That is not lazy
In April, I posted a question on Instagram asking followers to tell me one thing they learned about themselves during the pandemic. People added comments about the importance of boundary-setting, reflecting on their blessings, digging into self-validation, celebrating busy-ness and the joys of working from home— the thread is really lovely and it reflects champion hearts choosing themselves after a year of living with many things outside of our collective control.
But one response in particular stuck with me:
“I am not interested in a full time work schedule. It doesn’t work for me & that is not lazy, it is allowing me to follow other interests.”
AD has figured out what schedule best fits her life, and it’s not a traditional 40 hour work week. What an incredible discovery to make, and what a privilege it is to say TO THE INTERNET that “it doesn’t work for me” and putting something in place that does. And the time that she’s not formally at work she’s using to invest in things that round out what makes her a badass, unapologetically.
Gosh, does this hit me in all of the feeling places.
I left a good corporate job because I didn’t want to hustle on someone else’s terms anymore. I wanted the “oh, just one more thing”-ness of it all to be for me, for my goals and for my future. I wanted to balance work against my extracurricular interests in a healthier, more integrated manner. When I established up Uproar, I envisioned how each day and each week could flow, and it was something less-than-traditional and in a style reflective of my leadership and values. Much like AD’s full-time schedule, the traditional structures of a job weren’t melting my butter anymore.
Here’s the thing: when you’re starting out on your own or taking on a new role, you can follow the books and blogs about how to set up and go about your business. When you’re reaching up, you can feel inclined to try everything because “everything has worked for everyone else before”. You can model your life or your business after the environment you’ve left. You can fall into your own bad habits or marketing funnel and reestablish your bookkeeping tech and pivot hard and constantly. You don’t have to, but you can do these things.
You’ll try and fail and try and learn and try again. You’ll bump into things.
It will hurt.
You will hurt.
It stops hurting when you embrace that the way you want to conduct business is unique to you, to your style, to your product, and to your goals and values. It stops hurting when you embrace that the full-time-work-schedule-as-methaphor doesn’t work for you, but something else does that’s more uniquely aligned to your particular brand of badassery.
The moment you embrace that your non-traditional or less-than-traditional approach is the right approach for you is the moment that you’ll feel it all click into gear. Allow yourself the grace and the space to do business by your informed rules and in your way.
That. Is. Not. Lazy.
It’s boss.
