Hello, and welcome to the Limitless Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Nicole Laino. And we’re here today, just you and me for a little solo episode. Now I want to talk a little bit about hustle culture, and what hustle really means. And I have a lot of experience with hustle, and maybe you do too. 

Maybe you have experienced being so busy, being so in pursuit of something, feeling overwhelmed by all the things that you have to do. And just feeling like there’s not enough hours in the day, feeling like you have to continually do and level up, expanding your team, all of these things that can feel really daunting even when they’re supposed to be expanding. 

So if you feel that way, then then this episode is going to speak to you probably in a very, very deep way. Now, I have my own experience with this, and I have it at many levels of my life. Now, for a long time, my motto was, I’ll outwork anybody. I will outwork anybody, nobody’s gonna outwork me. I had it when I was in corporate America, I had that motto, when I went back out to LA to act, when I went back into entrepreneurship, with that mentality, because I thought that was what was necessary. That was the key to winning, that that was the ticket. 

And why? Well, kind of, because that’s sort of what we’re taught. But it was also the way that I look at it, too. I have a very blue collar background, I have a very blue collar upbringing. My father worked a manual labor job, my mother, she ended up working in an office, but you know, very lower to middle class upbringing. And so that feeling that you work for every hour, you work for every dollar, nothing comes for free. And the harder you work, the more that you make. But there’s definitely a cap to how much you make. 

Now, I didn’t really believe in the cap, I always believed that there was so much more available to me, I always believed that I could achieve more than what I could see, there was something innately in me that knew that. That just said, “Don’t trust what you say, trust what you know, and go after it with all that you have.” Now, that’s where the teaching and conditioning came in. Because it was this blue collar upbringing merged with a deep desire to be and experience more than my circumstances had dictated, which then turned into a seemingly successful career on Wall Street in corporate America. 

Now, corporate America, you’re rewarded for how many hours you log, you’re rewarded for your hustle, you’re rewarded for being a go-getter. There’s actually things on your review that talk about, you know, like, how hard you work. And usually, there are some comments in there, you know, she worked so hard. She’s always here, I remember that that was like this badge of honor. And I worked literally 12 to 14 hour days every day. And there was the sense of pride that I got from it. 

And even moving into entrepreneurship, could I work until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore? There was this sense of accomplishment, there was the sense of satisfaction about it, like I was getting somewhere as a result of this hustle. But what actually happens when I look back on it, when I look back on the time in my entrepreneurial career, the time in my corporate career, on what hustle really is, and when I see people doing it now, when I see clients coming to me with burnout, when I see people who are just–they can’t see the path any further than the hustle will take them. 

Because what happens is, you get into something feeling like well, I’ll just work harder than everybody. And you’re working as hard as you can. And you’re going and you’re going and you’re going and eventually you realize that you are tapped out. That there’s no way for you to do more. And then you look at how much you have to spend, and your revenue coming in, and who can you afford to hire. And you realize that some people aren’t able to do everything that you need, and you can’t hire all the help that you need necessarily right away. And maybe you step into that and you do hire and you put yourself out there and hire the right people and you get people on board. But eventually you’re looking at it and you’re going, I just don’t know how we get past this point. 

This happens with a lot of people at that six-ish figure mark, where you’re saying I kind of can’t figure out how to get past this mark. And you’ve probably heard people say that you can hustle your way to six figures, but you can’t hustle your way to seven. And there’s a reason for that. Because it requires an expansion of your mind to get to those higher levels, it isn’t an expansion of your effort. Because you can’t expand your effort anymore, you’ve kind of maxed out on it. 

And when I look back, and when I look at people who are clearly into hustle culture, or maybe just realizing now that they want to come out of it, that they’re like, I know there’s a better way. And that’s usually what happens. That’s what happened for me, where you come to this point, and maybe you look around and you see other people who aren’t doing it that way, who don’t seem to be hustling quite as hard, who don’t have a team of 17 people, they’re not burned out, and they’re making the money that you want to make. And you say, Okay, there’s clearly a better way, I don’t quite know how to get there, but I see it. 

