The “Work Is Hard” Myth
“This is work and work is supposed to be hard”. How many times have you told yourself that over the course of your business? Perhaps substituting hard for painful, or miserable, or just a feeling that it’s not supposed to be fun? It might be something you’ve used to justify not doing a project that you were really excited about, or it might be the reason you agreed to do something your whole body was ringing alarm bells about. It’s work, and work is supposed to be hard.
That was my mantra for a long time: that work was inherently something you didn’t want to do or that was a bit miserable because otherwise why should you get paid for it? It wasn’t really a conscious belief either, more an unquestioned truth that guided me to take on too much client work, and create what I thought others would want, and cancel fun days out on the off chance a client might need me. It made me feel guilty for enjoying parts of my work, and then cut down on the time I spent on them because if it felt good it couldn’t be proper work (I feel like this was a hangover from my first content creation job where we were only allowed to spend 30 minutes writing blog posts instead of product descriptions).
Perhaps this is true in traditional employment. Not that I think it should be, but when you’re in an office with other people and working on projects you wouldn’t choose, perhaps it is more reasonable to assume you’re getting paid because this isn’t what you’d be spending your day doing otherwise. But in that case, surely the experience of self-employment should be the opposite? When the only boss making you do things is you, surely the privilege there is choosing to do things you actually like?
For me, I quickly started to resent the self-imposed “have to”s. I didn’t want to “have to” spend 8 hours at a desk, I didn’t want to “have to” relegate my own wants or feel guilty for having an afternoon off, I didn’t want to “have to” say yes to things I didn’t really want to do. And finally, miraculously, after years of resenting them, I started to question them.
Because truly, what is the point of self-employment if you’re not enjoying it? When you’re forsaking a regular wage and an office bake off and maybe medical insurance, there has to be some kind of pay off. And for me, the best payoff is to work aligned with my values and enjoying what I do. When I set joy and fulfilment as the ultimate goal of my business (as opposed to perpetual growth), it became easier to let go of the ‘have to’s. I embraced a more casual working day of things not hours, I stopped cancelling my coffee dates with friends, I said no to unpaid speaking events with two days of travel. I now look at my to do list each week and can’t quite believe that the majority of it is to create things – which is what I wanted to do in the first place.
Important caveat here is that it doesn’t have to be, nor can it possibly be, joyful 100% of the time. Believe it or not, sorting out an error with course software does not spark joy for me. But the distinction is that it’s a small, annoying part of a much more joyful whole. Joyful working, for me, means spending much more time doing what I want to do, rather than what I don’t.
So what about you? How can you engineer your business to a place where you feel joyful?
The first step is to be clear on what you really want. This is harder than it sounds because what we think we want changes with the wind – it depends what mood we’re in, what that person who triggers us is doing this week, whether or not we have a holiday to pay for. We also tend to figure “what we want” based on what it looks like and the accoutrements we have thanks to capitalism, which also means that what fulfilment looks like can change with trends and it can feel like you’re never able to reach it.
We need to figure what we want from the inside out. Rather than focus on what it looks like, get clear on what it feels like. This can be fairly easily done by drilling down into what you want your fulfilment shopping list to do for you. Perhaps fulfilment to you looks like buying a house – but what do you want that house for? Is it for security, to feel grounded and settled? Is it because you want to decorate or have more space for projects, and if so do want that because you want creativity and aesthetics in your life?
When you have the feelings (in this case security, grounding, creativity), you can use them as your focus. You can work towards having them in the future, whether by buying a house or some other goal, and you can work on having them in your everyday now. Make time for small creative projects, get out into your local area and find a spot that’s “yours” to feel grounded, look at creating a financial check in ritual to make you feel more secure. When what you really want is a feeling, you don’t have to wait – you can have it now.
What I’ve described here are the first and fourth stages of the Inward Attainment Map. In the first stage, Align, we shift from what joy looks like to what it feels like, using our values and purpose to create an emotive vision of how you want to feel in the future and every day. And then in Ascend, the fourth stage, we practice Towards and Within – the practice of working towards your vision whilst simultaneously living within it. Between these two stages you also need to pass Accept, where you confront and work with your blocks about whether this is possible for you, and Apply, where you create a practical plan of how you’re going to work Towards and Within. With just a few shifts of perspective and approach, and a little how-to knowledge, it is possible for you to experience joyful working, without guilt. Because work doesn’t have to be hard – it has to be worth it.
(If you’re desperate to have more joyful work and want to build your confidence to claim it, then The Trail was made for you. Get on the waitlist here.)
