If you’re building a side hustle while working full time, there are going to be times where you dread going into the office.
Like, I’m talking you go to bed at 8PM the night before because you can’t get your mind off what happened at work that day and you’re dreading tomorrow and the only way you can think to turn your mind off is to drink, eat or watch TV, but you know none of those will make you feel better (and besides, no one likes to be hungover on a Tuesday).
Because out of the dissatisfaction of your life as an employee, you created something that you love on the side. Something that fuels your soul and gives you purpose. With people who are inspiring and take action and take responsibility for their successes and own their failures, away from all the whiners and complainers who blame everyone for everything and suck your energy dry.
And once you get a taste of what life could really be like when you love what you do to make money and support your family, the contrast is even more pronounced, and it can make going into the office every day even harder.
The irony is, now you’re mentally exhausted, and the last thing you want to do when you get home from a day like that is work on your side hustle.
And if you’re not careful, you can wake up one day and find that you’re on the side of the whiners and complainers that you’re desperately trying to escape.
And when you feel that negative vibration on the inside at work, and then you bring it home with you, you can bet it’s going to seep into your side hustle, poison your attitude and make you either quit your day job before you’re really ready, or worse, make you give up on your side hustle altogether because the stress of it all is just too much.
Either way, you lose.
So what do you do? How do you keep the desire for the dreamy freedom of the side hustle from turning you into the whiner and complainer you so desperately want to escape?
Fortunately I’ve got a few tools in my toolbox just for that, and I’m going to share them with you right now.
And you thought I just had a toolbox full of plugins and WordPress courses, didn’t you?
Tool #1 – Write about it.
Whether you pull out your journal, or just a piece of blank printer paper if you’re not into journaling and don’t have a notebook handy – just write it all down. Get it out of your brain. Write a blog post about it. Write it in an email (but don’t send it to anyone). What happened? How did it make you feel? Why do you think you’re so (angry, hurt, frustrated)?
After you get all that negativity out of you, notice how you feel physically. Do you still have that tightness in your chest? That lump in your throat? Those tense shoulders? Does your mind feel a little bit of relief?
You can throw it away, or you can save it as a keepsake, a reminder of why you’re on this journey. Because when you take your side hustle full time, you’ll probably have some bumps in the road and it can be easy to forget how it felt when you were just an employee, how unhappy you were and how badly you wanted this.
Tool #2 – Gratitude.
I was having lunch with a side-hustling friend the other day and we were talking about that feeling of yearning to quit your day job, even before you’re ready, and she shared that she thinks of her day job as her investor, or her benefactor. She goes into work every day so that her steady paycheck can pay the bills while she has room to take risks and re-invest her business earnings back into her business.
Ideally, we could all just think that way about our day job, but sometimes you dread it so much that you can’t get there. So start small.
Every morning, take out a piece of paper and write down five things you like about your day job, and 5 things you’re grateful for that your day job has helped you create in your life.
When you consistently practice gratitude for what you have instead of fighting it all the time, your whole attitude begins to transform. You’re not dreading getting out of bed in the morning, or watching the clock all say. You feel good about what you’re doing and you see the big picture. It’s waaaaaay much more fun to like what you’re doing all day even if it’s not the thing you’re most passionate about.
Tool #3 – Work through it.
The truth is that you decide how you feel… but that can be really hard to do in the moment.
When I used to hear “You just gotta work through it,” or “No one can make you feel a certain way without your permission,” I would think… “Really? How? How do I just change how I feel right now? My mind is on replay, my chest is tight, and the bully in my head is saying Why don’t you ever stand up for yourself? Why are you afraid of conflict? That’s why this is happening, because you don’t set boundaries. It’s your fault.”
There is a way to go from feeling super low emotionally to feeling better, and I learned it from my time with JoLynn Braley in the Inner Self Diet. It’s a tool I use often, and it totally works for me. If you’re woo woo, you may have already heard of it. It’s called the Emotional Vibrational Scale.
What you do is you identify where you are on the scale now, and write a sentence about how you feel. Then you move up one level and write a sentence about the situation related to that emotion, all the way up to Joy.
