Is Your "Hustle" Hurting You?

Beauty,

One of the biggest Holy Boundaries™ I’ve had to work on in the last years of being self employed is in relation to the idea of The Hustle.

To be clear, this is not just a term for entrepreneurs... If you are a working adult, you have some inborn push towards The Hustle.

You hustle to succeed.  You join the rat race.  You commit to the grind.  You push.  Yuck.

Now, if you know me and my English Lit and creative writing background, you know I’m kind of a slut for etymology.  I like knowing exactly what words mean and using them correctly to communicate in clean and honest ways.

I find it super interesting that we collectively use this word ‘hustle’ in a rather favorable way to convince one another of our worth through busyness and self sacrifice.

So the literal definition of ‘hustle’ is as follows...

HUSTLE:

1. force (someone) to move hurriedly or unceremoniously in a specified direction.

2. to obtain by forceful action or persuasion.

3. a fraud or swindle.

4. busy movement and activity.

To me, these meanings are pretty unattractive.

Yet even this morning, I had to use my tools to unhook from a sense of shame that I was resting while my partner was already a couple hours into his work day.

The compulsion that “busy” is an identity runs deep in our consumer culture... and that culture lives inside me.  Inside us.

The addiction to the false idea that scarcity and survival can only be solved by pressure and overworking has been handed down to us and runs even deeper.

(with compassion for those of us in literal survival mode.  I’ve been there, unable to feed my children well and it’s very hard to see around that level of stress when activated. It’s real, it’s hard... and I fully honor that.  And... I have sat with SO MANY women who were operating from this mindset and place and were not actually in true scarcity or survival mode.  This is what I am speaking to...)

Yet through my work, I have actually seen data that is quite the opposite of this story that we are told.  The story that busy = productive = success = a life = belonging.

The more I slow down and focus vs multitasking; the fewer mistakes I make.

Mistakes that take time and energy to course correct.

The more I care for the needs of my animal body, the more function my brain has and the more inspiration moves through me.

The more inspired I am, the more efficient I become as I see the clearest pathway towards any creation I want to bring to life.

The more efficiently I am creating, the more abundance naturally flows my way from those creations.

The more abundant I feel I am:

The better my relationships are.

The more joy and satisfaction I feel.

The more enjoyable work becomes.

I have this lived experience... and I have seen it first hand in ALL of my deeper container clients.

BEing In our body and moving from a grounded place with creative flow in the correct timing IS our design as human animals.

Yet...

Our culture tells us otherwise so strongly that most of my clients (including myself) have an internalized voice of oppression telling us that we are lazy, unsuccessful, unmotivated, will never succeed etc and so forth ad nauseum.

And I can’t help but wonder why?

If I KNOW from my lived experiments that the opposite is true - why was I taught this untruth?

If I look to the world of nature and see that rest and singular focus is prevalent - why were we told the opposite?

What good would it do to have an entire society that is so busy, distracted, feeling unworthy, disconnected and as though they must be utterly selfless and miserable in order to belong?

Who would benefit from a society like that?  Certainly not those participating in The Hustle (as in those of us participating in the fraud of being hurrying unceremoniously towards the direction of consumption and burnout)

I don’t have all the answers... but I sure do have a lot of questions.

And I am so curious to explore them with you!

I’d love to know - do you have a boundary with The Hustle?  Or is that still a soft place for you?

Love,

Wyld

P.S.  I wrote a whole book that supports other human animals in developing this level of self intimacy.  It’s a great beginning point to support developing Holy Boundaries™.  If you need a book this fall...it's a good one!