How to Work Less and Grow Your Business FASTER

What if building a business that fits your life doesn’t come after years of hustle… but starts with how you choose to live RIGHT NOW?

In this episode, Alice unpacks what #lifestyleselfmade means beyond the surface-level idea of success. It’s not about perfection, and it’s definitely not about grinding your way to some future version of freedom.

This can change your perspective on time, productivity and what it actually takes to grow something meaningful without losing everything else along the way.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is gonna be great news for anyone who is trying to build their lifestyle self-fate. It doesn't have to require endless hours and days and months and years of work before you achieve it. I'm Alice Seabai, your co-host of Lifestyle Self-Made, where we share strategies for building the life of your dream. Not a perfect life, but something that really works for you and makes you happy and those around you happy, and helps balance those priorities in your life. So go deeper into what lifestyle self-made means, at least according to our podcast namesake. Now it kind of sounds like some Instagram, I live the best life, and like things that you put out there to people, and the reality is like a total shambles. But no, that's not what we're talking about at all. And in fact, in your lifestyle self-made, if you are a private person, that kind of stuff gonna you're gonna, you don't need to be out there sharing everything and saying that your life is perfect because it's not about that perfection. What it's really about is balancing everything, right? Growing your empire or side hustle, whatever you want to call it, and whatever size you want that to be, if it's just a little project, it's to make extra money, it's to replace a full-time income, it's to grow wealth, whatever it is, right? That you sit that into your life. And if you listen to the productivity growth, so you gotta hustle, you gotta grind, you gotta do this so much, you gotta build your dreams, you gotta do that. If that appeals to you and that's what you want to do, certainly do that. To me, that's a recipe for not creating your lifestyle self-made, that's creating a hustle that you may love, you may enjoy, but everything else gets left by the wayside. We've talked about this concept of reaching your full potential, and I always say what bullshit that is, because nobody can have their full potential at everything. So if you want to be a full potential hustle and grind kind of person, your family life, your personal life, your everything else is gonna get put on the back burner. I don't believe in that myself. I believe that we can have balance and we can grow something really great. And the thing I have learned over the past 24 years of building my online business is that the more I put an effort into creating that balance, the better business decisions I make, better family decisions, personal decisions I make, the more I have sex, the more I'm connected with people. And it's absolute truth. And I don't know why, but sometimes I forget it and they get into this grind sort of phase. And because I love work, and if your work is not as big a priority for you and you find it hard to do that, I think you still follow what I say, but you need to make sure you prioritize everything that's important, including your work. You can't just expect it to happen. For me, I love work and I could work all day, and I have worked all day, and not all the time, but it sometimes happens. And it happened to me this past winter. Uh, as you may know, like my daughter, I'm living by the lake. Winter can be a little rustier and a little lonely because I mean we're in a small town. So my daughter went back to stay with her dad in the city. So for me, I was on my own, and I believe I've mentioned it as well. My my friend here told me, she says, You need hobbies summer. And I'm like, I'll be fine. I'm great at entertaining myself. I like being alone, I'm good with it. But I didn't heed her advice properly. And I did find myself I was working all the time because I'm like, oh, this is a great time, then I'll just go work. And all I did was flail around a bit too, right? I would work the entire day. Not a lot of my days aren't like super long, but there were days where I would continue to have dinner and then continue in after dinner, and I didn't mind that, but I realized suddenly I was like discontented. I felt more lonely than and I don't think I've ever felt lonely in my life, but I was in an isolated area, and that's how it kind of made me feel. And then recently spring is coming, and I needed to figure these things out. I like being outside, I like going on trails. I do paddleboarding on the lake, gonna paddleboard several times a week throughout the summer. So I started building that stuff back in, and suddenly I like had so much time, so much I felt like I had so much time where where previously in the winter I had been working all day, and I kind of felt like because my work took up the whole day, I felt like it must have been that much work I had. But it's an illusion because the work that we have will always fill a space, so there gets a lot of wasted time, there becomes a lot of wasted time, and I'm I I'm filling my day and I feel busy, and I am busy, but I'm wasting a lot of time. I'm probably doing things I think I have to do, but I don't, and now then I'm like, okay, no, I have to reschedule it. I want to be done work, I get up pretty early, I do my yoga every day. It's good for me in so many ways, and then I maybe do some chores