The Anti-Hustle Mindset: Achieve More by Doing Less

Are you feeling stuck, burnt out, or constantly hustling but getting nowhere?

In this solo episode of You Matter, I Matter, James explores why working harder isn’t always the answer — and how slowing down, trusting yourself, and taking aligned action can actually accelerate success.

We dive into the hustle culture mindset, burnout, manifestation, intuition, self-trust, and the power of relaxation in business and life. James shares personal stories about building a business, buying his home through faith and surrender, and learning to shift from constant doing to aligned receiving.

You’ll learn:
 • Why hustle culture can block success
 • How to take inspired, aligned action
 • The connection between trust and faith
 • How to embody confidence and self-belief
 • Simple daily practices to slow down and receive guidance
 • How your thoughts shape your reality

If you’re on a personal growth journey, building a business, or navigating a spiritual awakening, this episode will help you reconnect with your intuition and move forward with clarity.

Because sometimes the fastest way forward… is to slow down.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on purpose, trust, mindset, and conscious living.

Transcript

0:01

What if the reason you feel stuck isn't because you are not working hard enough, but because you are working too hard? We've been taught that hustle equals success, but what if slowing down, trusting yourself and taking aligned action is actually the faster way forward. Welcome to You Matter. I matter, a transformational podcast about reconnecting with what truly matters. I'm your host James, and each week is an opportunity to explore a little bit deeper who you really are with amazing guests. We explore topics such as purpose, connection, commitment, and what it really means to live more consciously. If you've been feeling disconnected from yourself, from others, or from life, you are in the right place. Join us on new matter. I matter. Now. Let's begin. Have you noticed that the more you work harder, the harder things become, but the more that you relax and allow, the easier things flow in. That's because things are changing the way that we once did things. Is having a paradigm shift. We, we are brought up in this world of hustle, of doing. You've gotta keep doing, you've gotta hustle, you've gotta keep working harder and harder and harder. And eventually, if you don't hit burnout, you getting to a point where your whole life is taken over by. Hustling by doing and you just feel stressed, more and more stressed. Now I know that from firsthand, I've been running a business since 2018 and what I've noticed over the years is, is that the harder I try to push myself, the less things happen. But the more that I relax and receive, the more it flows, opportunities arise, things happen. I haven't got to worry about the second, third, fourth, fifth step. I'm just focusing on what can I do next? And then once that's complete, what can I do then? And so on and so on and so on. I'm only worried about the next step. Obviously I have a big, big vision, but I'm just working for the next step, and I'll give you, I'll tell you a story. So the house that I'm currently living in, I lived in since 2017, so I've lived there nine years. And when I was searching for a house, I would go into these houses. Whichever house it was I was looking at. And I say, yeah, yeah. To my brother or family. This is the one. This is the one, this feels good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nothing would happen. And then I walked into this house and I loved it. It had loads of different rooms. It was like a, a rabbit warren. It had its own sauna. And I was like, yes, this is the one now. It was well above the price that I could offer. So first thing I did, obviously, I said, this is all I can afford. Here's the offer. And actually they accepted it, so that's perfect. I was like, yes, I, but it took nine months to get fell through twice, yet I still had that faith. I was still relaxed, like this is my house. And I just relaxed about it. And whenever people told me, because it fell through twice, you had to sort start looking for another house. I was like, no, no, no. I've got this. Relax. And hey, Presto, nine months later I get the house. That is just one instance where I have allowed myself to relax and receive, and it worked perfectly and it kind of indicates to me that. The more that we allow ourselves to relax and receive, the easier it is to get what you want or to get what you actually need. Now we are brought up in this society or in this world where we are babies. We are taught how to be adults. When we get to, or we, we go to school. When we get to 18, we either go to college or we start a job. We then have a, create a living, have a family, retire, get old and pass away. But nobody, nobody tells you that you can literally do anything that you want to do. If you have the mindset for it, if you have that idea, that vision, that idea of what you truly, truly want, and. We get kind of taught a score that we need to keep learning, learning, learning, doing this, this, this. The next thing, next thing, next thing. We get caught into this hustle mentality that in order to get the money that we want, the house that we want, the family that we want, we have to hustle, hustle, and hustle. And ev even now on motivational, um, talks or motivational speeches on, on YouTube. Even motivational speakers say, you've gotta hustle, you've gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. But I feel like our whole paradigm and way of thinking in this world now is changing and all you need to do. Is to have that vision of what you want and just to keep taking the next step. And there's almost this idea that sometimes you might hit a challenge, you might hit a block, and at that point it's about just allow yourself to relax and allow your intuition, your inner guidance to guide you. What is the next thing that you need to do? There's a lady I follow called Taylor Eaton. She's a money manifester. She teaches about money, mindset and all that kind of stuff, and what she teaches is that you need to, obviously, you know the direction you're going in. But then be in that state of relaxing and receiving. Your inner guidance will then give