And the other difficult thing is you might hire one of those people, but they might not be able to teach you this part. Because this is the part of expansion. This is the part of letting go. And when you’re so entrenched in hustle culture, and it’s part of who you are, and it is part of your identity. It certainly was mine, I was a person who would outwork anybody that was my identity, because it made me successful. So I became attached to it, because it worked. And I wanted to continue, I wanted to have things continue to work. 

So what do I do? Well, I had to detach from that identity. But when you’re entrenched in it, and when it is so, so much part of your identity, it can be very difficult to understand how you expand in a different way, how you expand beyond just doing more stuff. And it can be difficult for somebody to teach you how to expand because your instinct is to ask, “Well, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And when they say work less, enjoy your life more, that can feel a little like well, but I have things to do. And I have a company to run and how is this going to work? 

It can help sometimes to look at things from this perspective. Because what I’m explaining, I have come through this completely this whole process. And the clarity that I have on it is pretty profound right now. And so much is coming together and so much is being shown to me every single day, through this process of letting go. And having done this for a while, hustle is nothing more than chasing love. Chasing love, chasing fulfillment. And whenever we’re chasing something, we’re not believing that we’re good enough for it just to come to us. That we’re trying to prove something. Hustle to me has this very deep link with trying to prove our worth. And the first step in understanding, in the letting go, in expansion, because you’re talking about expansion of yourself, which will then lead to expansion of your world. 

And when you’re looking to expand, it’s going to come from your feeling of innate worthiness, your feeling of not needing to prove anything to anyone. The belief that by being you and by leaning into your gifts, into your innate strengths, into your higher frequency, into the highest expression of who you are, that that alone will do more of the work for you. I sort of, the way that I look at this is flow is the new hustle. 

Flow is the new hustle. Because when you experience flow, you’re not alone. It’s innately part of it. Because if you think about the flow, if you think about a river, if you think about anything that flows and you think about a river flowing down its natural course and the natural channel that it is. If you are in flow with that river, you are in the river, you are in this bigger thing than you, you are being carried by it. And you are allowing it to take you on the journey that you’re meant to go on. 

When you’re in hustle mode, you’re taking on all of the responsibility on yourself. You are feeling like you are running this thing alone even if you have it all around you, even if you have a team and even if you have some support, you are feeling like, it all comes down to you. And that in and of itself is going to hold you back. That in and of itself is going to cause you to continually shift back into hustle. And when we believe more in the hustle, you’re not going to be able to pull back, you’re not going to be able to because you’re believing, you’re leaning into this feeling like it all comes down to me. 

So it’s going to still keep you up at night, when you haven’t done something, it’s still going to make you feel like the list just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. Because as you want to achieve more, you’re going to add more things to that list. But when we want to achieve more, coming at it from a place of how do I expand into this bigger vision for myself? How do I expand into that? And the difference between the two is that your belief that whatever you do when you’re in flow, instead of in hustle, you are tuning into the things that truly means something to you, that you feel are an expression of your best self. And you know that when you are in an expression of your best self, that the effort you put in is magnified. That this is what the co-creation is all about. It is about you doing your part, and the universe meeting you halfway or more. Where you put in the effort and when you do it in that level of energy, when you do in the energy of flow, when you are working in that. That’s how you remain consistent. 

Because when you’re in flow, it’s easy to do all the things you need to do. Because you’re not thinking about necessarily what needs to be done. You’re thinking about it from a very, very different place. It’s not just tackling a list every day. It’s about how do I show up as the best version of myself, what would have the greatest impact today? 

Because you’re listening, when you are in flow, you’re listening to your inner voice, you’re listening to that inner knowing and when you’re in hustle mode, you are believing more in what the outside world is telling you than what you know yourself. You’re leaning into all of the “shoulds” the feeling of I have to do this thing in order to get this thing. And when you’re in that mode, you’re actually silencing that inner voice, you’re silencing that deeper knowing, you’re silencing your soul. 

