00:00 You are listening to this feeling of freedom podcast. I’m your host, Christina Bernhard and this week, we are chatting about how I recovered from being a workaholic. And building a business that we love in a life that we love without any guilt, learning to rest, all of these things I have, the clients that I work with are always very, very ambitious people. So this is something that we talk about all the time, it’s just a place that we relate. And a lot of my clients are living the lives that they always dreamed of. And I am myself. And so I wanted to do an episode on this coming from someone who kind of has these workaholic tendencies, which I know there’s, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, like before a few years ago, I feel like the messaging was very hustle, hustle, hustle. And things have really shifted into like we should rest and live our lives a little bit more. Especially because I feel like during the pandemic, a lot of us just kind of put our head down and just work because there I mean, we were just sort of home and we couldn’t live normal lives, and we couldn’t be social anymore. And so I think that just like put gas on the fire, it just made the problem like even bigger, at least for me and my peers and the people that I was around, that was a common story, common thing that we talked about and that we struggled with. And so first I want to clarify what I mean by workaholic. Because it can be a bad thing. It can be a glamorized thing, it just kind of depends on your experience with that terminology. So for one, I love to work. I just, I enjoyed, I love what I do, I was very blessed to even out of college, go into a career that I actually really loved. I do not belong in a corporate setting. I know that about myself, I just don’t fit. It just is not a fit for me at all, like in any sort of capacity. But the work itself though, I went into marketing, and I just love marketing and everything about it. And I’ve definitely niched down, but I love what I do. But in I used to always lean on that to justify how many hours I would work and all of that. But there is a difference between working to feel important and to feel worthy in working because you actually just enjoy it. So those are very different things, although they look the same in action, because both might end up just showing as working a lot of hours or just being really dedicated to your work. But inside underneath at all, it feels very different. And the result of it over time ends up being very different. In one way that I personally could tell a difference. If you haven’t picked up, I actually worked Yes, because I love to work. But in the beginning, whenever I was working a lot, I really did associate my value and my worth with how long and hard I was working. And I’ve actually done this since I was in high school, whenever I mean actually really before that even in you know, growing up, we were me and my sister, we were always involved in everything. And I like really wanted to I just loved being super busy. And I wasn’t working because I was like in, you know, I’m talking like junior high. But I would join every kind of team. I was like on the dance team. I

03:37 played volleyball, I did like all these different things. And I wanted to be involved in everything. So my evenings were absolutely packed after school and my dad had to take me to this practice from this practice to this practice. I did competitive cheerleading, I was even on two different competitive cheerleading teams. At one time I double teamed like I was just always busy. And then whenever I got into high school, I did the exact same thing. I took college classes at night, I worked almost full time while being in high school. I mean, I just completely like, over crowded my schedule all the time. I’m just always been this way. And I realized, you know, whenever I did start building my business, this was after I started to build my business on the side while I was in corporate. I worked a lot of hours in corporate so I was just feeling extremely tired, but also very excited. But whenever it was time to live sort of a normal life and you know, become more stable and it came to I came to the realization that building my business like this was a marathon and this was something that I wanted to continue doing long term which is kind of like duh, but honestly when I first started building my business, I didn’t really think that far ahead. I just wanted to like go headfirst into it. And then after a while I was just like, Okay, we need to, like, make something sustainable, right. And one way that I could tell that I was doing this just for some worthiness and myself is that whenever I did start to outsource, and I started building a team, my personal workload in the business became less and less. And it got to the point where I was finishing all my tasks by like noon. And I was just like, okay, like, what, like, what am I doing. And so I would try to like, come up with more projects, because as a business owner, you can literally just come up with 1000 things to do. There’s always something to do, and always something to improve. So I started to do that. But I realized after a while, I really was just trying to find a way to stay worthy, I guess, which, of course, is absolutely not true that you’re not worthy if you’re not working all the time. But that’s just what I felt like. And that’s just kind of what came natural. And, you know, once I realized that, I knew that I knew there was something that I needed to change. And I needed to figure out who I was without my business, so that I could actually, you know, have a life outside of it and build a business that I absolutely loved. And you know, be able to appreciate the fact that I can actually live a life outside of my business. So that is how I felt or I was able to tell a difference between the two and recognize it for myself. So what I did, you know, now that we have that clarified the, what I personally meant by being a workaholic, you know, not necessarily just working a lot of hours, but doing it for the wrong reasons, I guess, or the wrong reasons for me, and reasons that weren’t really serving me. So then, whenever I decided to build a business I loved these are the things that I did. So the first thing was recognizing the difference between busyness and playing big. And this is because you can work a ton of hours and not necessarily be doing needle moving tasks, you can just work longer and do more things and pedal and all of these different things. But working a lot doesn’t actually equal success, it doesn’t always result in bigger or better things, it doesn’t necessarily result in higher revenue and things like that, whatever you consider success. And so whenever I was recognizing that, it made me realize that, you know, even if I do fill my day with, you know, all these tasks, and I’m, you know, logging off at 8pm. And feeling accomplished and myself, it’s not really you know, it’s more accomplishing based on what I did with those many hours. And in order to do bigger things in my business, I wasn’t able to do that if I was working all the time, it actually required space because I needed to think bigger, I needed to think higher level, I needed to have a bigger vision, and understand how I was going to make that vision a reality. And that required me to have time to take walks to just process everything in my business and kind of just like be in my business, but also be in myself. And with that