and settle into work. Most most days I like to be down around noon or one, and then I want to get out and do something, and then I want to make a nice meal uh for myself or whoever is visiting. Um, and suddenly I like have all this time, and obviously getting out, doing these things, make me feel good, be out fun, getting exercise. Uh, and I'm more focused. I know what I need to do. I even remember this is like when my youngest was born and he started kindergarten. And it was kindergarten at that time, it was two and a half hours. And so, really, I had two and a half hours to work, and then the rest of the day I just made sure I was present or I was doing things around the house. Because when you get into work mode and you have a little kidares on laptop, easy to not be paying attention. So I was like, I'm getting so much done in this two and a half hours, where I used to work more when my son was home and I lived with their father, and he would be he would be in charge of it I realized that compartmentalizing my day like this made and made better choices. So if you have young children and think this is so hard, it's a blessing, truly. I know that's annoying when people say that difficult things are a blessing, but it's it's true if you embrace it and you realize I only have this much time, what can I get done in it? What can I do to move the needle? What can I do to make sure you also will be wise in investing your money that you're making and hiring people to do a lot of tasks? Because while I was working two and a half hours a day at that time, yes, it's true that I was only working two and a half hours a day. However, that didn't mean all the work for the business was getting done. I hired people, and that is what you want to do. You want to hire a virtual assistant, someone to manage your content, do different things for you where you're doing the high-level important tasks and they are taking care of the little details. And that's another secret to this lifestyle self-being is that when you do hire people to help you, so if you don't have the money now, that's fine. Start reinvesting the money when you get it, because you will also make better decisions, you are freeing up more time to focus on those growth ideas and what's gonna happen next, as opposed to being logged down and answering all your emails, managing every little bit of creating a product or whatever it is you do. When you start hiring out, you get that clarity, just like you get the clarity when you don't dedicate your entire day to working. And then I find even when you're doing different activities, when I'm clicking, I often get some clarity on things where I was feeling stuck, where I might have sat at the computer and continued to figure it out or plod through with an idea that had fully marinated, or when you're out and about too for me for going on these beautiful hikes, seeing beautiful nature and being inspired by it. A lot of clarity comes from that. And it doesn't matter what you like to do, it can be you don't have to start going on hikes, you don't have to paddle board, but you find what works for you if you're artistic or you just like reading and consuming stories, whether it's on a screen, I think people saying sh watch TV are full of crap, because we learn so much from stories. And I know that a lot of our audience like me, if you're drawn to this lifestyle self-made, and you like listening to my list podcast, you are probably a more empathetic person, and you like to hear about other people's experiences because it helps you understand them, but it also feels meaningful to yourself that you can figure out something your own lessons from those stories, whether they're fictional or you're watching a documentary, or you're reading a biography, or you're reading a fiction book, or you're listening to books, it doesn't matter. And I'm not saying fill up your old days with that consuming content, but I think that it does help. It's just that you need to keep everything prioritized. And if work isn't a natural instinct for you, like working on your business, then you have to build that in. Have to be the same hours every day, unless that really works for you. Just pick the time each day for the week. You could decide that at the beginning of the week, or you can decide that in the evening what you're gonna do the next day. That's my favorite. I just like to plan. I'm a somewhat of a creature of habit because yeah, yoga like almost always comes first, and then I have my tea and my special water with fresh orange used into it, lemon and lime, and ginger and turmeric. Those kind of things are pretty routine for me. But otherwise, I would like to plan what works best for that day, what works the best when in conjunction with the other people who are involved in my day. So I hope that this gives you thought on lifestyle self-made is not just this crazy idea that you might get to after grinding for a couple years, it happens right away, and balance is key. And it sounds like a cliche, but try it, try it, try to work if you're finding you're filling a lot of hours with work. Try to work less, schedule more social, get out with your friends, and see what clarity that brings you. I'd love to hear your experience, what happens from listening to this, or in the past, how things work for you. Let me know. I'll be back soon with a new episode, but be sure to rouse the art nuts. If you like this, you'll probably have a lot of different episodes that you'd love to hear, and that will help bring this balance and really help you see what's important and build that lifestyle self made. Talk to you soon.