When Your “Why” Isn’t Enough Anymore

What happens when your "why" is clear, but the way you're living while pursuing it is quietly draining you?

Whether you're:

• A business owner who's deeply aligned with your mission but barely hanging on,
• Someone in a traditional workplace wondering why meaningful work still feels exhausting, or
• A deep feeler who's been putting purpose on a pedestal above your own very human needs

…  this episode will give you both the reframe and the permission to start building differently.

We're diving into:

• There are actually two "whys" (but most of us are only paying attention to one of them)
• How you can be completely aligned in your purpose but misaligned in how you live
• Why wanting things like financial stability, flexibility, and a life that feels good isn't shallow
• The specific mindset trap that shows up for people in the healing and helping space around money and boundaries
• What it looks like to design your work around your life instead of the other way around 
• How to evaluate the "net sum" of your days
• Practical shifts you can make, whether you're self-employed or in a 9-to-5 
• Four questions to help you figure out if something needs to change 

Work With Me:

• If this episode has you rethinking your work, your offers, or how you're showing up in your business, my Storyboarding Session is designed to bridge the gap. We dig into what you do and how you actually want to be doing it. Learn more

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, INFJs, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Book a Full-Scale Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal life. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. I'm actually recording this from a closet on vacation, so we'll see how this sound does. I'm really excited about this topic. I have a lot to say about it, but I feel like every time I say that, I end up with a nine-minute episode. So we'll see what happens. We hear a lot about finding our why in business, you know, our core purpose or inspiration. Simon Sinek's book, Find Your Why, put this front and center for a lot of people about a decade ago. Why do you do what you do? And there's the idea that once you lock into that why, your work and your life get exponentially more fulfilling. But there are really two whys. The first why is your purpose. Why do you do what you do? For me, that's helping people find and share their voice, helping them feel seen. It took me decades to get there myself. So if I can shave off decades or even a few years off of that for someone else, that feels really meaningful to me. But you can be doing work that you enjoy that feels purposeful, but still feel really drained. Like, what's this all for? And that's where the second why comes in. The second why is your life, not what you do, but how you want to live while you're doing it. And this one is less about purpose and more about how you actually want your life to feel. How do you want to feel while you're living in your purpose? The goal isn't to pick one, it's to align them. If you're fulfilling on your purpose, but you're barely hanging on, that sucks. On the flip side, if you're loving how your life is set up, you know, where you live, your schedule, the people around you, but you're lacking purpose, that will catch up to you at some point. So we want to be in balance with both. And I think sometimes we skip over the second why because it feels less meaningful. It's not about purpose or passion, it's about the day-to-day of our life. And sometimes that's really surface level. It might be, I want to be financially abundant, I want more time with my kids, I want more freedom and flexibility, I want to travel more. And all of that counts. Your deeper why, your purpose, might stay the same over time, but depending on what season of life you're in, that second why is probably gonna shift. And if we want to keep working on our mission, our purpose, we want to be aware of when we're out of balance with what we want for our life. I see this imbalance a lot with my clients who I would categorize as the helpers, teachers, healers, therapists, coaches. They're wired to help other people. So they naturally pour themselves into their mission, their clients, their people. But that same wiring that makes them so good at what they do can make it dangerously easy to ignore what it's costing them to keep showing up the way that they do. You can feel almost weird about wanting things that are more surface level, money being a big one. So for my clients in the healing space in particular, there's often a shared level of feeling gross about wanting to create financial abundance from their gift, which might not fit more traditional business models. And that kind of thinking, you know, putting your purpose on a pedestal above your human wants and needs, that will burn you out fast because those things are what allow you to keep showing up fully for the people that your mission supports. So we have to get out of that either-or mindset. Both get to exist. The way you work should support your purpose, and vice versa. When it comes to how I live my life, freedom and flexibility are my top drivers. They guide how I do my work. And this shifted for me about a decade ago. I was sitting on my laptop at home. It