08:18 I had to find fulfilment in that type of action that I was taking, rather than the amount of hours that I was putting into my business. So was I doing things that were going to result in scaling my business, like where was I using that time to try and strategize how I was going to build out this team or, you know, the type of content that I was going to use or put out there to really attract my ideal client, how I could make my services even better, rather than just doing these tasks, just more tasks, if that makes sense. And that has given me so much freedom, because that means I can actually log off at 1pm. And feel just as fulfilled, as I did whenever I used to log off at 8pm. Because I’m not equating my success, my business within the amount of hours that I’m working. I’m equating it to am I playing big and you know, if you’re playing bigger nods it’s one of those things that we can’t really lie to ourselves about, like, you know, if you’re holding back, or if you’re really putting yourself out there and you’re giving it your all. So it’s not something that is easy, that you can easily just trick yourself into believing that you’re playing big like you just know. And so now that is what gives me fulfillment. So just recognizing that difference. The second thing was building systems and outsourcing. So I talked about this all the time. Everyone talks about this broken record, right? It’s cliche, it’s cliche for a reason. But I will say that this took five times longer and was a million times harder than I thought. And I have a very like system oriented brain, I’m very analytical, this is one of my favorite things to do is like build. Like, I feel like in another life, I could totally just be an OBM, even though I love ads and stuff, but I think OEMs have like the coolest super, super important work like they’re so valuable. And I just love that work. Because it’s just like, so intuitive to me. And even with that, even with loving it, and it’d be feeling so intuitive, I was still shocked at how long it actually takes to put these things in place. Because it’s not, I used to think it was just as simple as creating a map and with steps and you just do a through z. Super simple. Well, like, that’s the start of it. That’s pretty simple. But when you actually put it into practice, and you see all these different scenarios that are happening in your business, or how other people view your SOPs or understand them, things like that, then you realize how much tweaking and how much time it actually takes to expand them and really find all the holes in them. And you know, all of those things. So

11:08 the first thing I did was to get things that I hated off of my plate immediately. And I highly recommend that this has made me love my business so much, because anything that I just I hate doing. I’ve outsourced so I don’t do anything that I hate doing. Which is amazing, except for maybe like taxes and stuff, which I actually outsource that. So I guess I don’t really have to do that. But I really just hate, you kind of have to still understand what’s going on. I don’t even want to understand what’s going on. But I need to that would be maybe the only thing but everything else as far as the work that we do. Like I’ve outsourced anything that I absolutely hate. And I actually did that at the beginning to anything I hated from the beginning, those were the first things I outsourced. And that just helped me have that space that I was talking about before, whether even if it’s just not the time space, but the mental space, because those tasks that I hate, they drain me and they frustrate me. And so even just doing an hour of that I’m just like done after that. And so whenever I don’t have those tasks to do, then I get to just kind of keep going. And I just have that energy on a whole nother level. The third thing that I did, the last thing I’m gonna go over is that I gave myself permission to grow slow. And this was really, really hard for me. Because whenever my business started to take off, I was growing really quickly. And I was it was extremely exciting, especially for someone like myself, who is really ambitious. But also again, I like tied a lot of my worth to the success of my business. And I even was just so intertwined with my business that I didn’t even know who I was or what I wanted to be or do outside of my business, like I would just sit there and be like, I really don’t know what else to do. But work, like I’ve done nothing, there’s like nothing else to me. And I’m happy to say that it’s not true anymore, but that’s how it was, you know, and so when the numbers start to grow, the high, you know, the dopamine is like, on a whole nother level. And in this space, you know, it’s so big on fast growth, and it’s really, really hard to keep up with. And so it was a really big dose of reality whenever

