The Key(s) to Working Smart

Sometimes I really envy folks with linear brains. I imagine it makes things like planning and development in business significantly easier.

I always imagine those folks mapping things out and understanding what steps need to be taken, in what order, and when with ease.

I, on the other hand, have so much trouble thinking through the full picture and mapping my way to that end goal. I have the long term vision and the right now, but everything in between those two places is murky and unknown to me.

For business, that's definitely a solvable problem. I can hire an operations person, a strategist, and/or a project manager to help with that. But those people and things cost money. Money that I don't currently have.

So as I'm working to make things happen in my business and move towards my long term vision (and stay focused on it, lol), I'm finding myself wondering what it is to work smart in this moment.

And to be honest with you, I'm not really sure.

My Current Reality and Not Working Smart

I feel like I'm at that horrible place in my business where I have a million things to do that need to work right now so I can pay my bills on Friday. It feels like I'm simultaneously running out of time and wasting a bunch of it.

It's a frustrating and exhausting place to be so this week I'm focused on giving myself a reset.

This is definitely the result of me focusing on recovering from my launch and rewiring my dopamine hits, but it's also bigger than that.

My Work Reality

I've done a lot this year. I re-launched this blog as a way to keep myself connected to my natural rhythm so I have it as a constant reminder that moving according to my own unique rhythm is the best way forward. The accountability of sharing about my journey of building a business while doing this means that I never stray too far from where I need to be and it's made me more intentional.

But I've also pivoted and re-branded an entire business with a new offer hosted on a technology that I'm proficient in, but not an expert at. And well, it's a lot. But the truth is that even though I'm tired, I can't stop working from a financial perspective and I don't want to stop working because even though I am tired, my work is also really interesting and exciting right now.

My Personal Reality

So yes, work is both tiring and fun, but my personal life has also required a lot of energy from me.

Emotionally, watching my grandpa quickly deteriorate due to dementia over the past 2 years has been really rough. Especially because his condition really started to go down hill just as I was starting to feel like I had somewhat recovered from the grief of losing my other grandpa to the same disease.

The truth is that I've been dealing with the torturous slow grief of watching a loved one die slowly over time for the past few years. That in addition to the general state of the world has been a lot to hold and process emotionally.

And the grief waves kind of arrive out of nowhere. One minute I'm laughing and enjoying myself and the next I'm excusing myself to the bathroom and hoping to get inside the stall before the tears start falling.

It's a major Debbie Downer that I have tools to manage, but because it's ongoing, it definitely makes you weary.

On the brighter side, a big part of my personal reality this year is taking active steps to build community. So I'm on the leadership committee of a nonprofit that supports and advocates on behalf of Black founders. It doesn't eat up a ton of my time, but building consensus is it's own energy suck.

And I challenge myself to do something social once per week besides co-working to get myself back out there and used to meeting new people.

This week I'm going to a farmer's market meetup and walking event followed by an "eat donuts and yap" event hosted by a local food influencer. Next week, I have my silent book club and a reading in the park event.

These efforts have been making a huge difference in my quality of life and bringing in some much need vibrance, but I'm also deeply introverted so the effort and energy it takes to get myself to these things is also a lot.

Discovering the Art of Working Smart

So yes, my life this year has been challenging and beautiful in so very many ways. And even though we haven't quite reached the halfway point, I'm already feeling the call to pump the brakes, reassess, and recalibrate my approach to the remainder of the year.

I don't want to stop doing any of the things I'm doing, but I do want to explore what it looks like and feels like to do them from a more embodied and intentional space.

So for the rest of this year, I'm setting my sights on figuring out how to work smart so that there's more space for community goodness, family grief, unbelievable joy, and collective heartbreak.

I've shared more than once that my work has felt particularly chaotic lately, so I'm going to take the time now to get clear about exactly why.

The Chaos of Change

Pivoting my business has definitely created a lot of chaos in my life.

Before, my business was a 1:1 model. I sold 1:1 services like contract review and contract drafting and my financial stability depended on me being able to land a few clients a month. I'd do workshops every now and then to build my audience, but a lot of my work was referred and it was glorious.