You might not feel joy at the moment, but you can write what it would feel like to feel joy. And when you’re done, you take a moment to match up how you feel now with how you felt when you started. And then next day, you do it again. Not at Joy yet? Do it again the next day and repeat until you feel Joy when thinking about the situation.
If you’re intrigued about how this tool works in concert with several other tools for weight loss, I highly recommend checking out JoLynn’s website.
Tool #4 – Reframe it.
You know how you have those corporate retreats where these people come in and teach you all about your personality and have you do things like Myers-Briggs and the DISC and teach you how to get along with people that are the opposite of you?
Most people’s eyes are glazed over and they’d rather be anywhere else, but me? I love that stuff.
I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Phyllis Beck Kritek, a conflict resolution specialist and all-around amazing woman, speak at a several events at my day job. She teaches things like how to create win-win scenarios in any kind of negotiation by being a Creator rather than a Claimer, how to stop the perpetuation of toxic workplace environments by recognizing the Victim Triangle in action and knowing how to stop it.
But one of my favorite concepts that she shared is called Shadow Projection. This is the best description that I found online that describes what I learned in that presentation.
“(Shadow projection) is an involuntary transfer of our own unconscious behavior onto others, so it appears to us that these qualities actually exist in the other people. When we have anxiety about our emotions or unacceptable parts of our personalities, we attribute these qualities – as a defense mechanism – to external objects and other people. When we have little tolerance for others, for example, we are likely to attribute the sense of our own inferiority to them. Of course, there's always a “hook” that invites our projection. Some imperfect quality in other people activates some aspect of ourselves that wants our attention. So whatever we don't own about ourselves we project onto other people.”
Wait, what???
You mean that I’m feeling angry because I’m seeing behavior in someone else that I do too and I don’t like that I do it so I’m turning them into the villain?
What???
Yep. We’re not perfect, we’re human, and we can be shitty too.
Now that doesn’t mean that their behavior is acceptable, or that you shouldn’t have boundaries, but when you have such a strong, negative reaction to someone it’s possible that it’s about YOU, and not about them.
If you think about it, that’s a relief, because that means you DO have control over the situation because you get to decide how you feel. See Tool #2.
And then, have some compassion for yourself, flaws and all. It’s okay that you have a self-righteous, self-centered, ridiculous child inside of you that rises up when the right buttons are pushed. Now you know, and you know what to do to soothe it (without the Tuesday morning hangover).
Tool #5 – Detach yourself from the grapevine.
If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know what I’m talking about. The grapevine is how gossip travels in the office, and it can be toxic. It just perpetuates negativity.
If someone says any of the following things to you (or you say these things to other people), you’re part of the grapevine:
“Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but…”
“Did you hear what happened at X meeting yesterday?”
“Guess what I heard?”
“(Name) is at it again, who do they think they are?”
“(Name) said that they heard from (name) that X is happening.”
If you’re talking crap (or listening to other people talk crap) about your boss or your coworkers all day, of course you’re going to despise going to work! And if you’re contributing to it, you’re just putting negative energy out into the world.
If you have a conflict or an issue at work with someone and you’re discussing it with anyone else other than that person or their supervisor (or whomever the appropriate person at your company), you’re contributing to your own toxic work environment.
So do yourself a favor and cut yourself off from the grapevine. If your favorite watercooler friend starts complaining about their colleague, say, “Have you shared that with her?” and then change the subject.
You’re in control of how you feel, and when you feel good, you’ll have more energy for your side hustle.
So just keep moving forward. Because your day job isn’t the enemy, it’s not even a necessary evil.
It’s necessary.
It’s the steady paycheck that lets you take risks in your business, reinvest your income and what forces you to dial in your systems and processes and be more efficient.
And when you can figure out how to grow a side hustle while working full time and working through all the whack-a-moles that pop up to throw you off course, once you do quit your day job, you’re going to be unstoppable.
PS – If you’re serious about growing your side hustle in 2018, then I invite you to join my Serious Side Hustlers Membership! You can learn more and sign up here.
