really did well on social media. Yeah, I had experience running social media for some other jobs I had had. So I knew I had experience in it. And I’m like, ok, this is a skill that I have. I know that I can get paid for this. And there’s nothing wrong with making this choice. Like there really is nothing wrong with making a choice based on this logical, you know, what’s gonna make the most sense, what’s going to make me the most money. And I also recognize that there’s a huge reality behind that decision. A lot of times it’s, I have to make sure that I make money so that I can have food on the table. I have a roof over my head, over my family’s head. I understand that there is a huge reality behind those decisions. A lot of the time. And also with that in mind, it’s a huge privilege to be able to do the work that we love. And it’s not one that I take lightly for myself or that I take lightly when I have these kinds of conversations. But also I look back at both of those decisions. So to, you know, I’m gonna be a lawyer back in college and I look at my decision to become a social media manager. And realistically, both of those decisions I really could have chosen something else. And maybe that is speaking to privilege that I had of, you know, so I know that if I fail, I’m always going to have family that I can rely on to help pick me back up again, I totally recognize that. But I still, even with those kind of fail safe systems, I still made the choices that I did to not do the work that I loved because it didn’t make logical sense. If you ever read the book, The Big Leap by Gay Hendrix, he talks about this, I find issue with a couple of the ways that he talks about things, but I really love his framework for the zone of genius. And if you’re unfamiliar. It’s essentially these like kind of four quadrants of types of work that we do. So we have the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, the zone of excellence and the zone of genius. The two that I think are most relevant here are the zone of excellence in the zone of genius. Often times we’re kind of trained, I think a lot by society and by kind of expectations of what success means, we’re trained to do the zone of excellence work. The zone of excellence work is the stuff that we are really good at that. Other people are constantly like telling us, wow, that’s so good or you know, that we’re easily progressing in that field or whatever it is, we probably maybe even get paid well to do that work that we’re really good at. But that we don’t actually love doing. And this was totally me with saying I’m gonna be a lawyer rather than going and getting a business degree or an English literature degree because it was no, I’m not allowed to have the thing that actually I want, I have to do the thing that makes logical sense. And the thing that I’m good at because I actually have always been told my entire life that I should be a lawyer. I was the kid in class who could convince a teacher to give me a point on a question on a test that they had marked wrong because I had a reason why that was the thing. So anyway, so I chose the zone of excellence. I chose the thing that I knew I was good at. I chose the thing that people praised me for. I chose the thing that I was like, this is, you know, societally acceptable, this will make me money, this will be very safe and secure. I chose that over choosing my genius level work which as I’ve discovered in now, nearly five years of business is running and building and growing businesses and teaching other people how to do the same. The Zono genius. On the other hand, is the work that just comes naturally to us. It’s the work that is just so simple feeling and ease for us to do. And I remember even when I was pivoting from brand strategy into being a coach, I really just was like, wait, how is anyone going to pay me for this? This is a way too easy, like coaching just felt way too easy. Whereas social media and brand strategy both felt like there was actually a lot of effort required in order to do that work. I was good at it. I got great feedback. But again, it was another kind of representation of my zone of excellence work. So I guess all that to say it really makes a lot of sense when we find ourselves doing work that we think, oh, this is what I will get paid. For this is the thing that makes the most logical sense. And what I have found both in my own experience, but also in my experience, working with a lot of different clients who have had to make this shift from their zone of excellence into their zone of genius is that you might make a good amount of money doing your zone of excellence, work doing the work that makes logical sense. You’re always at least from my perspective, going to be able to make a whole lot more money and see a whole lot more success, but also have a whole lot more fulfillment when you’re doing that more zone of genius work. But it does take a lot of courage to make that leap. So we are going to talk about that in a little bit as well. One note of nuance here that is super important to me that we talk about is that doing work you love isn’t an all or nothing thing it exists on a spectrum. It’s not either you are doing work you love or you aren’t doing work that you love as we talk about. Even with the kind of broad concept of sustainable success in general, sustainable success exists on a spectrum. It’s not, you either have a sustainably successful business or you don’t have a sustainably successful business. It’s are you continually moving toward increased sustainability while also recognizing where what you’re currently doing is sustainable as well sustainable success is not a destination, just like doing work you love is not a destination and work that you love exists on a spectrum. And it’s going to look different depending on where you are in your life, what experiences you’ve already had, what experiences you haven’t yet had. And also how aware you are being through the journey of whatever the work is that you’re doing, a lot of clients will come to me and work with me inside of expand. When they realized that they’re ready to take a step in a new direction or one on one clients will come to me when they’ve already taken steps in that new direction. And they already are doing some work that they really love. But now they want to go even more deeply into it to give you an example of one of our expanders right now. She has work that reliably pays her bills. It’s a business she’s running for a while. It reliably pays the bills, but it’s not the work that she actually loves. And so she has started a little bit of a side hustle business where she’s actually doing the work that she loves. And the client obviously wants the work that she loves to be the thing that does pay