you the next step. You then take the inspired step, you then allow and receive. You then allow the ne guidance to come in again, and then you take the next inspired step and so on and so on and so on. And I'll give you, I'm, I'm sure she'll be a hundred percent fine in me telling this story, but she talks about. How she has a YouTube channel, and I think she's got hundreds and thousands of thousands and thousands of followers on YouTube, and the more that she tries to put more and more videos up just because. Just for this hell of putting videos up, the less traction it has. But if she allows that inspiration, that guidance, and acts on that guidance to come up and, uh, lead, lead the way forward and relax and receives the more traction that video gets. But it's our mind. Our mind is programmed to think that we've got to think in this old way of doing, doing, doing this old way of business and marketing that you have to keep. Doing all these different ways of marketing or you know, like I think somebody mentioned about 20 different, uh, different types of marketing you have to do. So you'd be, so you're seen and you have to be seen by somebody, perhaps, I think it's 10, 15, 20 times before they'll buy off you. But if you put out the right content. And you're in that state of, um, aligned action, that state of aligned, uh, in your power, then I feel like people will buy off you straight away because you're giving them what they need. So what if you don't need to hustle? What if you don't need to continually take action all the time? What if you can relax and allow that next step, that inner guidance, that aligned action to come to you and then take action from there? So one of the things that I do. Myself is I allow myself to first get into alignment, get into my o, allow myself to come, get into my power. I do that by kind of just taking a few deep breaths, coming into my heart space, and just beating that heart space for perhaps a couple of minutes and allowing myself to be in my highest version of myself, and then from that place. I allow myself to be in the present moment and to just breathe. And then from there, however long it takes, I allow myself to receive the present moment, and from that place, I can then gain the guidance that I need. The guidance will come if you allow. But one thing I've noticed myself is that how, how easy it is for me to sit down, have a cup of coffee or a tea, be in that place of present moment and my mind starts jumping in saying, I feel lazy. You lazy, bugger. You're just lazy doing this. This is just lazy. You should be you. You should be working. And I've had to battle. I've had to not battle, sorry, I've, I've had to deal with this for a long, long time because we get, I was kind of told that sitting down doing nothing was lazy. You have to be doing something. And so for years, and even sometimes now, I do find it hard just to, just to be, to relax, to be in that place of receiving. Uh, new Year I went to a yoga retreat and it add some other things like dance and, uh, sauna and other things like that. But one thing this retreat was all about was about relaxing and being in that place of receiving and allowing myself to. Honor myself with that time to relax and I found it so hard that I noticed myself on multiple occasions going up to the people who are running it. Join. Is there anything you want me to do? Is there anything you want me to do? Is there anything you want me to do? So much so sometimes the same with James. Go and sit down. So for me, this is it as well. This is, this is a learning practice. This is something that I, I'm having to retrain myself to, to do, to take into account to, and yeah, I have, I have good days and I have days which are, I'm particularly good, but that's okay. It's all, it's progress. I notice myself making progress. And so you could just start, it could be a matter of just starting by first thing in the morning, going downstairs, having a cup of coffee, sitting down with nothing, nothing, and just daydreaming or looking out of your window. It could even be what I've done in, in the past is I've took a notebook and pen, sat down. For 10, 15 minutes or sometimes half an hour, and whatever words come into my mind, I just write on the piece of paper and then Nays words will expand into something else and something else and something else. And you might have multiple different topics and that's okay. But it's that idea that these multiple topics lead to something in the end and there might be nothing at at times. So how can you, how can you today create some more space in your day to be in that place of present moment, to be in that place, place of receiving that place of relaxation, that place of just complete trust? And how can you start to allow yourself to expand to receive? More and more opportunities, receive more and more guidance and receive more and more space and trust. Trust. Trust is something that I'm learning to embody myself currently. Now, when I say embody, so let me just give you a quick picture of how I learn to embody trust. My whole idea of trust is that trust and words like confidence and, uh, growth and all these different words are actually a, a vibration. So I, I feel like our brain tries to comprehend what trust is, and to some extent it can understand it. But I feel like to truly, truly understand what these are, we have to embody them. We have to allow ourselves to feel the words. And how I do that is by firstly asking myself, where am my body? Do I feel trust? And this moment I feel a little on my, um, top of my left chest area. Yeah. And then from there, I will then put my focus into that space. I allow myself to be in that space of trust where I feel it, and then I allow it, then eventually to, um, envelop my whole body. And I sit, I allow myself to sit with this, this, um, place of trust. And then from there I allow myself to embody it more and more and more and more. And this is something that I've just started doing this last six months and practicing this in a way that helps me to explore what these words like trust, confidence, truly, truly are. Now, in order for us to achieve our dreams or aspirations or goals, we have to have. Trust and faith in what we are doing. I feel like between trust and favors, there's a link between them both. I don't know quite what yet or