More Flow, Less Hustle?

I tried to run from it, but like so many millennials, I finally got tired of feeling out of control of my days and my life. After a series of dramatic career events and some personal ups and downs, I finally sat down, paused, and allowed the flow to come for me yet again.

This time, I finally let myself get caught up.

Let’s start with a confession: I haven’t always allowed the concept of “flow” into my life.

The word has always had an air of cringe for me. All of the sayings to “go with the flow,” “find the flow,” and my personal fav (not!), “focus on the flow” seemed too ethereal, too flighty, and too woo-woo.

For all of my twenties, and a big chunk of my thirties, I felt like the concept of “flow” was mocking me-demanding me to slow down when all I wanted to do for the longest was figure out how I could speed everything up.

As defined by our good buddy Webster, flow means “the action or fact of moving along in a steady, continuous stream.”

In culture, it has come to mean being more chill, allowing things to happen naturally, and being in the moment. It’s not chaotic or forced. Flow, to me now, feels like lit candles, waves lapping at the shore, and catching the last moments of a sunset.

I wish I could say that my coming to peace with the concept of “flow” in my life happened serendipitously, but that would be a LIE.

Instead, the flow was forced on me.

This time, I finally let myself get caught up.

Before I tell you what I’ve discovered on my journey to add more flow into ALL areas of my life, let’s have a moment to talk about how we got here.

Hustling harder, faster, and by any means necessary has been the mantra that drove us through our twenties.

We’ve hustled to grow our careers in the shadow of a recession that stunted us. We’ve hustled to take the next steps on a path that became vaguer by the day, and we’ve hustled to try to stay one step ahead of burnout as the demands of work and life continued to increase.

Hustling our asses off became a way of being, a state of mind, and how we’ve been surviving.

But, as I wrote last week, a new day has dawned. Hustle culture has been sputtering and many people(including myself) have wondered if it finally died.

It took an entire pandemic to actually push us toward collectively having a discussion around how we’ve all felt that we had to do too damn much.

So much of our twenties were spent pushing back on this narrative that our generation was lazy when what we were trying to do was fight for changes that would promote better life balance.

In the last two years, we’ve seen that we can live life differently. We can strive for a better quality of life, we can make adjustments to have feelings of ease, peace, and flow be a part of how we aim to feel each day.

Now, I’m not saying that there won’t be moments in life, business, and career when you’ve got to step on the gas. If you have any sort of ambition in your life, you will be called to grow and stretch in ways that demand a sense of hustle from you.

But to be in that mode every minute of every day? It’s not sustainable, and I am so glad we’re finally saying it out loud: we need, we want, we deserve to have more flow in our lives.

So, there are three things I’ve discovered on my flow journey.

The biggest one is that there are still many days when the guilt of productivity for the sake of business and ego means that I have to challenge the idea that “hustling” has to be my permanent state frequently. I’ve had to become aware of the ways in which I was multitasking my way through life, and pushing through in moments that didn’t deserve or need the effort.

The next was actually being okay with defining my own timeline for work and life…..for real.

I know we all see those cute memes and posts about “comparison being the thief of joy” and it definitely is, but am I alone in saying that I still have those moments when I do it? And that when I do, I feel angst, which in turn makes me want to hustle, but not in a good way. Not in a way that feels steady, pointed, and in the flow?

Say it with me y’all: “My timeline is my timeline, and what’s for me will be.”

*Deep breath*

Now, the last thing that I am working through and learning about requires you to get real. You’ve been warned! I’ve had to ask myself: “What have I been neglecting?”

Whew, chile. This is where it got real for me!

In my season of reflection, I had to realize that for many years of my adult life, I thought I had to climb, and climb and that my ambition could only be tapped into if I spent every waking hour beholden to the activities that would move me forward.

You know what happens next: burnout, misery, and trying to entangle my true self from a version of me that seeks value in status markers.

The turning point came when I finally realized that chasing my potential didn’t have an exact script. When I took my travel year, I stepped so far outside of the norm that I couldn’t lean on the prescribed success markers.

I recognized that I could create my own rules. Sure, there will be sacrifices needed in certain moments, but even in my season of building, I should still find ways to create space for the things that bring me joy and make sure those things are a part of my timeline as well.

I’m still working on it, but I can say there is joy in flow and I want to continue to discover how I can have more of that in my life.