her bills. Now, this clay in particular does actually know that she wants that work that she loves to be the thing that pays the bills. She wants to be able to release the other work. Not everyone wants that we actually have another expander who has kind of a similar situation. And she’s like, I’m ok doing this work that I don’t love and having that be the thing that pays the bills. But I do also want to build this other thing, but not necessarily with the intention of getting rid of the work that pays the bills. But for the client who is in the place of, I do want to actually have my little side hustle business where I’m doing work. I really genuinely love. I want that to be the thing that pays my bills. I want that to be the thing that makes me the money and you know, that I get to focus full time on I shared with her that at some point, which doesn’t have to be right now, but it could be if she’s ready at some point, she does get to start thinking about how do I tip the skills and put more of my time and energy and money into doing the work that I truly love because oftentimes when we have kind of maybe more zone of excellence type of work that’s paying bills, we can start to feel like we’re in a little bit of a trap and not a trap of like, oh my gosh, I’m suffocating here, but sometimes maybe that too. But we can start to feel like we’re in a little bit of a trap. Or we’re a little bit stuck because it’s like I have this work and I’m good at the work and people are coming to me with a lot of ease and, you know, it’s paying my bills and it’s really wonderful for me in that sense, but I don’t actually love doing it but because it’s paying my bills and because it’s just happening with a lot of ease, it’s a lot easier for me to just keep focusing over here and investing my time, energy and money over here, which then gives my business or a little side hustle of the work I actually want to do it gives it the short end of the stick. And now I am struggling to figure out how do I balance these two things and how do I actually allow the side hustle business? The work I actually love to grow and expand when I still am doing so much over here with this work that pays the. So I I gave this client, you know, a couple of ideas here, but it all comes down to how do you tip the scales right now? The scales, the priority is all over on the work that pays the bills and there’s not a lot of priority on the work that you actually love. So how can we start to tip the scales? Really? It comes down to do you start to charge more for the work that pays the bills? So that you can do less of it for the same pay and therefore have more time and energy to actually put into the work that you love. Do you decide that for a season you’re going to put in extra work than you normally would so that you can prioritize building up the work that you love to getting that to a more sustainable revenue? So you can let go of more of the other work. Do you do a combination of the above? There’s really not a wrong answer here, but you do have to choose. I want to tip the scales. I want to begin doing more of the work that I love and less of this other work. And it is gonna feel like a little bit of a jump. Again. We’re gonna talk about the courage that goes into a decision to do more of the work that you love. At the end of this episode, a one on one client came to me last year already doing the work that she loved doing. So that wasn’t her quote unquote like problem here or her focus of things that she wanted to work on. But she came to me because she had realized that even though she was doing work that she loved, she actually was still limiting herself to a portion of the work that she loved because that’s what she believed that people would pay her for. And so a big part of our work together was helping her to open up the work that she loved and allowing herself to actually bring the depth and the breadth of work that she wanted to actually do in her business. And let that be her work rather than just this little portion that seemed like it was going to be the quote unquote right thing or the thing that people would pay her for. So, are you seeing how this idea of the work that you love is nuanced and it exists on a spectrum work that you love is not just one thing, it is not a destination that you just suddenly arrive at. And you’re like, I am doing 100% work that I love. Even me, like I said before, yes, I’m doing more work than I love today than I ever have in my previous five years of business. But even within this, I’m constantly becoming more and more aware of. Oh, I love doing this. Oh, I don’t really like doing that and I keep moving in the direction of the work that I love. Recently. I had a conversation with a couple of different people actually about this idea of doing work that you love. And a couple of them came back with, I can’t even fathom a world in which I would enjoy doing work at all. And you know, it’s kind of this idea of all I can imagine doing is just go sitting on a beach. And like reading books or something. If I was just to do what I loved, that would be it. I wouldn’t do any work. And actually, it’s so funny that they said this because I have a previous client who actually went and did that and sat on a beach for six months. But what happened after she sat on the beach for six months reading books and just enjoying life was that she had ideas about what she actually wanted to be doing. And I would imagine that for pretty much every human who actually just truly went and sat on a beach for six months and read books and did no work at all. And of course, was financially supported somehow during that time, I imagine that pretty much every single human who did that would emerge from those six months with immense clarity on the work that they actually would love to do. And I often find that I’m happy to be wrong on this. So if I am, I’m ok with that, but I often find that when someone is really struggling to access this vision of what even what a world looked like in which I loved my work, what I find is that often they maybe are experiencing some burnout or maybe on a less intense level, maybe just feeling really drained by some element of their present circumstances. And so imagining a world where you actually love your work just feels so far away that it doesn’t even feel accessible. If that’s where you’re at, where you’re like, I can’t even fathom this carly then know that you’re not alone because literally, I just had conversations with two different people about this and I have a previous client who was in that same place as well. And I hope that by even just hearing this, you gain a little bit of hope and recognition, there is potentially a world out there where I could actually love my work. I