Ep 152: The Moment I Knew Hustling Was No Longer Worth It For Me–And How It’s the First Step to a 3 Day Workweek For You, Too : Business Streamlining for Work-Life Balance
Episode Summary
Are you waiting for a personal wake-up call to leave hustle culture behind for good?
If you’re an ambitious woman entrepreneur who keeps promising yourself you’ll slow down “soon,” this episode shows why that promise never sticks—and how you can borrow my personal wake-up call (so you don’t have to go through it yourself!) to help you create both a growing business and a life you actually remember living.
In this episode you will:
Discover the single sentence that surprised me in a quiet desert—and why it became the non-negotiable that led me to create my 3-day workweek
Hear the unexpected result of waiting for a better time rather than starting now
Learn why the first step to working less has nothing to do with your calendar—and everything to do with a simple choice
Press play to start designing the intentional workweek that lets you earn, live and enjoy summer on your terms.
Resources Mentioned:
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This podcast dives into the potential of balancing a business and life without sacrificing revenue or impact. It helps women business owners and mompreneurs overcome overwhelm, decision fatigue, and the guilt of working less and stepping away from hustle culture while increasing leadership, strategic decision making, alignment and delegation / team building. Learn to build powerful habits and mindset, embrace smarter and higher vibration work methods, and master time management by streamlining tasks, implementing business systems, and even prioritising self-care. We explore efficiency and energetics, productivity and filling your cup, automation and where to personalize your efforts … all to reduce overworking, and finally take time off—without the fear or shame—whether that is with high-ticket offers, scalable offers, or passive income. Say goodbye to imposter syndrome and people pleasing while running a small business: It's time to shift your mindset, reclaim your work-life balance, and thrive!
Full Episode Transcript:
Jenna Harrison: [00:00:00] In this episode, you'll discover the very moment that I knew hustling just wasn't worth it for me anymore, launching my transition into a three day work week. A whole new way of living. Welcome to the three Day Work Week, helping women entrepreneurs run profitable, meaningful businesses in just three days a week if they like, without stress, guilt, or sacrificing growth.
I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, sharing practical strategies, mindset hacks, and even some woo, to help you work smarter leap boldly and find true balance. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome to the three day work week. You know, sometimes it is the very, very quietest voice in you. That launches the biggest change in your life?
That was the case for me when I realized that hustling just wasn't worth it for me anymore. I've been a guest on a few podcasts recently, and that is always the first question they asked me. Like, what was the moment that things changed for you? And so I thought, huh, if this [00:01:00] is something people are interested in, maybe you are interested in it too.
Or maybe like me, you've already had that moment, but you're having trouble actually living into it. I feel that because there were so many things that needed to shift in my mindset, in my way of working, and even energetically for me to live the way that I do now most often, because of course I'm human and in no way perfect, and I don't always live like this, but chances are I do more frequently than you do, which is why you're here.
So in this episode, you'll discover the single sentence that surprised me in a quiet desert and why it became the non-negotiable that transformed my entire business model. You'll hear the unexpected result of waiting for a better time rather than starting now, and you'll learn why the first step to working less has nothing to do with your calendar and everything to do with a simple choice.[00:02:00]
But before we dive in to get really meta, what I'm doing right now is exactly the kind of thing that I never would've done before, this moment that I'm about to share with you. But it's exactly the kind of thing that makes my shorter work weeks possible. And what I'm doing is I'm just turning on the mic and talking.
Typically, my podcast is where I do like to put some extra thought into it. I'm a person who tends to go off on tangents. And I'm a very associative thinker, so I see different connections between many different things, and while I get it, in my mind, my work has really been to simplify and I consider it such a gift when I can condense what I'm saying into something very palatable and succinct for you, because you're probably very busy.
And I know that if you tend to look at an episode that's 40 minutes versus another one that's [00:03:00] 15, and you can gain the same type of takeaways from both, then it's my gift to you to give it to you in its condensed form. However, there are times where you wanna be able to choose not to. Like now, my mom has been visiting us and this is her last week with us, and I just wanna spend a lot of time with her.
