Flow + Hustle
How to overcome procrastination, overwhelm, and anxiety to perform at your best.
When we enter the corporate world, we learn to celebrate the people working 20 hour days, hustling to execute on an idea that will revolutionize the business, meeting the expectations of leadership. We aren’t taught about hustle’s partner, flow, and how powerful the combination of the two can be.
“You just go with the flow because life is just all about how you feel.”
1. Get into the best feeling place you can right now.
Take time to align your energy with your mission and goals. Alignment could be gratitude, journaling, working out, or listening to your favorite song. The key is to pick something that feels good to you before you begin to take action. When you start a project from a good feeling place, you are much more likely to think positively, opening you to explore your brilliance.
2. Get clear. Write down precisely what you want to accomplish and how it will feel when you do it.
The act of writing down what you are to accomplish can place you at ease. Often we add our thoughts to what needs to be done, and it can be hard to remember the specific ask. When this happens, we can make something seem a lot larger than the original request was. Going back, thinking about the request, and writing down can be so helpful in bringing clarity.
We also find this helpful when you don’t have a deliverable, but have been invited to contribute. We are big believers that contributing is a magical space of influencing, leading, and executing in which you bring forward a skillset or talent someone else needs.
Once you have clarity on the ask, write down how accomplishing this will make you feel. I will do _____ by ____, and I will feel _______ when it is accomplished.
3. Fears. Write down the concerns that are swarming around – do not skip this step!
Critical to the process, fear-setting is something we learned from Tim Ferriss. In this step, you are going to get out all of the fears you have surrounding this topic.
We encourage you to create a bullet point list and be honest with yourself. Here’s an example:
- This is a big opportunity, and it is all on my shoulders.
- What if I’m not good enough to do this? What if I don’t meet their expectations? Everyone else is smarter; what can I contribute?
- I’ve avoided this because I don’t even know where to start. It is so big, and such a short time frame, how can I also be successful?
Any of these feel familiar? It doesn’t feel great to live in this space, but it feels so much better when we do it in this flow process. Note, don’t go into spiral thinking of “they won’t like me, I’ll lose my job, etc.”; instead, concentrate on the project exclusively.
4. Re-position your fears. Restate your concerns as positive statements.
This bit is all about to bring love to yourself. Take the fears and rework into positive statements, empowered actions you are excited to take.
This might look like:
- I’m taking ideas and setting them up in the proper environment for insightful collaboration. I am going to learn so much in this process.
- This is exciting and dynamic – precisely what lights me up!
- I’m creating the first draft and crave collaboration and good thoughts. This doesn’t have to be perfect, and I’m just getting ideas on paper.
- I’m trying my best, and this can be enhanced.
- I’ve done this before, I know I can do it again.
- Others have done the work, and I can be the thread to bring this together in new ways no one else has thought of doing.
5. Capture right now statements. Write down the actions you are going to take.
Write down the actions you are going to do directly after this exercise. Make it small, manageable, and actionable. We like to include your clarity statement and items from the re-position a statement such as:
I will do _______ by _______ and I will feel ______ when it is accomplished. Right now, I’m going to do the first draft so that I can collaborate with executive leadership to get feedback. I’ve done this before, and I know that I can do it again! Let’s give it a go!
Now, go, give it a try and take action! We want to hear about how adding flow to your hustle transforms the way that you work. Comment below!