Grow with Soul: Episode 117 - The Magic Potion of Work IN Life
Welcome back to a slightly revamped and refocused Grow With Soul. In the last episode I hinted at the changes that were to come, and you will have already seen the new artwork and heard the new jingle so you’ll know that something is afoot. Today I thought that I’d expand a little more on what exactly it is I mean by “work in life”, as well as introduce you to my wonderful new guest co-hosts who you will start to hear from next week (we’ve already recorded a couple of the conversations and they are just wow).
What I talk about in this episode:
What I mean by work in life
Introducing my brand new Grow with Soul podcast co-hosts
Grow with Soul: Ep. 116 - I've Been Asking The Wrong Question - What's Next For Grow With Soul
Sasha Glasgow
Cait Flanders
Syreeta Challinger
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Read the episode transcript:
Welcome back to a slightly revamped and refocused Grow With Soul. In the last episode I hinted at the changes that were to come, and you will have already seen the new artwork and heard the new jingle so you’ll know that something is afoot. Today I thought that I’d expand a little more on what exactly it is I mean by “work in life”, as well as introduce you to my wonderful new guest co-hosts who you will start to hear from next week (we’ve already recorded a couple of the conversations and they are just wow).
So let’s start with work AND life. This is the norm we’re used to, the phrase that slips so readily off the tongue, the one that I have been using on this podcast for the last three years. We learn about work and life from four years old when we go from eternal play time to suddenly having our days cut in half. There is the time where we have to go to a different place and do things we don’t want to do, and only when we’ve sat it out to ten past three are we allowed to go home and run around or play with our toys or watch television. We have the time and place where we work, and the time and place where we live.
And we’re used to it by the time we progress into a workplace and it makes sense that for 8 hours a day we do work that perhaps we don’t really like and then we fit in our friends and family and hobbies and sports and rest around the outsides of those allotted times. It is looked down upon, deemed unprofessional to “bring your life into work” if you have a problem with the kids, or a relationship issue, or really bad period pains. This is the time and place for work, and your life must not encroach on it. Not that work has any problem encroaching on your life, of course. Whether explicitly, in staying late or 9pm emails, or the more implicit ways it weaves it’s roots into our life portions - when you meet someone new they ask what you do, and you reply “I am a …”, defining your entire self by your work.
Self-employment seems like a good solution - freedom to set your own hours and define that work/life balance for yourself. The trouble is that this new unboundaried way of working almost always has the opposite effect. With no set working hours in the office you can just do a little bit more, work through til bedtime, do a seven day week, send just another email. With no KPIs, job descriptions or managers there’s no limit to what we have to do each day - there is always still everything that needs doing. It’s because we’re so desperate to make it work, so conscious that we are entirely responsible, that that work//life balance inevitably tips towards work. And also because we unquestioningly know that work is something we have to push through in order to deserve our time playing out.
It feels innocent to say work/life balance or work and life; we know what we mean. We mean we want healthy boundaries and to turn off the laptop at a certain hour and take up painting without feeling guilty about it. But do we really mean that? Does it not, every time we give equal weight to work AND life in a sentence, consolidate the idea that they are two separate entities with separate times and places?
For me, work and life isn’t helpful, because they aren’t two separate things. We look at them as the two cups we hold each day and try to make sure that they each have the same amount of tea in them all day long (although for some reason it’s ok to top up the work cup with the life cup but not the other way round). When really, there aren’t two cups. There’s one washing up bowl that you’re using to make potions in the back garden; there’s just your life. And in it you put petals of your hobbies, glitter of your friends, potato peelings of admin, sprinkles of solitude, a slosh of work. There is only one container, and everything fits inside it. If you try to split that container in two, then all of your magic potion spills out.
I don’t want to lose my magic anymore. It’s taken me a long time to get here. Two and a half years ago I was all work and no life; I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted outside of work. I was trapped in a business (of my own making) that squeezed the life out of life - I couldn’t take the dog out for half an hour without worrying about making the time back up. I couldn’t access joy without guilt, I didn’t feel like I had any choice.
And now, I work a couple of hours a day, a couple of days a week. On a sunny day I will take off into the mountains for a hike and will feel nothing but joyful about it. I pick up the phone to my friends and head out for coffee. I have a bath at 3pm. I read in the sunshine. I enjoy writing a newsletter and crafting a sentence that just feels like it. My eyes prick with happy tears when a client describes how they chose themselves in their business for the first time. All of those things are mixed together in my magic potion - some days their quantities differ but they’re all, always there.
It’s a process. You’ve got to explore, without expectation or judgement, what you actually want. You’ve got to believe it’s possible, and that you deserve it. You’ve got to be clear on what it’s going to take, and you’ve got to prioritise radically to reclaim the time and space to begin living it now. You’ve got to restructure what you do and how you do it to turn your two cups into one washing up bowl. And you need to keep choosing it. Every person, message, expectation you meet is telling you to have a work and life. You need to maintain your commitment to having work IN your life.
And maybe that sounds like hard work (no pun intended), but here I am with this podcast to accompany you. Because although I just gave you a big old long list of things to do (and what I work with people on), you really only need to do one thing - remember. Not listen to this podcast one hour a week and then for the rest of the 167 hours go back to having a work and a life. Remember you have only a life, and your work is a magical, fulfilling PART of that life. So how are you going to embody that, in a tiny way, today? And tomorrow? And the next day?
If you’ve been listening to Grow With Soul before today, from now on there’s going to be a less formal approach. I’m not here to share to do’s and definitive answers, but muse with you on what I’m thinking about, share some concepts and stories that you can take and make your own flavour of magic potion with. There’s going to be permission and pep talks, as well as struggles and “I got it wrong”s. We’re going to talk about balance, prioritising, goals, time, planning, intuition, energy, fulfilment, mindset, confidence and all the intangible possibilities for your work in your life.
I’m also very excited to bring you conversations with my new guest co-hosts. I found myself no longer listening to straight question/answer interview shows, but instead the ongoing conversations from episode to episode of co-hosted podcasts. I wanted to stop scratching the surface and go in depth, over time with some of the most interesting people I know. I wanted to chat in an open and unstructured way about what work even is, how we feel about it in different seasons, how we’re building this life. And so, in between solo shows, I’ll be joined by Sasha, Cait and Syreeta for free, deep and sprawling conversations.
Sasha Glasgow, aka Frank and Feel, is a dreamer, doubter, doer, a writer, a journaler, and one of the most emotionally intelligent people I know. She hits me with insights that make me go “oh shit”, and I’m so thrilled to bring our long Skype conversations to you. Cait Flanders is an author and podcaster, big time outdoorsy person and advocate of opting out. She is so very thoughtfully spoken and unflinchingly honest and has such different perspectives on this self-employment thing. Syreeta Challinger, formerly of the store Moments Of Sense And Style and now podcasting and creating at Leaven, brings extraordinary strength with softness, hope through chaos and beautiful rawness. These episodes are going to be alchemy.