13:27 I hit a plateau, and my plateau was actually a great one. Like, it wasn’t even, like I plateaued it, uh, you know, a revenue that I couldn’t live off of, I couldn’t even live my dream life off of like, I really just want to live in the city that I love, which is Austin, Texas, be able to travel the world, whenever I want to be location independent, like, all these things, you know, create my own schedule, all this stuff, like freedom is such a huge core value for me. And I was able to build that. And even within my plateau that was so horrible. I was able to have all of that. And so it really made me lose sight of what I had built in, like how much I should be grateful for what I had, because I genuinely had everything that I set out to have. But I might mind got so caught up in the numbers. And it was difficult for me to appreciate where I was. Because like there’s a book called The I think it’s called the gap in the game or the gap or the game, or I think it’s gap in the game. I’m not sure. But it’s a really good book. And the purpose of the book, like the takeaway from the book is for business owners to look at the gain instead of the gap. And we often look at the gap. So when we think about our goals, we’re often looking at how far we are from our goal, rather than looking at or you know how much we missed our goal by rather than looking at how far we’ve come in pursuit of that goal. And we really miss out on seeing amazing growth. and things that we’ve accomplished because we’re just so focused on that gap. And that’s what happened to me. Because I thought if I wasn’t growing in revenue, I wasn’t being a good entrepreneur. But one thing that I’ve learned is that you have to do your time. It costs what it costs, and it takes what it takes, it just takes time to build these things out. And honestly, every Plateau has really helped us propel so much further, because I was able to, you know, troubleshoot what wasn’t working and have bigger, better ideas. Whereas, if my revenue is just always going up, and we’re just always always growing, I’m not going to be such a problem solver, if anything, the plateaus and you know, dropping in revenue, and all the valleys, all those things that those times were, what was making me a good entrepreneur, not the times that I was just growing in revenue, we were just signing clients, clients clients, it’s the time whenever we are having to fix things and take a step back and hire and rehire and move team members around and just think, just look at things from a different perspective so that we can actually make changes in the business. And giving myself permission to grow slow, has made me make build such a better business. And even in the times where the revenue was lower, the business at the end of that was so much better and stronger and more stable and just more solidified. Despite the numbers going lower, there were so many other wins involved in that. And so, you know, that is been huge for me to be able to witness and see and recognize. And whenever we do grow, like, whenever the revenue does come back up, I’m able to see how much stronger it is. Because when the revenue goes up, we’re not actually that much busier, like, it’s not, you know, I can, we can sign a ton of clients and we still give the same level of service to everyone, I’m not necessarily working more hours, like it’s just works. And so recognizing those wins, and just being really conscious of that and allowing myself to not have to double our revenue every month, it’s been really, really a great lesson. And it’s been able to allow me to have gratitude for where I’m at, and just really enjoy it. And now more so also because, like, at the time of recording this, I’m pregnant. And so it’s just been really lovely to just enjoy my business and just love my business and wake up every day and do work that I love and not have to be trying to fight to grow and all these things. And I do want to grow. No doubt, like it is something that I love to do. I love to build my business. It’s just like I love everything about being an entrepreneur, even the hard times. How great you feel, once you get through them, is just a whole nother level of amazingness. And I love problem solving, and just all of those different things. And so I get to just enjoy it and just like embrace that. And so giving myself the permission to grow slow and just take it easy, and do bigger work with less it within less hours, has been a game changer for my personal life and

18:28 my professional life. So that is what I have for you today. That is how I built a business that I love. Without any guilt, how I recovered from being a workaholic, I recognized why I was actually doing all of that work. And it wasn’t just because I enjoyed it and loved it. It was also because I was tying this like worth to it. And I recognize the differences between you know, just being busy, and playing big and doing big things. And that gave me so many more hours and just freedom. I built so many systems and outsource so many things. And I gave myself permission to grow slow. So I’m definitely still in this process. Like I still always have to do the mind work, and always have to be learning and we’re constantly pivoting I’m actually doing a ton of changes in the business right now like a ton. So we’re in like one of those like, completely transformative times, which is super exciting. It’s like my favorite, but still on this process in this journey. And I just cannot wait to see what else I learned. But I hope that you found this helpful if you are someone who has struggled with, you know just feeling guilty for not working lots of hours or struggling to be able to take a step back and have that space. Give yourself permission for that. I hope that you found this helpful and just hearing my story and what worked for me and how I’ve gotten to where I am now versus where I was a couple years ago when I worked around the clock and thought I was I’m a little worthless if I wasn’t, which is absolutely not the case. But I will see you guys on Instagram and go ahead and follow me there. I talked about this a lot because this is definitely a part of my story and something that I have lots of discussions with you guys about. So if you’d liked this episode, go ahead and send me a DM. Let me know what you liked about it. And I would love to have this conversation with anyone who resonates with this if you relate to this kind of journey. I will see you guys next week.