Hustle and Grind vs. Relax and Unwind

I have some questions for you, Gorgeous. What if your growth, both personal and professional, was not dependent on your hustle? What if it was dependent on your rest?

As a woman entrepreneur, the best thing that you can do for yourself and others is to RELAX. As you nurture and seek your own joy, fulfillment, and fun, it WILL spill into your business. In this episode, the season one finale of Leadership is Feminine, I’m teaching you how to re-invent your relationship with rest.

Kris Plachy: Hello my friends, let's talk about hustle and grind versus relax and unwind. Let's do it. Hey, hey, welcome to podcast. I'm Kris Plachy. This is Leadership is Feminine, because we know it is. Anyway, welcome and thank you all so much for all the feedback that you've provided about the direction of the podcast since I've been in reinvention. I appreciate your comments. If you haven't had time but would love to do it today, I would certainly love it if you would drop a note in iTunes and let us know what you think and share your review. It helps other women like you find this work. The more reviews we get, the more it shows up in searches, which then means more women hear this message, which is ultimately my goal.

So we're coming up on the end of the year. We are officially, this is the official last episode of the first season of Leadership is Feminine. We've been focusing on reinvention, as I mentioned, and we're going to be going into a new season. And this new season, I'm calling CEO Magic. And there's a lot of reasons why I want to call it magic, but CEO Magic, but I'm going to be introducing you to some other beliefs and thoughts I have about the role of a CEO, and I'm also going to be introducing you to what I'm calling Sage CEO Wisdom and how we are all such vessels for this magic in the world. And this is an interesting discussion for me to be having pretty publicly with you. I talk to my clients all the time. So my clients listening would be like, "Yeah, yeah."

I've built a career being a very sound business person. I have nothing to say badly about it. I just have never considered myself incredibly [inaudible 00:02:04]. I have a whole story about that. And for those who've been following me for a while, you know my work around empathic CEO. I believe in complimenting the structures and the processes and practices of a business with these elements that I attribute to being incredibly feminine, which is wisdom and magic and intuition. And I want to talk more and more about that because I feel there's a space for a discussion where successful women who are leading businesses can also talk about the magic of that work and also by the way, talk about the structure that makes it go. And that's what I want to do in this next episode. So I'm going to be sharing information with you and I'm also going to be pulling in the wisdom of other powerful women. So I'm super excited. So stay tuned. Don't go anywhere. Keep listening. It's going to be amazing.

So today I want to finish off reinvention with this alliteration, as Dr. Camille [inaudible 00:03:11] would say, of hustle and grind versus relax and unwind. So we've been talking about this in quite a few of my coaching calls that there is a misunderstanding. There is a common, I don't know if I'd call it misunderstanding. There's a common practice amongst us entrepreneur types that we believe that in order to earn, we must do and we must do hard. Now the problem is that we get reminded and rewarded of that, right? So the harder you do, you often earn more, right? And so that's kind of not great. It's like my whole story I've always had about procrastination. I'm terrible procrastinator, but it's always worked for me. So why would I change? Right?

And maybe I don't need to. That's been my latest discovery at 52. It's I'm not going to change that part of me. I'm just going with it. I'm going to build a system to support me. But this hustle and grind thing you all is... So the counter to that is relax and unwind, right? And so the reason I loved the fact that unwind rhymes with grind because one of those, hustle and grind has a lot of masculine energy to it. A lot of force, a lot of push, a lot of aggression, a lot of oomph. And I'm not suggesting there's not times where that's right on time, but it's not sustainable, right? It's not a sustainable business model. And most of the women who come in to How to CEO, that's right where they are. They're like, "Oh, this is awful. How do I stop doing this part? I'm exhausted."