And what’s actually happening is you’re in this pursuit of something bigger, so you shift into hustle. So you’re like, I have to do do do do do. And doesn’t mean that we don’t, we don’t work hard. It just means that we’re doing it in very intentional ways, and not for the sake of working hard. Because we’ve tricked ourselves or convinced ourselves or conditioned ourselves into believing that the only way to get what we want is to work till our eyes bleed and we have absolutely no energy left in us. If that’s the belief, that’s what you’ll get. 

But rather, putting in the work in the energy of, I know that this is serving me, and I know that this is serving me on all levels, and I know that I’m expanding into this greater version of myself, that’s when you can shift into flow. But what happens is we go in with the pursuit of something bigger, we shift into hustle because we think that is the only way but in reality, it’s the hustle that keeps you small. It is the hustle that keeps you small, it does not expand you. It limits you. 

When you shift into flow, when you can get in tune with that, then you will feel what expansion feels like. That is when the clients show up. That is when everything you do has this greater impact. So I want you to take that away from this episode. Flow is the new hustle. If you can get into deeper and deeper flow, and here’s a little affirmation for you to say to yourself–I connect to a deeper sense of flow and trust in me every day. When I connect to my flow, when I connect to myself more and more opportunities come to me effortlessly. 

If you can start saying that if you can start believing that and tuning into that, that is where tiny shifts will be made. And you will start to shift over from the feeling and the belief that it has to be this hustle way. And you will slowly start to move over into the center, where you will be able to touch the flow state. And that’s the difference, when you can start making that shift, that is when exponential growth is possible, not just incremental growth like it is with the hustle. Okay? 

So I hope that you found this useful, I hope that kicking off this new year that this gets you into the belief, into the knowing that if you enter 2022 in flow, and you make flow, one of your number one priorities, that you will make 2022 your breakout year. This is how you do it. 

And if you want to dive deeper, we are doing a non-planning planning session called Future Impact. That’s an impact on you, impact on your family, impact on your business, impact on your life, really looking at the impact that you want to have all around. The impact on your audience, the impact on your clients, your 360 degree view of your impact. And looking at 2022 from a very different lens, from the lens of flow, from the lens of leaning into your gift rather than leaning into the hustle. And being able to plan your year out where you have both space for spontaneous and inspired moves. But also enough structure around you that it leaves space for you to be creative. So you don’t automatically shift back into hustle because you’re afraid that you don’t know what you’re doing, which can certainly happen. I’m going to show you some tools using human design, and some other tools that I have developed for myself and for my clients that help get you into this space of a creative expansion for the year, with things for you to do, things for you to give your team to do. But also for you to tune into yourself every day and to have a direction and to feel good about the work you’re doing day in and day out. 

Now, there’ll be a link inside the show notes for you to register for that workshop. It’s going to be this Thursday, January 6. So if you’re, if you’re listening to this after, please hop into our Facebook group, there’s a link for that in the show notes as well, where you can stay up to date with all of this information, please follow me on Instagram. And follow me on Facebook if you’d like to stay up to date with all of the things that we are doing. And to stay in tune with this. We also have many programs and other things that will help you, we have a money manifestation course coming up. And we also have a money manifestation challenge. So this is going to be actually an action oriented challenge called Money Moves, where we are going to get you into the state of taking action in alignment with your flow all at the end of January. 

So please tune in for all of that, reach out to us if you’d like more information on that please reach out to us or check out my Instagram where all of that stuff is available. I love you all. I’m so grateful for you. I cannot wait to see what everybody creates in 2022. And I’m very excited for this year. I honestly, I have very good feelings about it. That there is so much available to all of us. And if you step into what you know is yours already, it is destined to come to you. 

So everyone, remember you are only limited by the limitations that you accept. And when you stop accepting those limitations. That’s when you become limitless. So go out there and be limitless everyone. I will see you on the next episode.