And isn't it great that we've built a flexible business that can support that, but also a flexible mind that can support that? And I've built the capacity to just turn on my mic and start talking in a way that I wouldn't have been able to earlier. I wanted to let you in on the behind the scenes because I know it's important for more and more of us to show it's possible, especially if we've had perfectionist tendencies in the past and let's call 'em very high standards for ourselves, and we're used to performing very highly.
We forget that what might seem very simple for us to talk about [00:04:00] or simple for us to share might still be deeply impactful for somebody else. I remember being in a small mastermind once with some very successful entrepreneurs. Okay, so see here I go on a tangent. This is what happens when I don't have tight bullet points, but this is important because.
These two women had very successful podcasts and they talked about how it was just too much for them and they decided not to do it anymore, and wasn't it wonderful that they didn't have to stick to like a masculine version of consistency, that they could just start coming on whenever they wanted to, to drop a podcast, even if that was only every month or every two months.
And I just got a hit to share something with them. And I said, do you think that would still be what you wanted to do? If you felt that you could just turn on your mic, talk for five minutes and that would be worth it and wonderful for your audience? And they said, oh, yes, yes. It would still be the same.
This is just what I wanted do. But I wondered, and it's interesting because now when I [00:05:00] look at their podcasts, they don't actually drop episodes. Not saying at all that you have to put, be consistent and put things out weekly with anything you do, but just that you always really wanna get clean and understand your motivations before making a change like that.
So this is just an invitation to you to also start sampling some different ways of working. But what I really wanted to share with you was this story about when it hit me. So to set the scene, I was not a person who got into entrepreneurship because I wanted to work fewer hours. I got into entrepreneurship because I felt a very strong calling.
I wanted to see what was possible for myself in life, how far I could go. I didn't want caps on my salary in corporate. I didn't want caps on anything. I didn't want caps on my location. Independence. I wanted flexibility and freedom, and I also wanted to spend my waking hours doing something that meant something to me.
I've talked before about how when I was in [00:06:00] the fashion industry, I was just producing more clothes and I kept wondering, does the planet need more clothes? Is this really what I came here to do? And so once I did have the courage to step out of that, I was full steam ahead. I created the clarity for myself about what this really was going to be, and I was all in.
The problem is that I had a newborn. I had a newborn and I had a lot of demons too. A lot of demons telling me that if I were to fail, that would mean that maybe I wasn't cut out for this work, or maybe I wasn't cut out for greatness in any way. Maybe I'd been diluting myself. I had a lot of fear about becoming dependent on a man, and I was carrying a lot of scarcity and not having a steady paycheck really activated all of that.
My ancestors had been very poor, and so I had just grown up with this idea that the rug can get pulled out from you at any [00:07:00] moment. And so all of this combined with the schedule of breastfeeding a newborn meant that I started driving myself harder and harder and harder, and I ended up working nap times and evenings until about 10 30 or 11 at night.
My husband used to have to like pull me out of my office. And I did that for two years straight. I look back on it and I'm just like, what was I thinking? But I know that I wasn't thinking, I was just reacting. I was in survival mode. And in fact, the only night I would take off was Friday evenings to watch a movie with my husband, but only because I felt so guilty for being an absent wife.
Well then I had an opportunity to go on a business retreat. And the way this was set up, I couldn't not go. We were going to get all of our content done for the next quarter or year. I don't remember what it was, but I just thought it would save so much time and it'd be great networking and all the things.
So I rationalized [00:08:00] my way into something that my soul was deeply longing for, which was a break. And when you're used to go, go going, then at first it's really jarring when you try and turn down the tempo. But after a few days, I started to relax. I started to notice things around me again. I started to actually feel joy and feel presence and love and all those things that people talk about that we're supposed to live for and we're supposed to be high vibe, but in the day to day, it's so hard to make it happen.
