How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not?
However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find ourselves at a fork-in-the-road with projects we care deeply about.
Our choice when we hit that wall of being shackled by shoulds, is to either:
Pivot and switch directions, re-calibrating for what matters most in terms of what we create and how, or
Continue onward, ignoring our gut and true strengths, feeling increasingly like we are wading through quicksand
Oftentimes we sell ourselves and our businesses short before we even ask the question: how can I optimize for each of the core values I care about instead of pitting one against the other?
Most of you reading are not “in the game” just for the money. Nor do you want to be a starving artist. There is a happy medium inbetween, but you have to stay creative about inquiring what that looks like and how to get there. Then repeat throughout your building process.
That is the subject of today’s Pivot podcast.
In this 30-minute session I talk about specific tactics and questions to optimize for revenue and joy at the same time:
1. Revenue
The importance of steady cash flow
When and how to place bigger bets
Keeping a critical eye on how you spend your time across direct versus indirect revenue-generating activities
2. Joy (or the top value of your choosing)
Daily happiness formula: optimizing for how you work, not just on what (I recently shared what my typical day looks like on My Morning Routine)
Project-based purpose: how to take the pressure off of one “life purpose” statement (though you could try this one) and instead craft a mission for each project or business incarnation, knowing it may change every few years
Color by numbers: how to determine which goals are a means (i.e. specific numbers around traffic, subscribers, income), and which are an end — a compelling vision of success
Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly(ish) #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I’m geeking out on.