Ep #262: Hard Work Vs. Hustle

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 262.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal™ Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well hello my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday and happy New Year. It’s 2023. Are you ready? Let’s go. Right, this is a very short and sweet episode. I’m going to talk about the difference between hustle and hard work. Many people come to me saying that they are exhausted from overworking, that they no longer can continue this cycle of exhaustion, overworking, overwhelm. They’re trying to solve all the problems at once, fix everything, come up with solutions, do what everybody tells them to do, people please, and they can’t take it anymore. A lot of people hire me to try and figure this out.

They think that they can outwork their stress, or that they can outwork people pleasing, right. If they just work hard enough, everybody will be happy. If they just do more or spend more time at work or work faster. They think that they’re going to reach a point at which they can hustle and outwork themselves to get to the other side. There is a difference between hustle and hard work. Take this in for a second.

Hustle is when you are trying to outrun your lack of trust in yourself and others and the process. When you are caught up in the overwhelm cycle, and you are hustling, which means you’re overworking, you’re over exerting, you’re overextending yourself to the point of exhaustion, to the point of burnout, to the point of complete unhappiness and job dissatisfaction.

When you’re hustling, the reason you’re hustling is you’re trying to compensate for a lack of trust. Either you don’t trust yourself to get it all done and to schedule it out and get it done on time, and you’re worried you’re gonna miss something, or you don’t trust other people. You think they’re gonna get mad at you, and they’re gonna freak out at you, and something bad’s going to happen or they’re going to behave badly. You’re trying to control how they think and how they feel and how they behave. Or you don’t trust the process. You don’t hold space and give the process time to work.

That is hustle. When you’re trying to control and manipulate yourself, other people, and the process because you lack trust and belief in yourself, other people, and the process. That is the overwhelm cycle at play. When you are feeling chaotic and uncertain and confused and in doubt, or disillusioned and disappointed and overwhelmed and exhausted and you feel insufficient. You feel inadequate.

That cycle of thinking is what generates the action of hustle. You flow in and out of hustle. You will hustle, and then you’re going to have to crash. You need rest and recovery when you’re hustling because you’re pushing yourself with thoughts that are inadequate, with thoughts that are overwhelming, with thoughts that feel like no matter what you do, it’s insufficient. Notice that.

If you feel like you’re hustling, I want you to stop, ask yourself how am I feeling right now, and why am I feeling this way? You need to identify what thought, what sentence running in your mind is generating the urge to overwork, the urge to hustle, the urge to overextend yourself, and over schedule yourself. Those thoughts are not serving you. They are not working. How do we know? They feel terrible, and they put you on the roller coaster of overworking and underworking and overworking and underworking.

So if you’re a principal who goes for miles and then you crash out, and you just have to have a getaway or weekend off or take a mental health day. If you’re on this roller coaster up and down, you’re hustling. Hustling does not get you to your goal faster. It actually takes longer because you’re up or you’re down. It’s an all or none thinking. There’s hustle.

It’s understandable why we think that hustling is a good thing. There’s a lot of social media out there that glamorizes being a person who is in hustle mode. Hustle, hustle, move your muscle, right? Let’s go. Let’s go all in. Yes. Like there’s nothing wrong with that. But if it’s not creating the result you want, and you’re overwhelmed and exhausted and burning out, it’s not working. It’s not creating the result you want. Because the result that you actually want is to achieve your goals at school without burning out, without hating your job, without feeling like you have to take a break, or you can’t stand it one more minute. Versus hard work.

Now, we all know that school principals work very hard. There’s nobody who would—Well maybe somebody out there has the opinion that you’re not working hard, but that’s not the case. We know you’re working hard, and we know that you have good intentions with your hard work. I want to show you the difference between hard work and hustle. Hard work is when you believe that the effort you’re putting into your job is working. That the actions you’re taking on a daily basis are productive and impactful.

When you’re working hard, you like what you’re doing. You get up and you get to work. You do work hard, but it’s generated from the belief that it’s working. You trust yourself. You trust other people. You trust the process. You’re in a solution cycle. You’re in what my coach calls a high value cycle. I think of it as like an empowered thought cycle where you’re generating solutions.

Remember, last podcast I said you are a master at generating solutions? When you’re in a solution cycle, you are. The solutions come very quickly. So there’s chaos at school, that hasn’t changed. We’re not going to pretend that there’s no chaos, there’s no problems.

But the difference is this. You trust yourself. You feel certain that you can handle what’s coming your way. You have clarity because you know what your values are, what the vision is, the priority, the one priority you’re focusing on at this moment in time. You know what decisions you need to make and the one next best step. You make empowered decisions. You make decisions clearly and swiftly, and you trust those decisions.

When you trust yourself and your decisions, and you trust yourself to empower other people to be at their highest self, to be in their own solution cycle, that inspires them into action. It inspires them to create solutions, which makes you feel more inspired. You’re like wow, I’m doing great things. They’re doing great things. I trust them to delegate. I trust them and I empower them to solve their own problems. I believe they’re capable. It’s motivating, which creates determination and commitment and certainty.

That is when you feel like ah, our school is sufficient. We don’t need to hustle. We don’t need to push harder. We don’t need to rush. We don’t need to force or manipulate our success. We can achieve success through our trust in sufficiency and adequacy and focusing on the abundance that we have available to us to be empowered leaders.

So in the new coming year, in 2023, I want to work with you. I want to work with principals who want to be successful, who want to be innovative, who want to take themselves and their schools to the next level, who want to reinvent the school experience for everyone, for students and staff and leaders. I want to work with you if you want to reinvent what it means to learn and to teach and to lead.

This is the level of the Empowered Principal™ coaching program. It’s for you, the leader who believes in themselves and wants to expand that capacity to trust yourself and to believe in yourself as a leader. You want to expand your capacity to lead, to inspire others, to develop a vision, and to actually make things happen. To shift and shape and reinvent and reimagine what it means to lead and teach and learn. It’s for the type of principal who wants to be able to make decisions and execute those decisions, to delegate and empower other people, and to leave a legacy bigger than you could have first imagined.

So right now, you’re all out there working hard and hustling. But I want you to imagine where you create a legacy and you work hard, but without hustle. Are you that person? Are you a principal who wants to uplevel your experience and the experience of everyone on your campus? Do you want to be remembered for your legacy of leadership? If so, I’m inviting you to sign up for coaching now. Schedule your consult with me this week so we can get you on my calendar by next week.

I also want to invite you to attend the midyear reboot this coming January. The registration link is in the show notes. The midyear reboot is free to everybody, and I’m going to give you everything that you need to reboot yourself from now to the end of the year. I’m going to invite you to start coaching. So right now, as you’re listening to this, think about the impact you want to create, and the results that you want to experience in your career and in your life.

I want you to decide this. What if you could blow your superintendent’s mind from now until the end of the year? You can do this. You just decide you’re going to blow your own mind, blow your teachers minds. Like really take your school to the next level within the next six months. You don’t have to do that through hustle and overworking and burning yourself out. It’s not a matter of that. It’s a matter of believing that the hard work you are already doing.

We’re not talking about adding to your plate. We’re talking about being intentional with your time, your energy, your focus, with what you’re already doing. Taking that hard work and putting it into place so that the work you’re doing is the solution to reaching your school vision and your school goals. If this sounds like you, sign up today. Let’s get started. Happy New Year everybody. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal™ Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.