My new business model is 1 to many. In a lot of ways, this is truer to my goals (create universal legalese fluency for business owners) and it's also truer to my ambition.

The truth is that I want to build big things that have big impact and make a lot of money doing it.

I've hid from that for a while because the last time I was ambitious and working as a lawyer in big law, it was disastrous. I was incredibly successful (I made it to nearly the top of the profession in 5 years), but it nearly destroyed me and ended my life. My mental health was terrible and I quite literally couldn't muster the energy to care whether I lived or died.

So one of the things I've been wrestling with and processing this year is feeling the fire of my ambition re-light itself and having it trigger past trauma that sometimes still feels very real.

That means I have to be cognizant of doing actual work and doing the emotional work required for me to be in a state to do actual work. So when I feel overwhelmed or stuck, I have to be diligent about investigating whether the source is having a ton of work to do, having a bunch of unprocessed feelings/trauma, or a combination of the two.

On top of that, my Aries stellium and ADHD make me impulsive. Sometimes I will do things just to say I did something instead of thinking through how it fits into the larger puzzle pieces. Sometimes it pays off. Other times, it creates more problems.

If my goal is to work smart, then I need to get to a place where I have ample time to tend to my emotional state and work on the right things that drive my business forward in a meaningful way.

Using Human Design to Work Smart

To start course correcting some of these tendencies, I need to trim the fat or get rid of the work stuff that's not doing anything for me. So I'm going to spend the month of June reconnecting to my Human design to find my way to or back to working smart. I'm a pure generator and I've been feeling frustrated in my business over the past 5 weeks, which is the "not self" emotion of generators.

Frustration is usually a cue that you need to rest and/or head in a different direction. I don't feel burned out though. I'm sleeping quite well, being active, and eating halfway decently. But I do feel tired of things not working.

So that means I'm probably doing the wrong things. It also probably means I need to have a little more patience for the things that I'm doing that are right.

Whenever I feel this way, I like to go back to the basics and ask "what am I responding to?"

Sorting Between the "Yes" and the "No"

The key strategy for generators is to wait to respond. My natural inclination is never to wait. So I don't even bother to ask if I'm waiting. I know I'm not. But I do like to ask who or what am I responding to because it usually gives me a lot of information about where I need to adjust my efforts.

Right now, my business feels like it has a lot of shoulds. I should blog. I should post on Linkedin. I should be on Youtube. I should build systems. I should do this or that.

Some of these things are optional, like which marketing channels I want to use. For those, I need to see what is a sacral "yes" and what is a sacral "no" from a human design perspective.

For the things that aren't optional, like building better systems and creating better organization, if they aren't a sacral "yes" for me, then I need to figure out who I can hire that is a sacral "yes" and start budgeting accordingly.

Lastly, I have SO many ideas for new offers. Some of them are big "YESES," but this is also where I need to practice some impulse control. Because some ideas are connected to my existing offer of a one-time fee legal community and others have absolutely nothing to do with it.

So I have to sit back and discern a few things:

• Are these new offers just my brain's way of seeking out a dopamine hit?
• If they are things I really want to do, but don't relate to my current offer, how can I create space to play with them and document them without them becoming a full on distraction?
• If the things are in alignment with my current offer, could they play a key role in my sales funnel or would they detract from it?

My current phrase for this sorting project is "Mise en Place."

By the end of the month, I want to be clear about what I'm moving forward with and why and I want everything I'm moving forward with to be a resounding sacral "yes." To me, this feels like the first step towards getting back to working smart.

Next Steps

I'll be back in July to report on my progress. As I said, my big goal with this sorting phase is to ensure I'm expending my energy exclusively on "Yeses" because using my energy on "Nos" is hugely draining and is a fast track to frustration and burnout for sacral generators.

Once I've re-attuned myself to the "Yeses" in my work, then I'll be able to think about planning and organization a little more clearly.

Do you know your human design? If so, how do you use it to work smart? One of my favorite teachers on this is Dani Gardner, The Quiet Marketer. If you haven't heard of her, I highly recommend you go check her out.