might not be able to fathom it yet. I might not be in a place physiologically to even like access what that might look like or feel like, but it does exist. And hopefully, if you can get some support to really rest and take care of yourself in whatever way that looks like, hopefully you will be able to come to a place of recognizing. Yeah, there is work that I actually would love to do. I do have ideas. I want to try that thing. I’m gonna go in that direction even though I don’t know, it’s gonna work. I’m gonna see if that is the thing also. Sometimes though it’s not actually that someone’s burnt out and that’s why they can’t really think about what is that work? Sometimes it’s just literally that because of our circumstances, because of our lived reality, because of our experiences, we haven’t ever actually even allowed ourselves to open the door to explore what would work be that I would actually enjoy doing. It is such a courageous act to ask the question of what work would I love to do? Because the truth is in asking this question, it’s going to unlock new awareness and it really does create one of those sort of threshold moments where once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And especially the first time that you allow yourself to move in that direction of doing the work that you love. It also requires a whole bunch of self trust. I remember when I made the quote unquote leap from social media management and temporary and strategy started my business as a social media manager. And as I was doing social media, I realized I’m really good at this. I got a lot of feedback, my clients are getting results, but I don’t actually love doing this. In fact, I am drained by doing this. But what I saw in that work was that I loved looking at the underlying pieces, the foundation that actually made any of my clients social media work successful or not because with those foundations, we were able to then build a social media presence that brought the right people in and moved them into a purchase. And that’s why I pivoted into brand strategy because I realized I actually love this part of the work more than I love this part. That leap was a little scary. But what was even scarier was my leap from brand strategy into coaching. And I think the reason why that one was so terrifying for me was because up until that point, I was used to having value stuff of what I delivered in social media, I was delivering social media content. And then the ensuing results of that social media content in brand strategy, I was handing a deliverable over to a client. Here is your brand. But in coaching, I didn’t have anything to deliver. And so even though I had made the pivot into coaching, because I again, through doing the brand strategy work had come to realize, oh, this is actually work that I love, I love the coaching part. I don’t love all this having to like create the brand and hand it to you part, even though I knew that I was doing that because that was work that was more of work that I loved. I had to still have a lot of courage and a lot of self trust that I could leap into coaching from brand strategy and that it would work. I think that that’s the kind of scary part. A lot of times when we are allowing ourselves to do the work that we love. It’s this question of is it going to work? Because again, in a lot of us, like in a lot of our lives in this society, we are not supported in doing the things that we love, we’re supported in doing the things that quote unquote makes sense. And so even it outside of the context of business, we don’t have a ton of proof that doing things that we love will actually work. And so we end up doing the work, the kind of ho hum, you know, we end up just sticking with the things that have always worked because that’s what has always worked. And so again, even this decision to say I am going to move in the direction of doing work that I love is quite an effort. It requires a lot of courage and it requires a ton of self trust. And it’s not to say that that’s impossible. Of course, like I’m an example, that’s possible. I have clients who are examples that it’s possible. I think that we can look at so many places in the world and see that it’s possible, but it is going to require a lot of courage and it is going to require a lot of self trust and it is going to require that you take steps and that you believe that those steps are going to work before you have proof that they’re going to work. You think the quote is believing is seeing is that from the Santa Claus movie? It applies here as well. By the way, little side note here, one way that I like to show myself and like create proof that it is possible to be wildly successful and sustainably successful doing the work you love. I love watching biographical movies and shows of other really successful people in their industries because I just find that learn so much about what it actually takes to be successful in achieving your dreams. And really when I look at like the amalgamation of a bunch of different athletes or singers or creators or anyone that I’ve looked at who I would say, yes, they are successful and they are doing work that they love. I see that a lot of it comes down to self trust. A lot of it comes down to working through the fears of it’s not going to work. A lot of it comes down to continuing to take steps in the direction of the work that you want to do and in the direction of the work that you love without proof that it’s going to work without proof that it’s going to pay off. And I guess this is ultimately why I believe that in order for a business to be sustainably successful, we have to do the work that we love doing because again, what is going to keep us going when the going inevitably gets really tough or when outcomes look bleak, the laws of the work is what’s gonna keep me going anyway. The feeling that my work is in alignment with my purpose, the organic and innate desire to keep showing up and keep doing the thing is what’s going to keep me going and it just gets easier to keep going, the more you actually allow yourself to move in the direction of doing the work that you love doing. I know I’ve given you a good amount here. So I wanna just invite you to pause for a moment and really just ask yourself what’s coming up, what’s landing, what’s resonating, what is totally not jiving? What do I have questions still about? And I know that we’ve kind of opened a big conversation here and I can’t obviously bring all of it into one tiny podcast episode. So I’d love if you went over to the big hard and entrepreneurs Facebook group and if you opened up a conversation, tell me what’s coming up, tell me what’s landing, tell me what questions you have. Let’s keep having a conversation about this over there.