Redefining Work: Maybe Living is the Work

As a recovering workaholic, I tend to attract other workaholics into my world.

Maybe you can relate to:

• Feeling guilty, anxious, or lazy when you aren’t working.

• Finding yourself unable to enjoy free time unless you make it “productive.”

• Measuring your worth through revenue, recognition, and career milestones.

• Creating more work than is actually necessary for the bottom line.

• Neglecting sleep, health, creativity, relationships, and enjoyment because there is always work to do.

• Postponing your life until after the next launch, the next goal, or the end of the busy season.

• Working yourself to the bone, hitting a wall, recovering just enough to function, and then doing it all over again.

Raises hand.

Also, I feel like we needed a pharmaceutical ad running in the background of those bullet points, with a fun and free entrepreneur frolicking in a field 😂

The 24/7 grind worked for me for a while. If I’m being honest, I didn’t have anything better to do. I was single, introverted, ambitious, and determined to succeed. It was the perfect recipe for the early stages of building a business.

The only problem was that my “early-stage intensity” lasted sixteen years.

It wasn’t until I found myself pregnant at 43 and then madly in love with motherhood at 44 that I realized I needed to change my definition of work.

In my early postpartum season, there were things I simply didn’t have time for. Zoom calls? Absolutely not. Hours floating around my office recording videos, writing sales sequences, and creating programs? No time for that either.

For a while, I wanted to burn my entire business to the ground. Maybe I would become a stay-at-home mom and make homemade baby food all day. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen. The bills weren’t going to pay themselves. And frankly, this brain is too brilliant to waste on baby food.

So I pressed on.

I woke up at 4 a.m. and worked until the baby woke up. I worked during naps. Then I squeezed in a few more hours after bedtime. I tried all the strategies that had worked during my pre-baby years. This time, they didn’t work. At least not in the way they used to.

Eventually, I surrendered.

I was tired of trying to force my old way of working into a life that no longer had room for it. So I stopped forcing and started living.

I went to museums. I finally used the art supplies I had been hoarding for years. I took long walks and drives. I sat by the pool. I cooked. I dove into spiritual work with a fresh set of eyes.

And guess what happened? My inspiration came back. My creativity returned in a way I hadn’t experienced since art school. New offers and frameworks started appearing. I could see my business differently. The more connected I became to my actual life, the more powerful my work became.

Then it hit me: This is work too.

We’ve been trained to recognize only one kind of work, and it’s time to undo that training.

Last week, I was coaching a client who had “treated” herself to an hour of shopping. Not client shopping. She does that every day. This was a shopping trip to buy something for herself.

It felt good, but she also felt guilty. She thought she should’ve been working. This client is a self-proclaimed workaholic, and boy, does she work. She is booked, busy, and very much in-demand as a stylist.

But at what cost?

Did we really build businesses for ourselves so we would no longer have time to vacation, spend time with our families, or even shop for ourselves? More importantly, have we worked so hard that we’ve started removing the very qualities our clients hired us for in the first place?

This stylist is in demand because she has an incredible eye. Her taste is impeccable. But that eye didn’t develop because she spent twelve hours a day answering emails and scrolling through Net-a-Porter. She developed it by touching fabrics, visiting stores, listening to music, studying architecture, walking through museums, traveling, and experiencing the world.

If she stops experiencing the world because she is too busy “working,” one of two things will eventually happen: she’ll burn out, or the very gift that makes her exceptional will begin to dull.

The same is true for me. My clients don’t come to me for strategy alone. My work is effective because of what I have lived, questioned, tested, survived, created, and embodied.

Motherhood rocked my world and destroyed my schedule. At the time, managing my new life didn’t feel like work. It felt like a wall between me and my work. But the frameworks I created to navigate motherhood and business have now helped multiple clients who are mothers themselves.

Playing with paint inspired me to bring creativity and fun back into my brand. That energy rippled into my client work and has helped dozens of people see new possibilities for their own offers.

A few hours at The Getty gave me the space to imagine a new structure for my mastermind, which eventually evolved into The Circle.

Even the quarterly planning process I created came through play. I could have printed my workbook, grabbed a pen, and called it a day. Instead, I pulled out a journal, watercolor paints, stickers, and markers.

Did it take longer? Yes. Did it bring an entirely different energy into the process? Also yes.

What didn’t look like work was actually my most important work.

If you’re a stylist, shopping is work. Discovering designers, meeting store managers, studying trends, touching fabrics, and trying on clothes all sharpen the eye your clients pay you for.

Visiting museums, galleries, and botanical gardens is work. Inspiration matters when you work in a creative field. Art, architecture, nature, music, and culture fill up the well you draw from when you create.

Making art, even hideous art, is work. Creating without an audience in mind brings some much-needed fun and creative expression into our work.

Taking a walk, sitting by the ocean, or journaling in the park can be work. You know damn well your best ideas didn’t all arrive while you were sitting at your desk staring at a screen.

Reading a book or flipping through a magazine is work. When was the last time you actually opened one of those gorgeous coffee-table books you bought? Or read the $45 fashion magazine you picked up from the newsstand?

Travel can be work. One of my clients is traveling right now. She is surrounded by architecture, nature, fashion, and people she never would have encountered at home. She’s meeting designers and being introduced to an entirely new world, but she feels guilt because she isn’t working with clients or sitting at her computer. But she is developing the person her future work will come through. That shit matters.

Let me be clear:

Redefining work doesn’t mean we need to turn every enjoyable part of life into strategy. You’re allowed to visit a museum simply because you want to. You’re allowed to sit by the pool without birthing a new offer. You’re allowed to cook a delicious dinner that never becomes content, research, or a metaphor for business.

Not everything has to make you money to be worth your time.

But we also need to stop dismissing the experiences that cultivate our creativity, deepen our perspective, sharpen our gifts, and make us more interesting simply because they don’t resemble “work.”

During an Akashic Records reading, I was told I would be paid to exist. I loved the sound of it, but I didn’t fully grasp it.

I’m starting to see that getting paid to exist requires me to leave behind the paradigm that says money only comes through effort, exhaustion, and sacrifice. If I believe working hard is the only way to make money, then that is the only way I’ll allow money to arrive.

But what happens when I truly value the ideas that arrive at the museum? The relationships birthed from a shopping trip? The perspective I gain from motherhood? The offer that appears while I’m sitting by the ocean? The creativity that returns when I stop treating living life as an interruption?

I’m still practicing this. There are definitely moments when it would feel much safer sitting at my desk working myself to the bone. But I know that old paradigm, I know where it leads, and I’m not interested in going there.

My challenge to you, and a reminder to myself, is to expand your definition of work. Not so you can turn every moment of your life into labor, but so you can stop neglecting the parts of your life that are shaping your most important work.