In the last day or two of this retreat, we were in the desert, and I remember sitting outside at sunset. It was pure stillness. There was not a sound to be heard, and I was just absorbing the beauty thinking, why hadn't I done this a long time before? 'cause I also noticed the creativity I was feeling and the inspiration and the, the ideas I was having from my business.[00:09:00]
And in that pure silence, I finally heard a little voice that I hadn't been able to hear until then. 'cause often your soul does speak to you in a whisper, and if you don't slow down, you'll never hear it. And all it said was, I don't want to go back. I don't wanna go back. And I didn't mean back to being a mom.
I meant back to that experience of life. That low grade constant anxiety or even panic and exhaustion. But what if I'd been chasing the wrong thing all along? What if my experience of living was the true measure of success? Growing up, my dad was a military pilot and when I was very young, we lived in a test base where they were testing new aircraft and new features, and unfortunately.
There were failures that caused death. I remember when the little girl next door, who was in my class, when her father was [00:10:00] killed, and a couple weeks later they were just gone. I know this is morbid. But it really helped us all understand how precious life was and how precious relationships were. So for instance, we had a standing rule in our house that we, my dad could not leave for work with any of us still being angry or not talking to each other.
We always had to make up before dad would leave. And so from a young age, it was really instilled into me that life is so precious and we just don't know how much time we have left. And yet somehow I'd gotten to the point where years had just gone by in a blur. Until here I was in the desert hearing. I can't go back.
I don't want to go back to that now. At the time, I really thought that that meant, I don't wanna go back to that way of living in, you know, with those circumstances or in the rat race culture. Of the United States. I didn't yet know that all of that hustle was a [00:11:00] state of mind, and from then on it was not a linear.
And from then on, I'll be honest, it was not an abrupt change, and it wasn't even a linear movement from hustle to non hussle because I really had nobody around me that could model it. I didn't even know anyone around me that was striving for that. I certainly didn't know anybody who believed they could make whatever they wanted to happen with intention and diligence and reverse engineering.
It would've been laughable if I'd said, I wanna double my income working half the hours. It just wasn't what I was talking about with any of the other entrepreneurs I knew, but it's okay that it didn't happen as quickly as I wanted to, that I had to figure things out. I invested in coaching that I went through therapy that I trialed and errored my way through because now I get to live here.
When I can cut off early and go walk over and pick my son up from school [00:12:00] without feeling guilty, I know it's worth it. When something big happens in my life that's going to take a lot of my time out and I don't spiral into fear about whether that's going to affect my revenue or results, I know it's worth it.
And when I take an entire morning or an entire day off and I go hiking in the mountains, and I actually feel excited for the downloads that I'm going to get and how fun and easy it's going to be to create that next piece of content or that podcast episode because of it, I feel grateful. So for anyone who just feels like they're longing and yearning for something different.
They too are having that voice saying, I can't go back, or I just can't do this anymore. I just wanna let you know you're now crazy. You can create your own uncommon way. You can create the business that looks however you [00:13:00] want it to look, and your work to set your future self up for success isn't to try and get to some end goal as quickly as possible.
Then it's gonna be really challenging to break those habits later 'cause you'll have even more skin in the game, even more at stake. Your work to set your higher self up for success is to start now. Listen, the moment I gave myself permission to stop hustling, that was the moment everything I wanted became possible.
Alright, my friends, if you are feeling the call to a different way of living and working, because you too are realizing that when you look back on your life, how you experienced it will matter more to you than how busy you were able to look. And maybe you're just audacious enough to think that. Perhaps you can create the results you want with even the less time, then that's exactly why I've created a [00:14:00] slate of new tools to help you launch your own transition into working smarter, not harder.
These new offers are going to be launched in June over the course of one week exactly when you're heading into summer and working less and can really use support like this. So make sure to get on the wait list, because then if you do end up purchasing something during the days of deals, you'll also get a personalized audit from me.
I'm gonna go through your website, your socials, and really help you make powerful tweaks to bring in sales more naturally and organically so that sales won't feel like work. We'll link to it in the show notes, of course. But it's at the uncommon way.com/dod. Bonus days of deals bonus. Tune in again on Tuesday for even more ways to create a shorter work week.[00:15:00]
Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the clarity first strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit the uncommon way com. See you next time.