And I've just gone through this myself in my business, like, wait a minute, I can't outproduce the results of my business. I can't keep up. And so my coach who is Natalie Olson, she's amazing. Numerology Chick is her podcast. She's a brilliant woman and just an incredible fellow wisdom seeker that I've enjoyed knowing and will continue to do so. But she's been really working with me on allowing rest, like active rest, like choosing rest instead of self-care. And so relax and unwind to me because I love the word unwind, again, coming back to why I love that it rhymes with grind because I see all of us so bound up, tight, right? The stress balls. Like your shoulders hurt. I know they do. Your neck hurts. You're getting headaches. You're tired. You're fatigued. I was going to do this podcast on entrepreneurial fatigue, but I just didn't even want to talk about it that much. But there's a very strong sense of it in many ways for a lot of women and especially right now. It's just been a long couple years you all. You need to rest.

But what we have to do is reinvent our relationship with rest. That rest is the not pass it. Rest is not hiding. There's a difference, right? We know when we're hiding. Do you know when you're hiding versus resting? Rest for me is when I walk out of my office and I go into my other rooms in my house and I talk to my kids who are home from school, catching up with them. It's eating dinner with them. Yeah, maybe it's getting a massage. Maybe it's getting my lashes done. I don't know, whatever. Although I stopped doing that. That's too much maintenance although I'm kind of wishing I was doing it again. Anyway, that's a side note.

But do you allow yourself rest without the guilt that comes with it? Do you allow yourself moments to unwind? To detangle? I did a class several years ago sort of how to untangle yourself because you're touching so many things all day, right? And the visual for me is like this, not a spider web, but like a, you know one of those string games that kids used to play and you walk over there and then you walk over there and then you walk over there. Before you know it, it's this just nest of strings all over the room. It's hard to untangle that. It's hard to unwind that. And you can't unwind unless you rest. Unless you consciously choose to believe that rest is equally if not more valuable to the performance and success of your business and you and your life.

And one of my clients today, Shannon, said, she used to be a fitness instructor and she said that when you're really pushing, when you're really working hard, that's when your muscles are breaking down. It's in the recovery, it's in the rest that your muscles get stronger. And I loved that. I loved it. But we have a very... I think this is just baked into who we are as a species that we're that farmer, right? You must reap to sow. You must do to earn. But to what end? It's never going to end if you don't end that. And then what happens is your business is dependent on your hustle. And you can't do that. It's not sustainable. And as hard as it is to tell that truth, it is the truth.

If you're where a lot of my clients are and including myself, you're getting to the point where you don't even know where things are in your business anymore. You don't even do a lot of the things in your business anymore. You wouldn't know how to do them. And I'm willing to bet if you're anything like me and other people I know, you feel sort of freaked out by that. Vulnerable, powerless. But that's not what your business needs of you anymore, right? You grew it beyond you. So in order to grow the business, you have to grow the woman running it. You've heard me say that so many times. But what if growth is not hustle love? What if growth is relaxing? And I don't mean relaxing and like lay on the couch and have someone feed you grapes, right? I mean like relaxing. This isn't a race. This isn't a sprint. This is a journey.

And to me, it's magic. To me, the fact that all of us listening to this who created a thing and then put the thing in the world and then people paid money for the thing. And then I had to hire people to help me deliver the thing. So now other people are making money because I had an idea in my brain and people's lives are changing because I had an idea in my brain. You don't think that's magic? Come on. That's as much magic as it gets. So when you lean into the magic part, it doesn't feel like grind, does it? Hustle? It's magic. And the energy of magic is so much more potent to me.

And the other thing about the difference between hustle and grind and relax and unwind is to me, one is fun and one is exhausting. And I don't want to be exhausted. I don't want to cross the finish line with $5 million in my pocket and not even remember what I did. I'd rather make the decision that I know what I can achieve regardless, but I'm going to do it this way. You might recall I did a podcast several months ago called The Way is the Win, right? That the win is really... That we want to find the win in the way that we do it. Not that we do everything we can to win. But that's an initially hard ask of ourselves because we feel like we're letting go. We're losing control. We're throwing caution to the wind.