was December, it was gray outside, I was fully remote at that point, I was newly single. I was doing great work in marketing, like that felt really good, but I did not like how I was living. So I made a pretty big change. I started splitting my time between Northern Virginia and Southern Florida, which is a really drastic example, I know. But when I changed how I lived, everything improved. My boss at the time, who I still do a lot of work with, said to me, Man, I like you a lot better when you're in Florida. And it was true. I was happier, my work was better, and I was showing up for people in a better way in pretty much every area of my life. Was I happy all the time? No, but the net sum was really positive for me. So when you look at the net sum of your days, does it all feel worth it? Does the end justify the means? If the net sum doesn't feel good, that matters. That's really important information. Does the way you're working support your life? My personal mission is to help people find and share their voice. And the way I function best, the way that allows me to show up my best is when I have a real sense of freedom and flexibility. If I don't have that, and I've seen this movie before in my life, I will eventually get to that place of what's the point? What is this all for? To bring this into some real-world examples, some things I've done to my way of working that allows for this. One, I don't schedule calls on Mondays. If you go to book something on my website, you will not find a Monday opening, I promise you, because I want to own how I enter my week. Mondays are my time to focus in on what will move my business forward. Like what are this week's dial movers? You'd also be hard pressed to find, you'd also be hard pressed to find availability for a Friday on my calendar. Friday is my favorite day for creative work. And when I protect that time, I feel better and I show up better. And I'm also really selective about my high-touch clients because I know myself. I'm gonna be really invested in both your business and you as a person. So there has to be a real alignment there. I'm not gonna take on just anything or anyone for money. And look, there are trade-offs. Could I take on one or two really high-paying, high-touch clients and triple my income? Sure, probably. But what would I be trading for that? 15 years ago? Yes, I would have taken on a lot more for the sake of building up my money. But that's no longer my number one why for my life. It's up there, but it's not the main driver in this season of life. If you're in a traditional workplace, it's easy to think, well, how can I shift things to support my why for life without just getting a new job? I promise you, there are things you can shift in your day that will feel better for you. You don't need to blow up your whole life. We just want to align the way we work with the life that we actually want. So ask yourself, what would make my day-to-day life feel more supportive for the season that I'm in right now? Maybe that's remote work. Or maybe you realize you're actually too isolated and need more connection or structure in your day. Maybe it's protecting your mornings instead of rolling straight into stressy work mode the second you wake up. Maybe it's adjusting your schedule so that your energy heavy work happens earlier in the day when your brain is more highly online. And maybe it is having that conversation about compensation, flexibility, workload, boundaries, all the things. Small shifts can completely change how your work feels inside of your life. And if you own your own business, all of this is even more important because we didn't leave traditional workplace environments just to create the same kind of life for ourselves in a different format. Yes, owning a business will come with its own stress and pressure, but one of the biggest advantages you have is autonomy. You get to decide how you work, when you work, what kind of life your business is actually supporting. So we want to get in tune with that because it's really easy to build a business around your mission while abandoning yourself in the process. Again, what is it all for? So if something is feeling off for you, here are some questions to sit with. One, do I like the work that I do and the way I'm doing it? What parts of my day or week feel like friction? Is the way I'm working sustainable? And then if nothing changed, would I want this life a year from now? And if the answer to the last one is no, something has to shift. So all of this to say the way you want to live your life is just as important as your purpose and your mission. We don't just get to choose what we build, we get to choose how we build it. The goal is alignment between what we do as well as how we live. For my business owners, if you are rethinking your work, your offers, or how you're showing up in your business, this is exactly the kind of stuff we dig into in my storyboarding sessions. The goal is to bridge that gap between what we do and how we show up. So you can find more about that if you're interested on my website at just onewoo.com. I'm gonna leave it there. If this episode spoke to you, I'd love it if you'd leave a review or share this episode with a friend who might need it. Thanks for listening, guys. I will chat with you next week.