where, but I feel like in this moment I, it feels like there's a, there's a link between them both, and so we have to have complete faith and complete trust in what we are doing. And we have to have, and this is where being in that place or space, I feel like we are showing our trust in our own divine essence in what we need to achieve. And so this is idea that. When we allow ourselves to receive, to sit in silence, to be in that place of present moment, we are trusting something beyond ourself. And when we trust this something beyond ourself, I almost feel like this thing beyond ourself is what sends allows us to receive this guidance, these steps. And from that place we can then receive it and then action, whatever that is. And so I feel like. Allowing ourselves to trust in what we are doing, trust in our steps. Trust in giving ourselves space is so important for our own personal growth and experience because from that place, we receive opportunities, we receive guidance, we receive a. Chances to overcome challenges, to be able to step into deeper relationships, to be able to understand how to overcome something in our business or work to be able to communicate with people in a way that we might not understand, but we trust. And that brings us to the idea that. You are what you think. This concept of you are what you think is so important and it requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, and becoming present of our own thoughts and the words that we use to help to change. The way that the world around, the way we respond to the world and the way the world responds to us. So if you believe that you are unworthy and you keep saying to yourself with your thoughts and the words, then that world around us is going to te tend to dictate that. So it's the importance of realizing and changing the way that you think about yourself. I remember being at school in primary school and generally the school system kind of reacts to people learning, with regards to writing to do with, uh, reading. But they forget about that. Some people, some kids, some children learn through doing things. Whether that's with their hands, whether that's actually problem solving, but it requires the doing. And for me, when I, I learn best when I'm actually physically doing something. And so a. The school system from, from my own perspective, the school system didn't really suit me. And I remember being called, um, being called dumb and getting told I was, um, I'd never amount to anything by teachers and always being sent outside. Yeah, but I remember that, you know, I found it really hard to concentrate when it was just reading and writing. I like to be doing something. That's where my energy goes. I am best when I am doing something, and so this kind of stayed and stuck with me for many, many, many years that I'm dumb, I'm stupid. And I had to allow myself to realize that a lot of what I've been told in school about being dumb and stupid isn't true. It's just that I function different. And so it's that real. So it is being able to slow down and being able to observe oneself. How do we respond around people? How do we respond in situations? When we're in a certain situation, what are we saying to ourselves? I've done quite a lot of speaking gigs on stage and so often, and other people said the same, that people will come up to them and say, I could never do that. And my answer to them is that you can, it just requires changing things around. It requires becoming, being able to observe your own thoughts, that you can do this, that you are confident, and then keep reinforcing these patterns. Because we learn these state, we learn these words, we learn these statements, they become our beliefs. We reinforce this through, um, different things that happen to us. And so say for example. Uh, we are a situation and somebody says that, oh, that was a dumb thing to do. That is reinforce that statement. So then we have to kind of change the statement, change the belief, and then reinforce, do things to reinforce that new statement. So say for example, you wanna build confidence. Go and do something that requires a little bit more confident. You haven't got to step out and be on stage, but something that requires a little bit more confidence. And then you can say to yourself, there we go, James. I'm more confident now. You know, I've done that thing there. That's built me up. That's reinforced that a little bit more. Hey, Presto. Yes, and then celebrate. It's so important to slow down. I think. In fact, let's talk about this quickly, just while we're talking about why, as I mentioned the word slow down, because what does slowing down do? When we slow down, we can actually properly breathe, not breathe through the chest, but breathe into our stomach, allow our stomach to expand, and then from that place. We can become present in the moment. From that place, we can observe our beliefs. We can observe our thoughts, we can observe the words. We can observe situations, we can observe challenges. And from that place, we can start to realize what's going on and then change it if we need. And so by slowing down. We actually allow ourselves time to think. We allow ourselves time to be. We allow ourselves space to understand space, to gain guidance and space to reinforce or change beliefs. So really I wanna leave it there. We've talked about a few things, but they're all, I feel like they're all interlinked. Now. If any of what I've talked about relates to you, yourself, or you have friends who might be interested in this conversation, then share it with them. Let me know, let me what know what you think about this episode, because the more that I know and interact with people, the more that I can start to change things. It's not that I start to talk about different things that you might wanna know about. Thank you for listening. If something in today's conversation resonated, take a moment to sit with it. And if you feel called, share this episode with someone who might need it to you matter. I matter is a growing space, and if you would like to stay connected. You're welcome to follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. It really helps us work to reach people. It's meant for. These conversations matter. You matter. I matter. Until next time, take care of yourself and the relationships in your life.