When we know if I just do that thing, if I just say that thing, if I just write that thing, if I just show up on that thing, I just know I could make all the difference. And that, you know what? You could be absolutely right. But you know what you're not doing? You're not building the future of your business. You're just building today. You have to be at some point willing to relax and unwind yourself from all of the pieces and parts you've tangled yourself up in in your business and honestly, in your life. Why do women have such a hard time when their kids leave home? Empty nest, right? That's what we call it. It's because we're so tangled up in our kids' lives. And then our kids just walk away and all the little strings just follow the ground. A lot of women don't take the time to untangle before they go. So they're left there holding all these strings.

And I think there's a little bit of this empty nest or behavior that has to go on with a business. Can you let your business grow up? Can you challenge yourself to become an empty nesting founder of your business? You have to drop the hustle and grind to say yes to that question. But a lot of women buffer with their business. They're so used to that pace. They don't know what they'd do if they didn't have that. So they fill it. And I would just invite you to notice that the world is miraculous and there is so much you can pour your beautiful energy into. And by the way, as you nurture and seek your own joy and seek your own fulfillment and seek fun, it will spill into your business.

That's my word for 2022 is just fun. I want to have a hell of a lot of fun. I just want to have fun, right? Does that mean I'm going to ignore what's hard? Of course not. But I want everybody that I work with on my team to be asking like, "Are we having a good time here?" If we're not having fun, that bleeds throughout the entire team. And I know when I hustle and grind, I'm not having fun. What about you? Now, if you're answering yes to that, I'm going to invite you to really think about that or if you're just buffering with your business. I had a client who started with me this past January and she's like, "I don't know what I would do if I didn't work on my business." I'm like, "Right. That right there is interesting. Why is that?"

And that's one of the things that she said that's been the most powerful about this year is she now like has this balance she's never had before, right? She's going to work three days a week now. She never would've thought that was possible. So I think as we go into this new year, I believe firmly that women are the healers of the world. I've said that before. I believe that we need you healthy, wealthy, and strong. I believe that we need to help all of you seek and identify and indulge best in your own joy. Because as the women of the world experience all of that, it raises the overall vibration of the planet.

And I realized that sounds pretty lofty. That's what the world needs. So the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to relax and unwind and plan to do so. Give yourself that permission that this is equally if not more valuable to the future success of your business and yourself to spend time here as it is for you to spend with your nose down in a computer or in a notebook working. Can you do that? I'm really curious.

We are in the process of building our wait list for our next How to CEO advisory that we will be starting here in January. If you want to go to howtoceoregister.com, you'll find an opportunity to register for the wait list. I'm going to be talking more and more about How to CEO just so those of you who are new here know what it is, but what I would say mostly if you're not familiar with it is that How to CEO is really the only program of its kind that focuses on helping women like you who are running businesses like yours have the advice and support and counsel of experts to navigate building a team, redesigning a team, holding people accountable, having difficult conversations, figuring out who to hire, knowing when to fire. There's a lot I know that goes into running a company and I think a lot of women assume they should just know how to do these things.

And I just want you to know I think that's a lie. I think that everybody can learn, but I think sometimes we have to ask for help. So our new How to CEO advisory is launching in January. Go to howtoceoregister.com to put your name on our wait list and we will make sure that you know about some of the other cool opportunities we're going to have coming up in December. We're going to be offering some learning opportunities with us in advance of the registration opening. So if you're on the wait list, you'll be informed of that. So I would really encourage you to get on the wait list and then you'll have these invitations come to you to join us. And you'll get a chance to kind of meet me and understand little bit more about what goes on here.

But 2022 is going to be an incredible year and an awesome opportunity and time for you to invest in yourself and invest in your knowing when it comes to building a team that supports both the business and you so that you can continue to curate the goals that you have for both the business. So I'd love for you to join me. Thanks for tuning in today.