When you talk about your work goals, do you only talk about the achievements? The “big moments” like when you’ll talk on stage, publish a book, win an award, or sell your business. Or maybe about how your achievements will impact lives and you’ll change them for the better.
Do you ever make more mundane goals about your daily life? What do you hope your average Tuesday will look like in the future?
Those big moments, they come and pass, people’s lives are changed, and everyone celebrates the wins. A week later, you’ll still be answering e-mails, dealing with a software bug, and having a work colleague drop the ball. How you feel on the average workday is what you have to live with the rest of the time before and after the achievements. It’s incredibly important and you owe it to yourself to think about it because if you feel like shit on the average day, then that’s the main energy you bring to the world.
If you struggle to imagine a future workday or don’t know how it could feel pleasurable, don’t worry, that’s not a personal failing on your part. There’s a lot of false urgency in our society and a lot of people have been disconnected from what healthy work habits look and feel like. It’s built into the system at this point and it can be hard to visualize something that you’ve never been exposed to. Unlearning stressful work habits and creating relaxed environments is exactly what I hope to guide you towards. Work can’t always be fun, far from it, but it sure as fuck can be a lot more enjoyable than how most people live it now.
What’s the approach?
If people were deeply connected to their bodies and emotions, I would have nothing to teach (and nothing to learn). Evolution has given us all kinds of pleasures that we can experience through working. Because for most of human history, work was hunting, foraging, and survival, so it was kind of important that we be motivated to do it. Unfortunately, our ancestors seem to have been in a rush creating this world and built something where we feel psychologically like we’re always under attack. It has disconnected so many people from those feelings of pleasure, and created all kinds of twisted relationships to work. From total avoidance and living for the weekend to hustle culture and never taking time to rest. I work from two angles to help you develop an authentic relationship to work.
Hacks to improve your situation now
I have a ton of hacks based on research I’ve read, productivity books, and experiments me or my clients have had success with. In session we will look at your sleep hygiene, discuss habit formation, how to enter flow states, how to develop skills, talk about circadian and menstrual hormonal cycles, and other concrete tools that will give you a leg up.
But hacks are just hacks. They aren’t sustainable and they don’t work long term because every new situation you encounter will need a new hack. If you’ve ever tried an app blocker to cut down on your social media use, you likely know the experience of seeing its effectiveness diminish over time. While hacks can free up time and create space, they take cognitive energy to implement. My theory is that that energy cost is why we stop using hacks in the long run even when they’ve worked for us in the past.
Observing ingrained belief systems
The amount of shame, guilt, and anxiety around work is distressing. We’ve tied up our identities and sense of value to the output at our desk and dollars in our bank accounts. It’s no wonder talking about your job during the holidays or at a party can be so taboo. Unfortunately, we need to talk about it, especially in moments when we aren’t stressed so we have a fighting chance of thinking clearly.
So many people feel stuck in one way or another, and staying silent about it only leads to deeper isolation and even bigger shame over not being able to figure it out on their own. A coaching session with me is a place where you can unload your insecurities and private thoughts and start to make sense of bigger patterns so you can break out of them. I fucking love talking about work and there’s no taboo around it in my sessions 😄
Beyond creating space to talk openly, I’ll also invite you to challenge your limiting beliefs when they come up. Helping you build your own belief system instead of just inheriting the model that society gave to you that just isn’t working for you anymore. This is where the real magic starts to happen and emotional behaviours like procrastination begin to melt off on their own without any hacks. As you begin to reconnect with your emotional body and actually feel your real needs, you’ll become more resilient, set clear boundaries, and adapt to new stressors naturally.
Practical Details about the coaching
First few sessions (bi-weekly frequency suggested):
- We analyze your current work habits.
- Education about how your brain works (in a super nerdy way or in a casual way, your choice!)
- Hacks and experiments to improve your current situation.
- We aim to get you enough space to breathe so you can get out of survival mode.
Deeper work (monthly frequency suggested)
- Begins once you have the emotional space needed to challenge your core beliefs.
- Dig into shame, guilt, and work anxieties.
- You turn into a relaxed badass and start teaching me things 😎
My mission and my guarantee
This work is political for me. It’s my mission to help you feel good at work so that even as you bring incredible projects to life, you still have the emotional space to care for the people around you. So that as your career develops and you get into leadership roles, your capacity to care for the people under your charge leads to you treating them fairly and creating healthy work environments for them.
If me working with you isn’t helping that cause then I won’t push anything just to make a dollar off you. If during any session, even the first, you or I realize that I am not the right guide for you, I will not charge you for that session. It will have been my pleasure to simply be another experiment in your journey towards feeling more joy.
